New Masculinities in Contemporary German Literature: From ‘‘Native’’ to Transnational 3031103173, 9783031103179

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GLOBAL MASCULINITIES

New Masculinities in Contemporary German Literature From “Native” to Transnational Frauke Matthes

Global Masculinities Series Editors

Michael Kimmel Department of Sociology Stony Brook University Stony Brook, NY, USA Judith Kegan Gardiner University of Illinois at Chicago Chicago, IL, USA

The dramatic success of Gender Studies has rested on three developments: (1) making women’s lives visible, which has also come to mean making all genders more visible; (2) insisting on intersectionality and so complicating the category of gender; (3) analyzing the tensions among global and local iterations of gender. Through textual analyses and humanities-based studies of cultural representations, as well as cultural studies of attitudes and behaviors, we have come to see the centrality of gender in the structure of modern life. This series embraces these advances in scholarship, and applies them to men’s lives: gendering men’s lives, exploring the rich diversity of men’s lives - globally and locally, textually and practically - as well as the differences among men by class, race, sexuality, and age.

Frauke Matthes

New Masculinities in Contemporary German Literature From ‘‘Native’’ to Transnational

Frauke Matthes Sch. of Literatures, Langs & Cultures University of Edinburgh Edinburgh, UK

Global Masculinities ISBN 978-3-031-10317-9    ISBN 978-3-031-10318-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10318-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed 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. Cover illustration: Oleg Kozyrev / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For my daughters

Note on Translations

Unless otherwise noted all translations are my own. When quoting from the novels, other texts by this study’s authors, and secondary material in German, I have usually cited the original German, followed by a translation in English. The titles of novels and other works are given in German first, followed by a literal translation in English. If an official, published English translation of a novel exists, I have, with one exception, used this one and included all publication details. In rare cases, especially when including quotations of secondary literature in German in the main text would have overcomplicated the syntax, I have only given the English translation and included the German original in notes for reference.

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Acknowledgements

This book began as a postdoctoral project supported by the Leverhulme Trust with an Early Career Fellowship held at the University of Edinburgh (2008–10). I am grateful to the Trust for its support and for giving me the time and space to get this research off the ground at a crucial stage of my career. I also thank the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, whose support in the form of research grants enabled me to conduct research for this book in Berlin and Leipzig, and to the Institute of Modern Languages Research, University of London, where I spent a couple of weeks as Sylvia Naish Postdoctoral Fellow. Earlier versions of parts of this book have appeared in the following publications: • Frauke Matthes. 2011. Clemens Meyer, Als wir träumten: Fighting “Like a Man” in Leipzig’s East. In Emerging German-Language Novelists of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Lyn Marven and Stuart Taberner, 89–104. Rochester, NY: Camden House; • Frauke Matthes. 2018. “A Saxon Who’s Learnt a lot from the Americans”: Clemens Meyer in a Transnational Literary Context. Comparative Critical Studies 15 (1): 25–45. DOI: 10.3366/ ccs.2018.0258; • Frauke Matthes. 2012. “Echter Südländer—Reb Motke— Deutschmann”? Debating Jewish Masculinity in Maxim Biller’s Die Tochter. Forum for Modern Language Studies 48 (3): 323–35. DOI: 10.1093/fmls/cqs012; ix

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• Frauke Matthes. 2011. Islam in the West: Perceptions and Self-­ Perceptions of Muslims in Navid Kermani’s Kurzmitteilung. ­German Life and Letters 64 (2): 305–16. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0483. 2010.01535.x; • Frauke Matthes. 2010. Männliche Sehnsucht in (türkisch-)deutscher Gegenwart in Feridun Zaimoğlus Liebesbrand. Alman Dili ve Edebiyati Dergisi—Studien zur deutschen Sprache und Literatur 24 (2): 85–102; • Frauke Matthes. 2015. “Ich bin ein Humanistenkopf”: Feridun Zaimoglu, German Literature, and Worldness. In World Authorship and German Literature, ed. Rebecca Braun and Andrew Piper. Seminar 51 (2): 173–90. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. DOI: 10.3138/seminar.2015.51.2.173; • Frauke Matthes. 2016. Ethical Encounters with Nature: Ilija Trojanow’s EisTau. In Gegenwartsliteratur: Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch / A German Studies Yearbook 15, ed. Paul Michael Lützeler, Erin McGlothlin, and Jennifer Kapczynski, 311–36. Tübingen: Stauffenburg. I thank the editors, journals, and publishers for permission to reproduce this material in revised form. I would like to thank Sarah Colvin as my postdoctoral mentor at Edinburgh for the enthusiasm she has shown this project right from the beginning so many years ago, for her continuous support, and for her wisdom. Mary Cosgrove has always had an open ear for my work, and her precise suggestions have enhanced my argument in many places in this book for which I thank her wholeheartedly. In the early stages of the project I received invaluable advice and support with postdoctoral applications from Moray McGowan, W. Daniel Wilson, and Robert Vilain. I thank them all for helping me develop my ideas. A meeting with Inge Stephan during a research trip to Berlin in the summer of 2008 set me on a fruitful path of enquiry and I am very grateful for that. I would also like to thank my wonderful colleagues at Edinburgh, especially in the German Section, but also in the Department of European Languages and Cultures and the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures. Conference and research grants from the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures allowed me to present my work at conferences and to conduct research elsewhere. And teaching gender and masculinity on a number of courses certainly added to my own learning.

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I have received suggestions and advice from a number of colleagues and friends to all of whom I am very grateful. Special thanks go to two of them: Clare Bielby has, for many years, been a loyal friend who has opened my eyes to many gender issues well before I even thought of researching masculinity and introduced me to some crucial works, some of which found their way into this book. Our collaboration on the chapter “Gender and Sexuality” (2015, in The Routledge Handbook of German Politics & Culture, ed. Sarah Colvin, 250–67. London and New York: Routledge) was such a rewarding experience (thank you again to Sarah Colvin for asking us to work on the chapter together) and has also influenced some ideas in this book. And Kim Richmond’s generosity, curiosity, and sharp thinking prompted very many discussions about gender, masculinity, and beyond and always left me with lots to think about. Even if life prevents us from meeting often these days, our conversations keep inspiring me. I would like to thank the editorial team at Palgrave Macmillan, especially Molly Beck and Divya Suresh, for their advice and patience. I thank the anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful feedback. Their attention to detail and their ability to keep an eye on “the bigger picture” have helped me turn this book into a better study. Deep gratitude to my family. I thank my parents, Beatrix and Andreas Matthes, for their continuous support and interest in my work and for their unfailing belief in what I do. Paul Melo e Castro has been my companion in very many ways—thank you so very much (and by no means not only for your critical as well as encouraging comments on various drafts of my writing, although they have always been very welcome). Our daughters Saskia and Isobel remind us every day why thinking and talking about gender continue to be so important. This book is dedicated to them. Edinburgh, UK April 2022

Frauke Matthes

Contents

1 Introduction:  Masculinity, Transnationalism, and the German Cultural Imagination

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2 Men Without Women: Clemens Meyer 29 3 Masculinity in Conflict: Maxim Biller 65 4 Masculinity and Religion: Navid Kermani103 5 Masculinities Across Borders: Feridun Zaimoglu147 6 Man in Crisis: Ilija Trojanow193 7 Conclusion:  Towards New Masculinities in Contemporary German Literature231 References237 Index265

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About the Author

Frauke  Matthes is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Edinburgh, UK. She is the author and co-editor of several books and articles on contemporary German-language writing, masculinities in literature, and transnational and world literature.

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Masculinity, Transnationalism, and the German Cultural Imagination

Approaching Masculinity in Twenty-­First-Century Germany In an interview with the Berlin-based English-language magazine EXBERLINER, Dirk von Lowtzow, singer of the German band Tocotronic, responds to the question “how would you characterise the German man?” with the following words: “I don’t know. I already have a problem with the attribution [sic] ‘man,’ let alone ‘German’” (Montani 2013). Although this is the answer of a successful, white, middle-class German man, someone with access to the privileges that accompany this position in the wider gender order, the remark is interesting in itself: even someone who has been socialized and celebrated in Germany is unsure about his own, a “native” German’s, masculinity. Von Lowtzow’s reaction thus provokes the question: what does masculinity mean in contemporary Germany, a country that has recently undergone some remarkable political, social, and demographical shifts and become more consciously aware of the transnational context in which it now finds itself? By examining various representations of masculinity in contemporary German literature, primarily by writers of an originally non-German background, this book will not only tackle difficult notions of masculinity rooted in the social, political, demographical, and cultural developments of the past thirty years or so, but also trace what constitutes masculinity in the German cultural © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Matthes, New Masculinities in Contemporary German Literature, Global Masculinities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10318-6_1

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imagination today. I am particularly interested in the interactions between various manifestations and discourses of masculinity in contemporary German-language writing. I argue that through these interactions, which also reflect the different local, national, ethnic, religious, socio-economic as well as literary contexts of masculinity, new masculinities emerge in my selected literary texts. These new masculinities both critically react to the developments that have defined Germany’s more recent self-perception as a nation in a transnational context and also render the transnational as a major influence on contemporary life. Thus at the core of this study is a reassessment of the well-established nexus between gender and nationality (see Herminghouse and Mueller 1997; Yuval-Davis 1997), particularly between masculinity and Germanness (see Bielby and Matthes 2015, 256–58). This nexus has long troubled, but also fascinated the German cultural imagination; yet it is questionable whether the seemingly clear-cut association between national identity and certain masculine traits remains a helpful one for a transnational twenty-first century. In order to approach this complex issue it may be helpful to start with a recent view of masculinity in relation to nationality. The tongue-in-cheek quiz “How much of a German man are you?,”1 which appeared in the January 2013 issue of the aforementioned magazine EXBERLINER as part of a special feature on “The German man,” gives some amusing answers to that question. Those achieving the highest score are told: Congrats, you’re a real German man! You choose function over fashion, reason over spontaneity and principles over romance. Post-war guilt and decades of German feminist upbringing have turned you into a proud, penny-pinching, pontificating Sitzpinkler [a man who sits down to urinate]. On the outside, you might come across as a little feminine … but in bed, your inner beast expresses itself. […] You’re pragmatic, organised and not easily distracted. When it comes to romance you seek someone self-reliant and understanding, not unlike your mother, for a steady, settled future. (2013, 21)

The quiz clearly draws on certain myths surrounding Germanness and “German masculinity” from the vantage point of outsider-insiders (viz. expatriates in Berlin). Its mention of the presence of the past (National 1  For more on this special issue of the EXBERLINER, including this quiz, see Bielby and Matthes (2015, 257–58).

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Socialism) and the impact of German feminist movements (see Ferree 2012), but also specific cultural values, especially when it comes to romance, humorously highlight the supposed components of “German manhood.” It reminds us that masculinity is also always defined in relation to others, a relation that is based primarily on the dichotomy masculine vs. feminine that is often evoked to “explain” certain “masculine” or “feminine” traits. Yet a brief look at the description of those achieving the lowest score in the quiz brings to the fore another relation which in this study is at least as significant if not more so: that with other forms of masculinity and other men. Those with the fewest achievable points are deemed to be “the polar opposite of the Teuton” whose “character is more Mediterranean or Slavic than Germanic” (“How much” 2013, 21). Despite the humour underlying the quiz’s evocation of a competition between these different forms of masculinity, it does point us to the fact that masculinity is a concept that can be, indeed often has been, challenged or “threatened” by cultural, religious, and national others (see Bielby and Matthes 2015, 257). With this in mind we first need to define briefly the significant role that nationality and nationalism have played in the construction of modern masculinity so as to understand its more recent perceptions in transnational contexts. We can ask, in analogy to Rebecca Braun and Benedict Schofield’s question about the construction of Germany, “‘who’ makes [, or has made, masculinity] and ‘how’” (2020, 13). According to Joane Nagel, “the modern form of Western masculinity emerged at about the same time and place as modern nationalism” (1998, 249). Germany is no exception; indeed German history has shown that masculinity has often been an exaggerated marker of cultural and national identity, not least during historical periods of political and social upheaval, most prominently that of National Socialism (see, for instance, Paul 2009, 26; Connell 2005b, 193). This defining epoch in German history is the primary reason why it is not far-fetched to speak of a particular notion of “German masculinity.” As George L.  Mosse argues: “for centuries, yea millennia, the Germans have been ruled as a Männerstaat” (1996, 175). If we accept Mosse’s assessment of Germany as a Männerstaat, then Todd W. Reeser’s following point may help us think further about the specific interrelation between masculinity and nationality in the German context. He argues that “[n]ational discourse may implicitly or explicitly teach its men how to be masculine, a leader may transmit what a man is or should be (or what he should not be), or he may pass on a certain national style of masculinity” (2010, 180). That specific national forms of masculinity

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can be clearly defined may be a moot proposition, but it is noticeable how the nexus between masculinity and nationality has preoccupied many scholars of masculinity studies, sociology, and German history, here often in the context of institutions such as the military (see, for instance, Frevert 2001). The most prominent example is perhaps Klaus Theweleit’s influential two-volume monograph Männerphantasien (2019 [1977/1978]; Male Fantasies, 1987/1989). Widely regarded as the first work of masculinity studies as well as of the study of violence in Germany, it examines, by drawing on psychoanalysis, the type of masculinity that paved the way for fascism in the Weimar Republic. Although the time period most associated with the appropriation of masculinity as a marker of nationality is indeed that of National Socialism, as this study will make clear, it remains an urgent undertaking to think about how constructions of nationality, ethnicity, and masculinity interact and influence each other but are also in mutual conflict. This holds especially true for contemporary Germany as people’s experiences of globalization and transnationalism have increased since the country’s unification, especially in terms of their interactions with others. These interactions may happen directly with migrants or postmigrants, a situation that, after Germany’s recruitment of guest workers in the 1960s, has gained significant attention again in the early 1990s with an increase of migrants from Eastern Europe, in the wake of the so-called refugee crisis of 2015, and with the arrival of war refugees from Ukraine in 2022. Yet people are also indirectly affected by others in the form of incidents such as terrorist attacks that have shaken the Western world since 11 September 2001 or in the form of late-stage capitalism, the media, and worldwide concerns, above all climate change. As I will explain in more detail in each chapter of close readings, these moments—German reunification, migration and demographic changes, 9/11 and the “war on terror,” global capitalism, and the consequences of climate change—have had major impacts on Germany’s self-perception and self-presentation as a nation in a transnational context.2 They serve as the political and social parameters which frame my analysis of the manifestations of masculinity in my selected literary texts.

2  For a detailed analysis of Germany in a transnational context, see Stuart Taberner’s chapter “Transnationally German” in his study Transnationalism and German-Language Literature in the Twenty-First Century (2017, 7–50).

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Considering the role that others have played in Germany’s recent attempts to (re)define itself,3 this study proceeds from the assumption that masculinity is an “inherently relational” concept (Connell 2005b, 68; see also Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 848, Butler 1999, 15). Masculinity depends on others, first and foremost “femininity” (Connell 2005b, 68), yet also ethnic, cultural, or religious others (see Reeser 2010, 154) in order to exist. In this study I therefore largely follow Raewyn Connell’s definition of masculinity: “Masculinity,” to the extent the term can be briefly defined at all, is simultaneously a place in gender relations, the practices through which men and women engage that place in gender, and the effects of these practices in bodily experiences, personality and culture. (2005b, 71)

I already hinted at relationality in my earlier remarks on the quiz “How much of a German man are you?,” but I need to engage with it a little further to stress its particular relevance for my analysis of constructions of masculinities in transnational contexts. Relationality—often conceived as the negotiation of self-other relationships in the selected texts—is a helpful concept with which to dig deeper into current anxieties surrounding masculinity and nationality, and the role of others that are often seen as the root cause of those anxieties. They have become particularly noticeable (again) in the years since German unification.

Masculine Anxieties and the Other German unification, whose aftermath continues to impact the social and political life in Germany, marks one of the most recent times of political and social upheaval when those anxieties are usually most noticeable. During such times discourses of masculinity are often evoked in order to tackle social anxieties caused by the arrival and (potential) presence of others and ultimately to “defend” the nation (compare Ahmed 2004a, 123–24, 2004b, 47–48; see also Reeser 2010, 189). In her book Politische Männlichkeit (Political Masculinity), Susanne Kaiser uses a quotation from a speech delivered by Björn Höcke of the right-wing party Alternative für 3  This is something that Clare Bielby and Frauke Matthes also focus on in their considerations of “Masculinities and Germanness” in 2015, 256–57. They write: “‘Other’ masculinities, like ‘other’ femininities, have become a canvas on to which questions about Germanness can be projected and on which they can be played out” (ibid., 256).

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Deutschland (AfD; Alternative for Germany) in Erfurt on 18 November 2015, that is, at the height of the so-called refugee crisis, to explain how masculinity can be used to “mobilize and to make politics” (2020, 14).4 Höcke’s telling statement reads thus: “Wir müssen unsere Männlichkeit wiederentdecken. Denn nur wenn wir unsere Männlichkeit wiederentdecken, werden wir mannhaft. Und nur, wenn wir mannhaft werden, werden wir wehrhaft“ (quoted in Kaiser 2020, 13–14; we must rediscover our masculinity. Because only when we rediscover our masculinity do we become manly. And only when we become manly, do we become strong). Such rhetoric, clearly “mobilizing fear, or the anxiety of being ‘overwhelmed’ by the actual or potential proximity of others,” to borrow Sara Ahmed’s words (2004a, 122; see also Ahmed 2004b, 64–68), is proof of the fact that masculinity remains a crucial tool with which to tackle, and supposedly overcome, perceived political and social crises in the face of the other. Any potential threat to “German” masculinity (compare Ahmed 2004a, 122), to male privilege, control, and hegemonic advantages (Kaiser 2020, 13) from others, that is, a potential “crisis” of “German” masculinity, can, so it is believed, be nipped in the bud. Despite Höcke’s attempt to “remasculinize” German men (compare Reeser 2010, 219) and his apparent insistence on some form of “German” (“our”) masculinity that needs to be protected against others, his comment inadvertently reveals the vulnerability of this concept. If “German” masculinity can be threatened by the presence of others, then we can subscribe to Connell’s observation that “masculinities come into existence at particular times and places, and are always subject to change. Masculinities are, in a word, historical” (2005b, 185; see also Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 852). In other words, “‘masculinity’ represents not a certain type of man but, rather, a way that men position themselves through discursive practices” (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 841; compare also Butler 2004, 10). In this study I will take a closer look at those discursive practices by drawing on literary works that engage with social, political, personal, as well as global challenges and their meaning for the protagonists’ masculinities. As we shall see, “masculinity” is portrayed as anything but stable in these works and is seen to manifest itself in a variety of forms depending on circumstance.

4  My rendering of “Mit Männlichkeit kann mobilisiert und Politik gemacht werden” (Kaiser 2020, 14).

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In the last paragraph I deliberately avoided the term “crisis” and used the word “challenges” to describe how moments of political, social, or personal upheaval can impact perceptions of the masculine. However, the trope of “crisis of masculinity” or “masculinity in crisis,” which came up in connection with Höcke’s comment above, is such a widespread one, it would be negligent not to introduce it in a book on new masculinities in German literature. Among many masculinity studies scholars “crisis” is a contested, if nonetheless attractive, term. In the 1990s the notion of the crisis enjoyed wide popularity in psychoanalytical discussions of contemporary masculinity; as a concept it seemed to offer ready explanations for the changes in and challenges to Western masculinities, especially in the aftermath of the feminist movements of the 1970s. Marketable titles such as Masculinity in Crisis: Myths, Fantasies and Realities by the psychotherapist Roger Horrocks (1994) stand for a number of studies which highlight how men have become “problematized” (Horrocks 1994, 5). Following Stephen Whitehead, an outspoken critic of the notion of “crisis of masculinity,” however, we can understand how the perceived challenges to “true” masculinity, a masculinity that Höcke appears to evoke, ultimately are a reaction to the increasingly complex positions of men in contemporary Western society. He states that a discourse of masculinity in crisis has emerged to some prominence. That is, across many societies, most notably but not only in the Western world, the idea that men are facing some nihilistic future, degraded, threatened and marginalized by a combination of women’s “successful” liberation and wider social and economic transformations has become a highly potent, almost common-sense, if at times contested, understanding of men at this point in history. (Whitehead 2002, 50–51)

Such discourse assumes, however, as Whitehead, amongst other critics, warns in the same context, a fixed, monolithic idea of the masculine that is incapable of change and development.5 This kind of assumption of “masculinity in 5  Whitehead specifies this as follows in Men and Masculinities: “the idea of a ‘crisis of masculinity’ speaks of masculinity in the singular; usually white, heterosexual and ethnocentric. Moreover, the masculinity posited is ahistorical and absolute, with men perceived as a homogenous group lacking class, ethnic, sexual or racial differentiations. Men are, paradoxically, understood to be somehow simultaneously powerful and threatening, yet also rendered powerless by external (often feminist) forces” (2002, 55).

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the singular” has already been contested in the early 1990s by Lynne Segal in her seminal work with the telling title Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men (2007 [1990]). In it Segal points out the fact that masculinities only exist in the plural, a view on masculinity that my study will be arguing for throughout. Her book was originally published in 1990, suggesting a counter-discourse to Horrocks’s account of the “crisis of masculinity” that insisted on masculinity in the singular. A few years after the publication of Segal’s work, in 1995, Connell confirmed Segal’s view by pointing out that we can only speak of a crisis if masculinity is perceived as “a coherent system” (2005b, 84). Yet for Connell masculinity is “a configuration of practice within a system of gender relations” (2005b, 84; Connell’s emphasis); thus it is not productive to think of changes to the “practice” as a “crisis of masculinity.” The various manifestations of masculinity in this book will highlight such change to the “practice,” to what “doing” or adapting masculinity means in changing circumstances. However, all these considerations of the unsuitability of the notion of the crisis beg the question why this term is so persistent. Perhaps an obvious explanation may be the desire for stability, for maintaining power and order, in unstable, challenging times. As Whitehead again puts it: The notion of a “crisis” of men/masculinity can be seen as a desire to change culture in order to maintain a “natural” gender order. Implicit in this notion is, first, some men’s desire to continue with or return to a given set of power relations between women and men which is, in the main, materially advantageous for them; second, evidence of some men’s attempts to reinforce or construct a particular sense of masculine identity that provides them with a feeling of potency in an increasingly insecure world. However, the ensuing belief that something is “fundamentally amiss” with contemporary gender relations is only tenable if one assumes that a previous natural state of affairs has now given way to an “unnatural” state. (Whitehead 2002, 61)6

In a similar vein Jürgen Martschukat and Olaf Stieglitz view such “Reden von der Krise” (crisis discourse) as “ein performatives Ritual, das zur Überwindung empfundener Schwäche beiträgt (Kaltenecker 2000: 39; Martschukat 2003)” (Martschukat and Stieglitz 2008, 70; a performative ritual that contributes to the overcoming of perceived weakness). Talking about “crisis” can therefore also be a productive way of 6  This is echoed by Jürgen Martschukat and Olaf Stieglitz in Geschichte der Männlichkeiten (2008, 64–65).

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understanding changes in male (self-)perceptions. Connell has outlined such a fruitful way of employing the term crisis. She writes: “[w]e cannot logically speak of the crisis of a configuration; rather we might speak of its disruption or its transformation. We can, however, logically speak of the crisis of a gender order as a whole, and of its tendencies towards crisis” (Connell 2005b, 84). Whatever vocabulary we choose to capture the challenges and changes that hegemonic forms of masculinity have been subject to, it may help us to look more closely at the transformations of particular masculinities, as Connell suggests. In order to discuss the transformations of particular masculinities productively, I will think about them intersectionally. Considering masculinity, like gender generally, as “a way of structuring social practice” (Connell 2000, 29, 2005b, 75), that is, in relation to class, “race,” ethnicity, nationality and regionality or locality, and sexuality (see Butler 1999, 6) allows me to understand how “both [masculinity and the nation] are constructed through representation and discourse” (Reeser 2010, 174). Or as Connell stresses: “It is now common to say that gender ‘intersects’—better, ‘interacts’—with race and class. We might add that it constantly interacts with nationality or position in the world order” (2000, 29, 2005b, 75). The close readings that follow this introduction will, accordingly, offer analyses of the patterns that influence the production, practice, and subversion (Butler 1999, here esp. 185; Butler 1993, esp. 9–11) of certain forms of masculinity, but also their “normalization” (compare Butler 2004, 39–56, esp. 42) in the transnational context that has shaped the recent German cultural imagination. Arguing from an angle of poststructuralist gender theory, this study does therefore not assume a single form of masculinity but various masculinities that interact with each other (see Connell 2005b). Questions of normativity and difference, of inclusion in the nation or exclusion from it, are also of concern to Sara Ahmed (2000, 2004b), as the brief references to her work in relation to Höcke’s “remasculinization” comment above have already indicated. Her examination of “the ways in which contemporary discourses of globalization and multiculturalism involve the reproduction of the figure of the stranger, and the enforcement of boundaries, through the very emphasis on becoming, hybridity and inbetweenness” (Ahmed 2000, 13) is of particular interest to my study. Relating this to masculinity, as well as bodies that “perform” (in Butler’s sense) this masculinity, in intersectional terms as outlined above, this means that “how masculinity or the ‘male’ body is ‘done’ and ‘felt’ at

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any given moment is always also about how Germanness, ethnicity (including white Germanness), and class are being ‘done’ and ‘felt’” (Bielby and Matthes 2015, 251). Although “race” is not a central point of discussion in this study as such, as Ahmed (2000) and also Butler (1993, esp. 18) and Jasbir K. Puar (2007) make clear as bodily identifier, it plays into the perceptions of other (that is here, primarily, non-white) masculinities or, in Reeser’s words, “[m]asculine anxieties are projected onto gendered others, but race can be a key factor in how those projections get played out” (2010, 144). It is thus through the body with “its invariably public dimension” (Butler 2004, 21) that strangers, often racialized others, can be recognized, embodied, and known (Ahmed 2000, 21–74) and ultimately can be included in or excluded from the nation. Fatima El-Tayeb has argued similarly when she asks who constitutes a European (2011, 2016). She has drawn attention to the “ethnicization that permanently defines ethnicized citizens as ‘migrants’” (El-Tayeb 2011, xiii–xiv) and that ultimately leads to the division of “Europeans and non-Europeans along lines of race and religion” (ibid., xxxii). However, thinking about masculinities intersectionally will also help me think about them in a postmigrant context (see Ring Petersen and Schramm 2017, Ring Petersen et  al. 2019)7: that is, rather than insisting on difference and otherness as insurmountable obstacles, I will focus on how “notions of ‘difference’ and ‘otherness’ are produced through interactions and relations between people” (Ring Petersen and Schramm 2017, 1; my emphasis) and think about their function for the construction of masculinities in our transnational “social reality” (Taberner 2017, 51 and 289). Following Myra Marx Ferree’s call for “a reconsideration of intersectionality as a transnational feminist theory” (2012, 178), my reading of masculinities in contemporary German-language writing is very much a transnational approach to understanding masculinities. In fact we need to think about masculinity transnationally “at this current historical moment, with new configurations and intertwinings of the local, the national, and the transnational” (Hearn and Blagojević 2013, 1). My approach ties in 7  Anne Ring Petersen et al. define “the concept of postmigration as a means of moving beyond the widespread binary way of thinking about migration and migrants (e.g. juxtaposing us and them, self and other, uprootedness and rootedness, home culture and foreign culture, leaving and arriving etc.)” (2019, 4). However, El-Tayeb is rather sceptical of the concept of postmigration understood in this sense in Germany and regards its handling of the “refugee crisis” as “bestenfalls den ersten Schritt zur Auseinandersetzung mit dem Migrantischen” (2016, 12; at best the first step in engaging with migration).

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with “the transnational turn in literary studies,” as the subtitle of Paul Jay’s study Global Matters (2010) names it (compare Taberner 2017, 53, Herrmann et al. 2015, 2). The rise in interest in “migrant writing” in the early 2000s is often associated with this turn, a development that cannot be divorced from the more recent conceptualization of postmigration as briefly outlined above. As “a structuring principle of contemporary societies, and indeed the world” (Taberner 2017, 55), something that Steven Vertovec and other critics have described in detail following a “rapidly growing academic interest” in the concept (Vertovec 2009, 3), transnationalism captures the way local lives consciously become part of an interconnected globality.8 Dörte Bischoff and Susanne Komfort-Hein have thus pointed out how the transnational can reflect “die Verstrickung des Nationalen in globalisierende Prozesse […], ohne die spezifischen und konkreten Austausch- und Transferprozesse, die diese Verschränkung bedingen, ausblenden zu müssen” (2019, 3; the entanglement of the national in globalizing processes without having to ignore the specific and concrete processes of exchange and transfer that determine this interconnection). Indeed, according to Braun and Schofield, “[t]he transnational […] only makes sense when seen as emerging from the interplay between the macro and the micro, the grand historical tableau of quasiuniversals and their local, contingent manifestations” (2020, 4). In this study I am interested in the local, that is, specific manifestations of masculinity as they have been unfolding in Germany’s transnational context. This also follows Bischoff and Komfort-Hein’s view that the concept of the transnational is “in besonderer Weise geeignet, Partikularitäten und Differenzen innerhalb der von Globalisierungsprozessen betroffenen Kulturen Raum zu geben” (2019, 4; particularly suited to acknowledge the particularities and differences of cultures affected by processes of globalization). In his study Transnationalism and German-Language Literature in the Twenty-First Century, Taberner offers this definition of transnationalism, which is particularly useful for my study: Contemporary flows of people, products, and ideas occur not only solely between metropoles and peripheries but also multidirectionally, across and 8  I have also explored the interconnection between the local and the transnational/transcultural and the question of postmigrant national belonging in an article on Fatih Akin’s film Soul Kitchen as a “new Heimatfilm” (Matthes 2012).

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between nations perhaps previously unconnected by trade routes, colonial histories, or language and culture. Equally, people everywhere encounter a greater diversity of others, in a greater variety of contexts, than ever before. Consequently, we are all more profoundly challenged to allow ourselves to be transformed. (2017, 18; Taberner’s emphasis)

In this book I look precisely at this transformation in terms of masculinity because “[f]ocussing on men contributes to understanding how transnationalizations actually work from local to global and vice versa, through and by male social actors” (Hearn and Blagojević 2013, 11). Connell has made a substantial contribution to the understanding of how “[g]lobal history and contemporary globalization” (2005a, 72) impact on manifestations of masculinity.9 Her concept of the “world gender order” will play a crucial role in some of my textual analyses (Connell 2000, 40–43). Connell also points us to the impact of the global on the local when she writes that the creation of institutions and communications that operate across regions and continents also creates the possibility of patterns of masculinity that are, to some degree, standardized across localities. I call such masculinities “globalizing” rather than “global” to emphasize the process—and the fact that it is often incomplete. (2005a, 74; Connell’s emphasis)

While Connell’s verdict may deny masculinities their local specificities, something I will also consider in my close readings, contemporary masculinities cannot be disentangled from a wider, global, and transnational context. As Anke S. Biendarra makes clear: “the global and the local are intrinsically linked and cannot be divided” (2012, 8). I will pay close attention to their interaction, because in their interaction “new gendered subjectivit[ies]” (Reeser 2010, 194) may emerge (compare also Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 850). In fact, as Reeser points out, “it may be the oscillation or the tension between previous and new masculinities— whether those found or those produced—that define transcultural masculinity” (2010, 194–95). As this study argues, new masculinities are produced in a transnational context in which the local and the global interact. They have also gained new visibility in the twenty-first century. 9  See also Pease and Pringle (2001), esp. “Introduction: Studying Men’s Practices and Gender Relations in a Global Context,” 1–17 (here 9–10), and compare Whitehead, ed., 2006, vol. 5: Global Masculinities.

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The New Visibility of Masculinity Although the various redefinitions of “German” masculinity since the end of the Second World War have remained thematically central to German literature, the subject has only quite recently begun to attract critical attention from scholars as gender studies has emerged from, and in critical interaction with, feminist cultural criticism (compare e.g. Jerome 2001, 3, Gardiner 2002, or Stephan 2003, 18; see Eck 2020, 2). The root of this relatively new interest in masculinity (apart from as a “by-product” in the form of “criticism of patriarchy” [Eck 2020, 710]) lies in “the rise of gender as a category of analysis in the 1980s” (Showalter 1989, 1). Although initially largely “seen as a matter of and for women” (Hearn and Pringle 2006, 1), “gender” became in the 1990s a concept less focussed on women alone (compare Adams and Savran 2002, 4). As Ferree explains this is partly due to Butler’s enormous influence, which shifted “attention away from ‘women’ to ‘gender’” (Ferree 2012, 177; see also Bielby and Matthes 2015, 251). Similar shifts can also be observed outside the academy: “gender” became the key word at the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (Ferree 2012, 184; see also Bielby and Matthes 2015, 251), and in its Amsterdam Treaty (1997) the European Union put its focus on gender mainstreaming (Ferree 2012, 188; Eck 2020, 5), “mandat[ing] that EU countries pass an anti-discrimination law to outlaw discrimination on the basis of gender, sexuality, nationality and ethnic origin, age, disability, worldview, language, and religion” (in Germany the law was only passed in 2006) (Bielby and Matthes 2015, 251). These developments have also meant that men and masculinity increasingly became objects of study, especially in sociology (see Jerome 2001, 4, Stephan 2003, esp. 18). The sociologist Michael S. Kimmel explains thus: “Men’s studies responds to the shifting social and intellectual contexts in the study of gender and attempts to treat masculinity not as the normative referent against which standards are assessed but as a problematic gender construct” (1987, 10). In many ways this, seemingly paradoxically, meant an “end of masculinity,” as the title of John MacInnes’s book reads. He writes: 10  Here Matthias Eck is referring to: Stefan Krammer. 2007. Fiktionen des Männlichen– Männerforschung als literaturwissenschaftliche Herausforderung. In MannsBilder– Literarische Konstruktionen von Männlichkeiten, ed. Stefan Krammer, 15–36 (here 18). Vienna: Facultas.

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what we now think of as masculinity was originally used to legitimate patriarchy, by demonstrating how men were more capable of exercising public power than women. […] [H]owever, […] masculinity does not exist as the property, character trait or aspect of identity of individuals. […] [M]asculinity exists only as various ideologies or fantasies, about what men should be like, which men and women develop to make sense of their lives. (1998, 2; MacInnes’s emphasis)

So the new visibility of men, or of masculinity, also meant a questioning of often unquestioned norms of hegemonic masculinity. Unsurprisingly, a backlash—a term that gained significance in gender discourse with the publication of the feminist critic Susan Faludi’s book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women (1992 [1991])—against the feminism that allowed such a reconsideration of masculinity in the first place was not far off (see also Connell 2002, 149; also 2005b, 249–53).11 In her study Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Modern Man (2000 [1999]), Faludi has also drawn attention to men and their perceived failure to meet expectations of traditional masculinity as they were entering the twenty-first century, which has been marked by social shifts due to phenomena such as globalization.12 In today’s Germany the reaction to more recent political and social changes rooted in transnational developments (such as demographic changes as a result of an increase in migration) bears similarities with Faludi’s “backlash.”13 Kaiser relates this reaction to the notion of “Entsicherung” (2020, 234; literally: de-securing), a destabilization of everything that was believed to be stable, including gender norms and roles, and thus a perception of a loss of control (ibid.), that is here, of hegemony and white male privilege. New “Mannosphären” (Kaiser 2020, e.g. 9; manspheres) marked by misogyny and racism can be the result. Those more recent backlashes are directed not only against women but also against other men (as my earlier comment on Höcke’s “remasculinization” attempts in the face of the other already indicated). So, by engaging with constructions and discourses of masculinity that are closely tied to our contemporary transnational experience, my book not only 11  Robert Bly’s controversial book Iron John: A Book About Men (1990) serves as a textual example of such a backlash against feminism (see also Adams and Savran 2002, 5). 12  The original titles of Faludi’s books as they were published in the USA are Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women and Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. 13  Bielby and Matthes discuss “the launch of the German-language website ‘wikiMANNia. org’ in 2009” as another backlash (2015, 258).

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contributes to the “gendering [of] men” but also to the “gendering [of] transnationalization” (Hearn and Blagojević 2013, 12), that is, to an understanding of transnationalism as something also shaped by gender dynamics and the interaction between different masculinities. My comments on more recent backlashes bring us back to the interaction between constructions of masculinity and nationality. Emily Jeremiah has pointed out that “[t]he constructs ‘nation’ and ‘gender’ often work together to legitimize ‘hegemonic masculinity’” (2012, 14). This book is precisely interested in how those masculinities which are not immediately part of the hegemonic mainstream, that is, which are in one way or another other(ed) and marginalized, engage with hegemonic “German” masculinity, question and contest it, and sometimes also offer alternative ways of being masculine. I thereby do not share Matthias Eck’s suggestion that “current Austrian literature, and German-language literature more broadly, do not really suggest positive representations of an alternative, non-hegemonic masculinity” (2020, 2). However, hegemonic masculinity (in Connell’s sense) remains an important reference point for the manifestations of masculinity under discussion in this book and indeed for my interpretations of them. The concept is crucial to understand the dynamics between the different forms of masculinity I shall explore. Returning briefly to the term’s origins, and my earlier remarks on the rise of interest in masculinity as an object of study, masculinity was firmly placed “as a political, multiple, contested, yet powerful concept” (Whitehead and Barrett 2001, 15) with the theorizing of hegemonic masculinity in sociology in the early 1980s. Connell has explained her use of the term thus: “The concept of ‘hegemony,’ deriving from Antonio Gramsci’s analysis of class relations, refers to the cultural dynamic by which a group claims and sustains a leading position in social life” (2005b, 77). Represented only by “a minority of men,” hegemonic masculinity was perceived by Connell in her earlier research as “normative. It embodied the currently most honored way of being a man, it required all other men to position themselves in relation to it, and it ideologically legitimated the global subordination of women” (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 832). Few men actually enjoy the advantages of hegemonic masculinity, a concept linked to “compulsory heterosexuality” (Connell 2005b, e.g. 103–106), yet many are often complicit in it (Connell 2005b, 79–80). In The Men and the Boys, Connell specifies “some of the main patterns of contemporary hegemonic masculinity [further]: the

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subordination of women, the marginalization of gay men, and the connecting of masculinity to toughness and competitiveness” (2000, 84). Over the years the term has attracted much criticism14: for instance, it has been criticized for being “reductionist” (Whitehead 2002, 93) or, similarly, for simplifying hegemony (Demetriou 2001).15 Demetrakis Z.  Demetriou has particularly taken issue with “Connell’s binarism between non-hegemonic masculinities and hegemonic masculinities” (2001, 347–48), “[t]hat is, subordinate and marginalized masculinities are seen as having no impact on the construction of hegemonic masculinity. Nonhegemonic masculinities exist in tension with, but never penetrate or impact, the hegemonic masculinity” (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 844). Connell and Messerschmidt are wary of accepting Demetriou’s suggestion of a “hybrid [masculine] bloc that unites various and diverse practices in order to construct the best possible strategy for the reproduction of patriarchy” and “that is made up of both straight and gay, both black and white elements and practices” (Demetriou 2001, 438; Demetriou’s emphasis) (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 845). They argue that “there is little reason to think that hybridization has become hegemonic at the regional or global level” (ibid.). While Connell and Messerschmidt’s reservations are certainly valid, in my close readings I shall probe how other, non-hegemonic masculinities have the potential to influence the “native” mainstream in a transnational context. My endeavour to consider perceived otherness as a marker of masculinities in my analysis leads me back to Connell’s suggestion that [t]o recognize diversity in masculinities is not enough. We must also recognize the relations between the different kinds of masculinity: relations of alliance, dominance and subordination. These relationships are constructed through practices that exclude and include, that intimidate, exploit, and so on. There is a gender politics within masculinity. (2005b, 37; Connell’s emphasis)

Building on Connell’s view, I am concerned to engage with how masculinities interact in today’s transnational Germany and how this may lead to new masculinities from “native” to transnational rather than with a taxonomy along national, cultural, or religious lines. Thus the aim of this 14  For a summary of the critiques of hegemonic masculinity, see Connell and Messerschmidt (2005, 836–45). 15  I shall engage with other criticism revolving around the concept of hegemonic masculinity in Chap. 4

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book is not only to tie in with this new visibility of masculinity considered above, but also to make potentially new forms of masculinity visible.

New Masculinities in Contemporary German Literature: From “Native” to Transnational Recent examples of German-language writing will help us understand how the “cultural meanings” of masculinity (compare Paul 2009, 9) are shifting from a “native” to a transcultural understanding in the transculturally German context of the twenty-first century. Although this book only includes works by male writers—Clemens Meyer, Maxim Biller, Navid Kermani, Feridun Zaimoglu,16 and Ilija Trojanow—the carefully selected novels reveal a playing with patterns of masculinity, nationality, and otherness or difference. My analysis of those patterns will unpack the various layers of the complex nexus between masculinity and national identity, using specific theoretical paradigms that bring the writers’ diverse explorations of the masculine to the fore: homosociality and marginality, hypermasculinity vs. “effeminized” masculinity, a reassessment of hegemonic masculinity, a rethinking of (literary) models of masculinity, and a reconsideration of “crisis of masculinity” under ethical considerations. Although revolving around Connell’s relations among masculinities and her concept of hegemonic masculinity, the various masculinities explored throughout this book are discussed most productively with the help of those particular methodological approaches. They will be put into context in the chapter summaries below but, owing to their complexity, will be explained in more detail in each chapter. Thinking about new masculinities in conjunction with specific critical paradigms reflects clearly the changing perceptions of Germanness and masculinity in today’s transnational Germany. My choice of authors and literary texts is not to suggest that literature by men is necessarily a privileged source of insights into cultural constructions of masculinity, nor that primarily authors of a non-German background have the privilege, or ability, to expose new (in the sense of “fresh” or “not too ‘boringly’ German”) masculinities. While I will also engage with the authors, or their characters’ ethnic backgrounds, these are not explanations of the novels’ 16  Throughout this book I write Zaimoglu’s name as it appears in his publications. However, some secondary texts use the Turkish “yumuşak ge” (ğ) in his name rather than the, here, Germanized “g.”

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constructions of masculinity per se. Neither is it my intention to define “German masculinity” in the twenty-first century or to differentiate it from culturally or religiously other masculinities as indicated in the previous section. This is an endeavour that can only lead to generalizations and simplifications. “New” thus moves us away from thinking of masculinity as a marker of nationality (alone) and towards urgent questions revolving around diversity, otherness and difference, and transnationalism in the contemporary German cultural imagination. In this book diversity tends to be discussed in relation to ethnicity, “race,” and class. The authors’, and this study’s, focus on male heterosexual protagonists may suggest that in my analyses I equate masculinity with men. As my earlier remarks concerning the constructedness and instability of masculinity have made clear, however, masculinity is certainly not “naturally” tied to men, as Jack Halberstam has argued in his influential study Female Masculinity (1998). Yet considering the protagonists’ markedness in terms of ethnicity, “race,” as well as class, and the frequent questioning of their “male masculinity” based on their social positioning, (non-)conforming to hegemonic masculine norms or even looks, my readings of their masculinities open up new avenues of thinking about masculinity as a concept that includes much more than a hegemonic norm. So, following this introduction, the book takes up the first historical juncture that marks the transnational developments of the past thirty years or so: the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 (the Wende, turning point). The first chapter of close readings focusses on “Men Without Women” in novels by a writer whose work is often read in the context of post-Wende literature: Clemens Meyer. Although Meyer is an ethnically German author, my reading of his novels Als wir träumten (2006, When We Were Dreaming) and Im Stein (2013; Bricks and Mortar, 2016) highlights discourses of masculinity, that, by being rooted in the characters’ homosocial worlds as defined by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1985), that is, worlds which are either devoid of women or in which women serve as the men’s commodity, shed a revealing light on the interrelation between the local and the global as it is played out via the characters’ manifestations of their masculinities. Als wir träumten centres on delinquent adolescent masculinity in Leipzig in the late 1980s and early 1990s, whereas the polyphonic novel Im Stein explores organized prostitution and sex work in post-1989 East Germany. Meyer’s characters are largely situated at the socio-economic margins of the newly unified German society, a position which highlights their local masculinity in the “world” or “global gender order”

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(Connell 2000, 40–43, 2005b, 200). It also allows them to recognize both the tensions between hegemonic and marginalized forms of masculinities (as defined by Connell) and the changeability of those concepts. Ultimately, though, the characters’ homosociality gives them local security in a transnational, and fundamentally uncertain, world. The book continues with different forms of “Masculinity in Conflict” in Maxim Biller’s novels Die Tochter (2003a [2000], The Daughter) and Esra (2003b). Both novels play out conflicts, first, via the tensions between hypermasculinity and “effeminized” masculinity experienced by the Jewish male protagonists in their interaction with non-Jewish men, and, second, via new forms of “the battle of the sexes.” This “battle” takes on a particularly intriguing meaning here as the female others are of a German and German Turkish background, respectively, thus highlighting the potential for conflict inherent in gender and cultural/religious difference. However, Biller’s novels take the complexity of his male protagonists’ masculinity to a further level with an outspokenly transnational dimension because as an Israeli and a German Jewish man living in Germany, respectively, they are confronted with two major issues. The first one is the age-old dichotomy between Germans and Jews, which Dan Diner has famously termed the “negative symbiosis” (1987). This is a topic that has seen much debate again since the early 1990s, a time that saw attempts to “normalize” the relationship between Germans and Jews in the wake of Germany’s reunification, and to which Biller continues to contribute. The second issue is the effects of military conflict (the Lebanon War  in particular) on both men and women, especially with regard to Israel’s interaction with its non-­ German others. Tamar Mayer’s work on the relation between nationalism and masculinity (2000) is crucial in my analysis of the latter in Biller’s work. Fatherhood adds a further dimension to Biller’s self-centred male protagonists and their engagements with their various others. Moreover, Biller’s multi-layered exploration of the self-other divide in a German-­ Jewish context brings to the fore the complex relationship between the various cultural and religious backgrounds found in contemporary Germany and beyond, especially when, as in the case of Die Tochter and Esra, love plays a crucial, if destructive role. Difference, which already marked the self-other relationships in Biller’s work, takes centre stage in the chapter “Masculinity and Religion.” Here I consider religious and ethnic difference, as manifested by Islam in Germany, in relation to hegemonic masculinity (in Connell’s sense). I first focus on the ways in which difference is marketed in Navid Kermani’s

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novel Kurzmitteilung (2007, Short Message). Here Kermani critically examines how Islam can serve as an object of Western counter-­identification. This is a particularly urgent topic considering the so-called war on terror that has defined the relationship between Islam and the West since the turn of the millennium, above all since 9/11. Kurzmitteilung examines the influence of the West on the ethnically non-German protagonist’s self-­ perception, his struggle to come to terms with his imposed difference, but also his opportunities to market it, both commercially and interpersonally, and thus to challenge a German hegemonic mainstream that consumes difference. Puar’s work on homonationalism (2007) in particular helps me unpack these complex issues. The relationship between Islam and the West is treated more subtly in Kermani’s novel Große Liebe (2014, Great Love). The narrator, a Kermani-like figure, remembers how, as a teenager, he fell in love with an older German girl. The novel connects the now adult narrator’s self-reflections with his reflections on Islamic mysticism. Thus the challenging of hegemonic masculinity is more nuanced here than in Kurzmitteilung: difference plays a crucial role in the narrator’s younger self’s journey of discovering new emotions via Islamic mysticism in an environment seemingly not susceptible to this kind of love. Both novels reveal in distinct ways how religious and/or ethnic difference can be used to appropriate, challenge, and/or negotiate hegemonic forms of masculinity. The recasting of established models of masculinity also provides the basis for literally transnational manifestations of masculinity. “Masculinities Across Borders” reads representations of masculinity as appropriations of (literary) models of masculinity. Feridun Zaimoglu’s novels Liebesbrand (2008, Love Fire) and Hinterland (2009) reflect Romantic masculinity with their male protagonists embarking on journeys to fulfil their longing for love. This new interest in Romanticism is no coincidence: as in the Romantic period around 1800, the years around 2000, Zaimoglu’s time of writing, too, saw a critical engagement with the idea of Germanness as well as with that of Europe, and the meaning of Germanness within this Europe. In Zaimoglu’s novel Romantic male love is associated with Germanness, but it also alludes to the Romantics’ interest in the Orient, which allows Zaimoglu to play with Romantic (German) and Oriental manifestations of love via his male protagonists. Furthermore, this love openly embraces Europeanness. The ethnically non-German protagonists cross borders (of both countries and identities) on their journeys that are no longer migrant stories, but journeys of outward-looking, transnational,

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and economically successful European Romantics. Zaimoglu’s Ruß (2011, Soot), a work of working-class or crime fiction, centres on less individual, reflexive, or outward-looking, European forms of masculinity. Instead, Zaimoglu focusses on local perceptions of masculinity rooted in traditional gender roles and puts little, if any, emphasis on the ethnic or cultural backgrounds of his characters: their masculinity is informed by the protagonists’ working-class background and social status, and by their association with Duisburg. By comparing these seemingly opposing constructions of masculinity, this chapter reassesses links between concepts of masculinity and ethnicity at a time significantly marked by transnationality, more precisely global capitalism, regardless of locality. Timothy Morton’s concept of the “mesh” (2010) and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s notion of “Empire” (2001) help me thereby to capture the borderless globalization that Zaimoglu’s characters, especially those in Ruß, experience at a local level. Adopting Walter D. Mignolo’s “border thinking” (2012 [2000]), the chapter re-evaluates Zaimoglu’s approach to geographical, identity, but also literary borders. Borders are also crossed in “Man in Crisis.” This chapter takes up the renewed interest in the male traveller as explorer, which coincided with, for example, the 100th anniversary of the un/successful South Pole expeditions in 2011. Ilija Trojanow’s novel EisTau (2011; The Lamentations of Zeno, 2016)—not his first to zoom in on a traveller as his best-selling novel Der Weltensammler (2006; The Collector of Worlds, 2008) shows— centres upon a middle-aged glaciologist-cum-Antarctica tour guide whose personal crisis takes place as the global environmental disaster of melting glaciers becomes an increasing threat. The text explores the West’s awareness or ignorance, but also appropriation of otherness, yet—and this makes the text different from the other ones discussed in this book—not in terms of culture, religion, gender, or ethnicity, but in terms of nature. EisTau thus also begs urgent ethical questions of power, ownership, and responsibility that encourage a reconsideration of masculinity affected by moral dilemma and personal failure. Critical work on the ethical issues that come with the self-other encounter helps me shape my approach to those questions in my reading of EisTau. Emmanuel Levinas’s work (1989) on the ethical implications of facing the other represents a crucial first step in tackling those questions, whereas Sara Ahmed’s notion of “stranger fetishism” (2000) and her later work on the relationship between emotionality and the embodiment of the other (2004b) provide a productive way of considering affect in

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self-other encounters. Finally, Carrie Smith-Prei’s (2015) ideas revolving around the relationship between affect and politics provide another useful angle from which to view the role of emotion in self-other dynamics in transnational contexts. This is the only chapter that specifically engages with the contested idea of “crisis of masculinity” at times of social and political, or here climate, change and questions the usefulness of this category for a discussion of “German masculinity” in a globalized world from an ecocritical point of view as developed by, for example, Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin (2010). Over the coming pages it will become clear that the new masculinities discussed in each of the five chapters of close readings have emerged in the light of, and as critical reactions to, significant global events and developments that have defined Germany’s recent interaction with its others. As noted above, these include the fall of the Iron Curtain, national and transnational demographic movements and changes, 9/11 and the “war on terror,” global capitalism, and climate change. As I will discuss in detail in the chapters that follow, some of the writers included in this study consciously challenge established patterns of masculinity by, for example, reconsidering the relationship between hegemony and marginalization, self and other in complex social and political contexts (Meyer, Biller, Kermani). Zaimoglu’s and Trojanow’s work may reveal a return to traditional models of masculinity—German Romantics, working-class men, the failed hero—yet these authors redefine those models and create equally thought-provoking, new forms of masculinity. All constructions of masculinity discussed here lie at the intersection of fluid conceptions of gender and gender relations, ethnicity, “race,” class, and (trans-)nationality, thus destabilizing the nexus between masculinity and nationality and moving contemporary manifestations of masculinity from “native” to transnational.

References Adams, Rachel, and David Savra. 2002. Introduction. In The Masculinity Studies Reader, ed. Rachel Adams and David Savran, 1–8. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Ahmed, Sara. 2000. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2004a. Affective Economies. Social Text 22 (2): 117–39.

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———. 2004b. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bielby, Clare, and Frauke Matthes. 2015. Gender and Sexuality. In The Routledge Handbook of German Politics & Culture, ed. Sarah Colvin, 250–67. London and New York: Routledge. Biendarra, Anke S. 2012. Germans Going Global: Contemporary Literature and Cultural Globalization. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Biller, Maxim. 2003a [2000]. Die Tochter: Roman. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag. ———. 2003b. Esra: Roman. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Bischoff, Dörte, and Susanne Komfort-Hein. 2019. Programmatische Einleitung: Literatur und Transnationalität. In Handbuch Literatur & Transnationalität, ed. Dörte Bischoff and Susanne Komfort-Hein, 1–46. Handbücher zur kulturwissenschaftlichen Philologie 7. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Bly, Robert. 1990. Iron John: A Book About Men. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Braun, Rebecca, and Benedict Schofield. 2020. Introduction: Transnationalizing German Studies. In Transnational German Studies, ed. Rebecca Braun and Benedict Schofield, 1–13. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York and London: Routledge. ———. 1999 [1990]. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge. ———. 2004. Undoing Gender. New York and London: Routledge. Connell, Raewyn [R.W.]. 2000. The Men and the Boys. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2002. Gender. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2005a. Globalization, Imperialism, and Masculinities. In Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities, ed. Michael S.  Kimmel, Jeff Hearn, and Raewyn [R.W.] Connell, 71–89. Thousand Oaks: Sage. ———. 2005b [1995]. Masculinities. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Polity. Connell, Raewyn [R.W.], and James W.  Messerschmidt. 2005. Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept. Gender and Society 19 (6): 829–59. Demetriou, Demetrakis Z. 2001. Connell’s Concept of Hegemonic Masculinity: A Critique. Theory and Society 30 (3) (June): 337–61. Diner, Dan. 1987. Negative Symbiose—Deutsche und Juden nach Auschwitz. In Ist der Nationalsozialismus Geschichte? Zu Historisierung und Historikerstreit, ed. Dan Diner, 185–97. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuchverlag. Eck, Matthias. 2020. Masculinities in Austrian Contemporary Literature: Strategic Evasion. New York: Routledge. El-Tayeb, Fatima. 2011. European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2016. Undeutsch: Die Konstruktion des Anderen in der postmigrantischen Gesellschaft. Bielefeld: transcript.

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Faludi, Susan. 1992 [1991]. Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women. London: Vintage. ———. 2000 [1999]. Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Modern Man. London: Vintage. Ferree, Myra Marx. 2012. Varieties of Feminism: German Gender Politics in Global Perspective. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Frevert, Ute. 2001. Die kasernierte Nation: Militärdienst und Zivilgesellschaft in Deutschland. Munich: C.H. Beck. Gardiner, Judith Kegan. 2002. Introduction. In Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions, ed. Judith Kegan Gardiner, 1–29. New York: Columbia University Press. Halberstam, Jack. 1998. Female Masculinity. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2001. Empire. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Hearn, Jeff, and Marina Blagojević. 2013. Introducing and Rethinking Transnational Men. In Rethinking Transnational Men: Beyond, Between and Within Nations, ed. Jeff Hearn, Marina Blagojević, and Katherine Harrison, 1–24. London: Routledge. Hearn, Jeff, and Keith Pringle. 2006. Studying Men in Europe. In European Perspectives on Men and Masculinities: National and Transnational Approaches, ed. Jeff Hearn and Keith Pringle, with members of Critical Research on Men in Europe (CROME), 1–19. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Herminghouse, Patricia, and Magda Mueller, eds., 1997. Gender and Germanness: Cultural Productions of Nation. Providence and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Herrmann, Elisabeth, Carrie Smith-Prei, and Stuart Taberner. 2015. Introduction: Contemporary German-Language Literature and Transnationalism. In Transnationalism in Contemporary German-Language Literature, ed. Elisabeth Herrmann, Carrie Smith-Prei, and Stuart Taberner, 1–16. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Horrocks, Roger. 1994. Masculinity in Crisis: Myths, Fantasies and Realities. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. How much of a German man are you? (2013). EXBERLINER no. 112 (January): 21. Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. 2010. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. London: Routledge. Jay, Paul. 2010. Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies. New York: Cornell University Press. Jeremiah, Emily. 2012. Nomadic Ethics in Contemporary Women’s Writing in German: Strange Subjects. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Jerome, Roy. 2001. Introduction. In Conceptions of Postwar German Masculinity, ed. Roy Jerome, afterword Michael Kimmel, 3–12. Albany: State University of New York Press.

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Kaiser, Susanne. 2020. Politische Männlichkeiten: Wie Incels, Fundamentalisten und Autoritäre für das Patriarchat mobilmachen. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Kermani, Navid. 2007. Kurzmitteilung: Roman. Zurich: Ammann. ———. 2014. Große Liebe: Roman. Munich: Hanser. Kimmel, Michael S. 1987. Rethinking “Masculinity”: New Directions in Research. In Changing Men: New Directions in Research on Men and Masculinity, ed. Michael S. Kimmel, 9–24. Newbury Park, CA and London: Sage Publications. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1989. Ethics as First Philosophy. Trans. Seán Hand and Michael Temple. The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand, 75–87. Oxford: Blackwell. MacInnes, John. 1998. The End of Masculinity. Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press. Martschukat, Jürgen, and Olaf Stieglitz. 2008. Geschichte der Männlichkeiten, Historische Einführungen. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Matthes, Frauke. 2012. “Ein Heimatfilm der neuen Art”: Domestizierte Männlichkeit in Fatih Akins Soul Kitchen. Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik 3 (1): 131–44. Mayer, Tamar. 2000. From Zero to Hero: Masculinity in Jewish Nationalism. In Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation, ed. Tamar Mayer, 283–307. London and New York: Routledge. Meyer, Clemens. 2006. Als wir träumten: Roman. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer. ———. 2013. Im Stein: Roman. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer. ———. 2016. Bricks and Mortar. Trans. Katy Derbyshire. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions. Mignolo, Walter D. 2012 [2000]. Local Histories / Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. With a New Preface by the Author. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Montani, Ines. 2013. German is a Relatively Inconvenient Language. Interview with Jan Müller and Dirk von Lowtzow. EXBERLINER, online edition 22 January 2013, https://www.exberliner.com/music-clubs/tocotronic-interview/. Accessed 12 November 2022. Morton, Timothy. 2010. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Mosse, George L. 1996. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. New York: Oxford University Press. Nagel, Joane. 1998. Masculinity and Nationalism: Gender and Sexuality in the Making of Nations. Ethnic and Racial Studies 21 (2): 242–69. Paul, Georgina. 2009. Perspectives on Gender in Post-1945 German Literature. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Pease, Bob, and Keith Pringle. 2001. A Man’s World? Changing Men’s Practices in a Globalized World. London and New York: Zed Books. Puar, Jasbir K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

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Reeser, Todd W. 2010. Masculinities in Theory: An Introduction. Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Ring Petersen, Anne, and Moritz Schramm. 2017. (Post-)Migration in the Age of Globalisation: New Challenges to Imagination and Representation. Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 9 (2): 1–12. Ring Petersen, Anne, Moritz Schramm, and Frauke Wiegand. 2019. Introduction: From Artistic Intervention to Academic Discussion. In Moritz Schramm et al., Reframing Migration, Diversity and the Arts: The Postmigrant Condition, 3–10. New York: Routledge. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1985. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press. Segal, Lynne. 2007 [1990]. Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men. 3rd, rev. edn. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Showalter, Elaine. 1989. Introduction: The Rise of Gender. In Speaking of Gender, ed. Elaine Showalter, 1–13. Routledge: New York and London. Smith-Prei, Carrie. 2015. Affect, Aesthetics, Biopower, and Technology: Political Interventions into Transnationalism. In Transnationalism in Contemporary German-Language Literature, ed. Elisabeth Herrmann, Carrie Smith-Prei, and Stuart Taberner, 65–85. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2015. Stephan, Inge. 2003. Im toten Winkel: Die Neuentdeckung des “ersten Geschlechts” durch men’s studies und Männlichkeitsforschung. In Männlichkeit als Maskerade: Kulturelle Inszenierungen vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Claudia Benthien and Inge Stephan, 11-35. Literatur—Kultur—Geschlecht: Studien zur Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte, Kleine Reihe 18. Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau. Taberner, Stuart. 2017. Transnationalism and German-Language Literature in the Twenty-­First Century. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Theweleit, Klaus. 1987. Male Fantasies. 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History. Trans. Stephen Conway in collaboration with Erica Carter and Chris Turner. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 1989. Male Fantasies. 2. Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror. Trans. Chris Turner and Erica Carter in collaboration with Stephen Conway. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2019 [1977/1978]. Männerfantasien. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz; https:// www.matthes-­seitz-­berlin.de/buch/maennerphantasien.html. Accessed 23 July 2021. Trojanow, Ilija. 2006. Der Weltensammler: Roman. Munich: Hanser. ——— [Iliya Troyanov]. 2008. The Collector of Worlds. Trans. William Hobson. London: Faber & Faber. ———. 2011. EisTau: Roman. Munich: Hanser. ———. 2016. The Lamentations of Zeno: A Novel. Trans. Philip Boehm. London: Verso.

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Vertovec, Steven. 2009. Transnationalism. New York and London: Routledge. Whitehead, Stephen M. 2002. Men and Masculinities: Key Themes and New Directions. Cambridge: Polity. ———, ed. 2006. Men and Masculinities: Critical Concepts in Sociology, vol. 5: Global Masculinities. London and New York: Routledge. Whitehead, Stephen M., and Frank J. Barrett. 2001. The Sociology of Masculinity. In The Masculinities Reader, ed. Stephen M. Whitehead and Frank J. Barrett, 1–29. Cambridge: Polity. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 1997. Gender & Nation. London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi: Sage Publications. Zaimoglu, Feridun. 2008. Liebesbrand: Roman. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. ———. 2009. Hinterland: Roman. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. ———. 2011. Ruß: Roman. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch.

CHAPTER 2

Men Without Women: Clemens Meyer

East German Masculinities in a Transnational World The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, commonly referred to as the Wende (turning point), together with the ensuing German unification in 1990, is widely regarded as a major juncture in recent history: locally, nationally, and globally. The significant political, economic, and social changes that marked that period in Germany, particularly in East Germany, also involved the often contentious “national” question of what being German meant after the state’s forty-year-long separation. The early 1990s were also a time of noticeably accelerating globalization (see Taberner 2007, 3–5), which brought with it another set of tensions, namely, between the local and the global. In this chapter I am interested in how literary discourses of masculinity reflect these “glocal” tensions. Clemens Meyer’s male characters, the majority of whom are East German, are particularly worth exploring in this context as they are shown to carve out their own particular spaces largely as homosocial spaces in a radically changing world. While it may be tempting to regard many East German men, especially those whose socio-economic situation deteriorated in the early 1990s, as “Wendeverlierer” (unification losers) (Lewis 2008, 137), such a limited interpretation of their post-unification status does not suffice. Thus reading Clemens Meyer’s novels and many of his short stories, we see how masculinity in East Germany since 1989/1990 can find literary expression © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Matthes, New Masculinities in Contemporary German Literature, Global Masculinities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10318-6_2

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well beyond such reductive labels (compare Meyer in Gathmann and Hoch 2008; Pye 2020, 119) and bring the complexities of negotiating masculinity at times of great change to the fore. Meyer’s work appears to confirm what Alison Lewis has pointed out in relation to the effect of the Wende on perceptions and representations of gender: “Postunification fiction, it would seem, has a different, possibly more balanced, story to tell about the ways in which the rupture of unification and the transition process from communism to capitalism have affected gender” (2008, 137). However, Lewis’s assumption that several films and novels “reveal eastern German masculinity as being in a state of crisis,” which “is frequently figured in terms of a crisis of intimacy” (2008, 137), is too short-sighted, certainly in relation to Meyer’s work, as my analysis will demonstrate. What I am interested in unpacking in this chapter is how Meyer emphasizes the local position of his male protagonists while recognizing the globalized world in which these men find themselves after the Wende and whose transnational movements of people, capital, and opportunities do influence them, even if this appears to be in a primarily indirect rather than direct way.1 The mediated influence of the global world on their local environs is especially the case for those who are often regarded as excluded from the new freedoms that came with the fall of the Berlin Wall: in Meyer’s novels these are socially less affluent or working-class adolescents and men who turn to criminal activities or run or work in socially marginalized businesses. Thus his debut novel Als wir träumten (2006; When We Were Dreaming) is a coming-of-age story of a group of friends, young delinquents, around the time of the Wende, and the central theme of his more mature novel Im Stein (2013a; literally: Inside the Stone/In Stone; translated as Bricks and Mortar, 2016a) is masculine power and control over the post-Wende prostitution market.2 Meyer is known for being sceptical of labelling his characters as “Unterschicht” (e.g. Meyer in Gathmann and Hoch 2008; underclass) and thus marginalizing them in 1  Similarly, Lyn Marven points out that, while contemporary German-language novels tend to be global in their outlook, which is often “reflected in the cosmopolitan plots and content […], as well as their language,” they “nonetheless relate to the literary historiography of German-language literature and engage with local concerns; they are in that sense also ‘glocal’” (2011, 2). 2  Page references to Als wir träumten and Im Stein will appear in the text, preceded by the abbreviations “Awt” and “IS,” respectively. Translations of quotations from Im Stein are taken from Bricks and Mortar (translated by Katy Derbyshire), preceded by the abbreviation “BM.”

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socio-economic terms. Yet “marginalization,” a term that Raewyn Connell herself has perceived as “not ideal” (2005, 80), remains a useful frame when reading Meyer’s male characters in relation “to the authorization of the hegemonic masculinity of the dominant group” (ibid., 80–81; Connell’s emphasis), that is here, West German ideals rooted in global capitalism. As Gillian Pye points out: Meyer’s “protagonists are men battling to survive in an environment where traditional working-class male identity, based in the culture of heavy industry, is challenged by the flexible, mobile hegemonic masculine identity of global capitalism” (2020, 119). My analysis will demonstrate that Meyer’s male characters try to position their local masculinities in what Connell refers to as “the world gender order” (2000, 40–43) or “global gender order” (2005, 200), in which “the diversity of gender orders” is replaced and “European/ American gender arrangements are hegemonic” (ibid.). So, not only do Meyer’s (East German) men need to position themselves in relation to the hegemonic capitalist (West German) mainstream, but they also need to navigate from their local position the new opportunities and market forces that globalization has brought. Their relations with various groups of men and different forms of masculinity and, crucially, their creation of homosocial spaces play a key role in that process. Meyer was born in 1977 in Halle/Saale and grew up in the neighbouring city of Leipzig, where he lives to this day. He is known to have worked in the construction industry, for example, and to have spent some time in youth detention before taking up his studies at the Deutsches Literaturinstitut Leipzig (German Literature Institute, formerly the Johannes R. Becher Institute, founded in 1955). Although Meyer has also deliberately placed himself at the margins of the Leipzig literary scene that actually produced him, his experiences certainly contributed to the maverick writer label with which the publishing industry categorized him at the beginning of his career.3 This became a marketing factor when Als wir träumten hit the German literary market in 2006, gaining Meyer numerous prizes4 and much media attention. Meyer has made a name for himself by giving marginalized characters a literary voice (compare Pye 2011, 3  See my comments on Meyer’s evolving self-portrayal as an author in Matthes (2011, 89 and 101). See also Matthes (2018, 26–28 and 38). 4  Meyer received, for example, the Rheingau Literature Prize (2006) and the Clemens Brentano Prize (2007). Since then he has received a number of other prizes: for instance, the Leipzig Book Fair Prize for Die Nacht, die Lichter (2008) or the Klopstock Prize for New Literature for his oeuvre (2020).

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127).5 Thus side-lined figures also take centre stage in his short story collection Die Nacht, die Lichter (2008; The Night, the Lights; translated as All the Lights, 2011), the “diary” Gewalten: Ein Tagebuch (2010, Acts of Violence / Forces / Powers: A Diary), Im Stein, the story Rückkehr in die Nacht (2013d; Return into the Night), and his—at the time of writing— most recent story collections Die stillen Trabanten (2017; Dark Satellites, 2020a) and Stäube (2021; Dusts), the latter of which contains the essay “Wozu Literatur” (Why Literature), a reflection on Meyer’s own writing and on literature more generally. His 2020 story, Nacht im Bioskop (Night at the Bioscope) about the massacre in Novi Sad in January 1942, is said to be a “taster” for a forthcoming novel (Dallmann 2020). The author has also worked for the theatre and written film scripts for both television and cinema, some of which are based on his short stories such as In den Gängen (In the Aisles, directed by Thomas Stubner, 2018).6 Meyer came to wider prominence in the English-­speaking literary world when Im Stein, which had already been shortlisted for the German Book Prize in 2013, was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2017 (see Matthes 2018, 28). He has also won numerous prizes for his work, and his visiting professorship in 2014 at the Deutsche Literaturinstitut (Deutsches Literaturinstitut 2021), where he was once a student, and his lectures given as part of the prestigious Poetikdozentur at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt in 2015 (Frankfurter Poetikvorlesungen 2021), which were published as Der Untergang der Äkschn GmbH (2016b; The Downfall of Action Ltd), are certainly evidence for his arrival on the literary scene of which he was rather sceptical at the beginning of his career (Matthes 2011, 89, and 2018, 27). As my opening remarks to this chapter have made clear, Meyer is interested in the local—typically urban spaces in East Germany post-1989, which can often be identified as his hometown Leipzig—and in the everyday lives and ordinary milieux of his characters. Some critics have suggested that Meyer’s work can be read in the context of (post-)Wende writing, that is here, literature written about the time of the Wende

 On “Meyer’s reputation as a spokesman for marginal figures,” see Pye (2020, 128).  Als wir träumten was also adapted for the theatre by Armin Petras, who also directed the play, and Carmen Wolfram (Schauspiel Leipzig, premiere 13 April 2008) and for film by Andreas Dresen (director) and Wolfgang Kohlhaase (script) (premiere at the 65th Berlin Film Festival in 2015). See Matthes (2018, 31). 5 6

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(compare Pye 2011, 127–28),7 particularly by those of his generation such as Jana Hensel and Claudia Rusch (see Matthes 2018, 35).8 However, these authors’ largely autobiographical accounts of their (post-)GDR childhoods (see also Bach 2017, 16), Zonenkinder (2002; literally: Children of the Zone, i.e. the Soviet Occupied Zone; translated as After the Wall, 2004) and Meine freie deutsche Jugend (2003; My Free German Youth), respectively,9 often tap into the idea of Ostalgie (feeling nostalgic for the former East Germany) and, by evoking the “schöne warme Wir-­ Gefühl” (Hensel 2002, 7; nice and warm we-feeling) with which Hensel opens her text,10 produce characters who insist on being different or other from West Germans.11 As my analysis will make clear, these notions are not central to Meyer’s work. Meyer’s novels, particularly Als wir träumten, may perhaps be more effectively compared with other writers of his generation: Jakob Hein and Jochen Schmidt, who equally concern themselves with what Paul Cooke refers to as “a fragile generation with no fixed points of orientation” (2007, 67). Texts such as Hein’s Mein erstes T-Shirt (2001; My First T-Shirt) or Schmidt’s Müller haut uns raus (2002; Müller Kicks Us Out), though focussing on the “everyday experience of growing up in the GDR,” present us with “a far more matter-of-fact portrayal of life in the GDR” (Cooke 2007, 67; see also Leeder 2009, 239). Such comparisons with Hein and Schmidt are useful. Yet Meyer also offers an “everyday experience” of a less-known kind: those of the 7  On the Wenderoman (novel of/about the Wende), see Bilz (2009). However, as Susanne Bach points out Wende writing (Wendeliteratur) is a more complex term (2017, 21–25). She ties the term closely to Frank Thomas Grub’s wider-ranging definition of Wendeliteratur in his 2003 study “Wende” und “Einheit” im Spiegel der deutschsprachigen Literatur (Berlin: de Gruyter) (Bach 2017, 24–25) and the idea of generation. 8  On generations in the context of literature by the younger generation of East German writers, see Bach (2017, 13–21). See also Leeder (2009, 239–40). Bach also reads Als wir träumten in the context of Wendeliteratur (2017, 61–181). 9  For the comparison between Meyer’s and Hensel’s texts, see also Mensing (2006). See also Bach (2017, 67). Here I follow Paul Cooke’s separation of young East German writers such as Jana Hensel, Claudia Rusch, Jakob Hein, and Jochen Schmidt from older ones such as Ingo Schulze and Thomas Brussig (2007, 56–71). This seems to me the fairest basis of comparison in terms of life experiences and the way these writers have grown up. I therefore do not include Schulze, Brussig, and others in my discussion of writing from East Germany. 10  In Honecker’s Children, Anna Saunders explores the “we-identity” that “has emerged only since confrontation with life in west Germany, and perceptions of western arrogance and political colonisation, as well as the persistence of economic inequalities between east and west” (2007, 5). 11  See Evans on the subject of the alleged otherness of “Zonenkinder” (2005).

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aforementioned young male delinquents of Als wir träumten and the pimps and managers of brothels or somehow broken men of Im Stein. Although these characters are portrayed as being shaped by the political and social shift that followed the Wende, I would not like to continue on the well-trodden path of placing “East German masculinity”—whatever that collective term may mean—in contradistinction to “West German masculinity”: this binary does not do justice to the complex but also fragile masculinities of Meyer’s characters. That said, a brief look into discussions of “East German masculinity” can help us put Meyer’s characters into context. Holger Brandes, for instance, makes a clear distinction between “East” and “West German masculinities” when he points out the clash between their different hegemonic patterns. In his view “[t]he hegemonic masculinity in West Germany can be described as a pattern oriented on the lifestyle and aesthetic standard of modern middle classes and transnational entrepreneurship, while the hegemonic masculinity in the former GDR is shaped through a proletarian-petty bourgeois lifestyle and taste” (2007, 192). After the Wende he sees “the hegemonic extension of Western culture into the East and the higher attraction of the Western pattern of masculinity” and thereby an increasing marginalization of “the existing hegemonic concept of masculinity coming from the GDR tradition,” that is, “the more proletarian-petty-bourgeois-shaped pattern of masculinity […] has been pushed into the less future-oriented and often already underprivileged fringes of society” (ibid., 193). Lewis has observed similarly: “It was inevitable that, when compared with West German hegemonic ideals, East German ‘hegemonic’ men found themselves in inferior, subordinate, or even marginal positions” (2008, 139). By contrast, in his study of military masculinities in East German culture, Tom Smith points us, with reference to Mark Fenemore, to “[t]he “multicentric nature of GDR masculinities” (2020, 14).12 Rather than suggesting one specific pattern of East German masculinity, Smith makes clear that “GDR’s masculine ideals were themselves always plural and subject to substantial change and revision during the state’s forty-year lifespan” (2020, 34). His argument builds on Sylka Scholz’s exploration of 12  Smith refers to Mark Fenemore. 2007. Sex, Thugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll: Teenage Rebels in Cold-War East Germany. New York: Berghahn Books.

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co-existing forms of hegemonic masculinities in the GDR (2001; see also Smith 2020, 35), namely, “the socialist soldier personality, the working-­ class hero (Held der Arbeit) and the affectionate father” (Smith 2020, 14). Smith also includes the anti-fascist fighter in his study (2020, 35). However, Smith makes clear that [w]e should see these three forms of ideal masculinity [the working-class hero, the anti-fascist fighter, and the “socialist soldier personality”] not as competing forms of hegemonic masculinity so much as different manifestations of a set of hegemonic values that are never reducible to a single form of gender practice. They reveal the importance of Connell’s plural and shifting understanding of hegemonic masculinity, as men and women could appeal to hegemonic values and norms in different ways. The three ideals are entirely compatible with one another and were always in dialogue: the heroic worker and the socialist soldier are often depicted in an antifascist frame, and most soldiers or antifascist fighters in official publications come from working-class backgrounds. (2020, 35)

Bearing in mind the multicentricity of masculinities in an East German context as Smith has explored it, we may conclude that it is not particularly helpful to juxtapose an “East German” hegemonic form of masculinity with a “West German” one, and the same holds true for reading Meyer’s characters under a single, collective label such as “Wendeverlierer” or “Unterschicht.” However, by unpacking how Meyer’s characters navigate the, for them, new “world” or “global gender order” (Connell 2000, 40–43, 2005, 200) and their locality in the more noticeably transnational, capitalist world of the post-Wende years, I will read their socio-economic marginalization more productively, namely, transnationally, that is, beyond their East Germanness (compare Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 849). I will thereby avoid any potential orientalization of Meyer’s characters, or even of the author himself, as East German alone (compare Cooke 2005; see also Matthes 2018, 38). What is particularly interesting is how the characters create, and experience, their own world in the wider “gender order,” namely, as a world that is largely devoid of women or, if women are present, where men have control over them. These homosocial spaces, in which the male characters can confirm their masculine values and hegemony “als zentrales Kriterium von Männlichkeit” (Meuser 2001, 8; as a

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central criterion of masculinity), appear to promise local security in a transnational, and ultimately uncertain, world.13

Becoming Men at the Cusp of 2000: Als wir träumten

Set in the 1980s and 1990s, Meyer’s debut novel Als wir träumten depicts a time of transition,14 or crisis, as Martin Jörg Schäfer has specified it (2013),15 on both a personal and a political level. This interconnection between the personal, or local, and the political, or national as well as global, or, in Doreen Massey’s words, “the global as part of the local, the outside as part of the inside” (1994, 5), sheds a particularly interesting light on how perceptions and meanings of masculinities can change, adapt, or break down at times of upheaval. Als wir träumten revolves around a group of working-class adolescents, then young adults in the years shortly before and after the Wende. Their home is the eastern part of Leipzig, Reudnitz, home of the Premium 13  See Jürgen Martschukat and Olaf Stieglitz on how homosocial groups “suggerieren Sicherheit und können somit gerade in Zeiten, in denen Geschlechtersysteme prekär werden (oder von bestimmten Teilen so wahrgenommen oder beschrieben werden), eine besondere Bedeutung erlangen” (2008, 115; suggest security and can therefore gain particular significance, especially at times during which gender systems become precarious (or are perceived or described as such by certain groups)). Although they refer to the instability of gender systems as a crucial factor in constructions of homosociality I argue that instabilities caused by political and social changes such as the ones just described can have a similar effect. 14  Pye has explored “the literary representation of the material environment [in Als wir träumten] as a significant marker of such transition” (2011, 126). She points out that “the broken material environment offers an interesting perspective on questions of rupture, continuity, and uncertainty, which in turn offers insights into the experience of transition some twenty years on” (ibid.). 15  Schäfer names the following set of crises that shape the setting of Als wir träumten: “die Krise des Kindheitsendes in der Pubertät, die Krise des Zusammenbruchs des Ostblocks und dem Heraufkommen einer neuen, die soziale Marginalisierung nur zementierenden Ordnung, außerdem die Krise des Zerfalls von Familien und des Abdriftens in halbkriminelle Milieus” (2013, 54; the crisis of the end of childhood in puberty, the crisis of the collapse of the eastern bloc and the emergence of a new order that only cements social marginalization, moreover the crisis of the breakdown of families and the drifting off into semi-criminal milieus). While the term “crisis” is a popular term to describe such times of transition, I do not find it productive but rather negative and so shall refrain from using it in my reading of Meyer’s novels. See my comments on the limitations of the “crisis” paradigm in relation to masculinity in the introductory chapter. I will also return to its usefulness in Chap. 6.

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Pilsner Brauerei, an area characterized by industry and working-class life. Although the brewery still exists (it is  now the Leipziger Brauhaus zu Reudnitz), the other industries disappeared after the Wende, and the area was hit by high unemployment; consequently, parts of the neighbourhood became derelict.16 As readers are carried between the past and present tenses, they learn about the narrator Daniel Lenz, or Danie, and his group of friends. They are: Rico, the boxer, who spends more time in youth prison than in the boxing ring and who leaves the narrative after starting a long prison sentence; Fred who is proud of his “legendary” crimes (Awt, 10); Paul whose collection of sex magazines is the largest in the area; Stefan, or rather Pitbull, who almost beats his father to death and ends up dealing drugs; Mark, whose drug addiction kills him; and “der kleine Walter” (little Walter), who drives head on into a tree and dies in the collision (Mensing 2006).17 Meyer does not develop a tightly plotted storyline, but rather the novel is a succession of rapid film-like montages of Daniel’s memories recollected in prison, giving a sense of immediacy, which is enhanced by Meyer’s sparse, direct style. We read about the boys’ school years under the late GDR regime and about their activities as adolescent gang members and delinquents in the early 1990s. The novel opens with a chapter that carries the telling title “Kinderspiele”; those “children’s games” of the characters’ early teens rapidly turn into reality, into severe violence, and sometimes even death: whereas the pre-1989 years appear in Meyer’s novel as a time of relative innocence (see Williams 2013, 138), the post-­ Wende years bring devastation and social decline. The political Wende is thus in many ways also a marker of their change from childhood to adolescence: the start of the new regime coincides with the beginning of the criminal activities of the characters who are between thirteen and fifteen at the time of the Wende and face the end of their childhood after the Wende. In order to come to terms with these developments, Daniel narrates the events from the perspective of a more mature man in his mid-twenties (compare Bach 2017, 73). This perspective allows Meyer to introduce the novel’s leitmotif, which the title already anticipates: the idea of dreaming. 16  This holds true for the time of when the novel is set; the area has undergone some developments since the mid-1990s, but it still had a high vacancy rate in housing in the 2000s. See Pye (2011, 227). Compare also Williams (2013, 136). 17  For an analysis of this car crash, see Cosgrove (2016). Cosgrove reads the car crash as a symbol of “death, the disintegration of friendships and a sense of historical nihilism and social disenfranchisement” (ibid., 216).

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Dreaming relates to the central question “do you remember,” which guides the reader through the narrative.18 This question brings back memories of the boys’ childhood and early adolescence, of their innocence, but also of the beginning of their criminal activities, which mark the beginning of their homosocial experiences. Thus, for Schäfer, “[d]er titelgebende Traumzustand bezeichnet weniger den Traum als Utopie, sondern vielmehr die Traumwelt als eine des Rausches” (2013, 56; the eponymous state of dreaming does not so much denote the dream as utopia but rather the dream world as one of ecstasy). These times, “the old” or “wild times” as the boys call them, are connected with fun, but—significantly—also with a sense of lostness. The first chapter ends with Daniel’s reflection on his past: Es gibt keine Nacht in der ich nicht von alldem träume, und jeden Tag tanzen die Erinnerungen in meinem Kopf, und ich quäle mich mit der Frage, warum das alles so gekommen ist. Sicher, wir hatten eine Menge Spaß damals, und doch war bei dem, was wir taten, eine Art Verlorenheit in uns, die ich schwer erklären kann. (Awt, 14) There isn’t a single night I don’t dream about all that, and every day the memories dance in my head, and I agonize over the question why everything ended up that way. We had a lot of fun back then, that’s for sure; yet still, whatever we did there was some sort of lostness, which I can’t quite explain, inside us.

Meyer allows Daniel to connect his friends’ brutality with a sober look at their actions; even though Daniel was one of boys, as the narrator who reflects back on their earlier lives, he takes on the position of an outsider and can thus dismiss moments of sentimentality quickly. Although, to Daniel, their adolescent activities appear as “seltsam traumartige Flugnächte” (strangely dream-like nights of flying), he does not hide their brutal reality: these nights usually ended “mit einer Landung in der Ausnüchterungszelle oder auf dem Flur des Polizeireviers Südost, mit Handschellen an die Heizung gekettet” (Awt, 7; by landing in the sobering-­up cell or on the corridor of the Police Station South-East, being tied to the radiator with handcuffs). It would seem that Daniel’s narration in the form of “dreaming” is a way of escaping into a glorified and idealized past; yet Daniel’s recollecting of his memories is primarily a means of  On memory in Als wir täumten, see also Bach (2017, 66).

18

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re-­imagining his and his friends’ pre-criminal innocence. Seemingly insignificant details bring this to the fore: for instance, the characters typically keep giving their “Pionierehrenwort” (Pioneer’s word of honour) even years after the collapse of the GDR and after leaving school.19 Their “Pionierehrenwort,” perhaps unwittingly, creates a sense of collectivity, stability, and belonging (compare Bach 2017, 69 and 108). While this term, and the performative act that goes along with it, may be rooted in their experiences of a GDR childhood, they are carrying this over to the 1990s and thus into their adolescence marked by the lostness on which Daniel reflects early on in the narrative. It is not far-fetched to read those moments of collective recollection of things past as the beginning of their homosocial experiences. Bach also points out the frequent switch from Daniel’s first-person narrative to a collective first person plural “wir” to stress the boys’ closeness (2017, 107–108). Thus in his “dreams,” Daniel imagines an exclusively masculine world, a world of homosocial relations and gangs, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes it: in any male-dominated society, there is a special relationship between male homosocial (including homosexual) desire and the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power: a relationship founded on an inherent and potentially active structural congruence. For historical reasons, this special relationship may take the form of ideological homophobia, ideological homosexuality, or some highly conflicted but intensively structured combination of the two. (1985, 25; Sedgwick’s emphasis)

Meyer does not present his readers with reasons for why his characters have transformed from innocent boys to violent, homophobic, xenophobic, and women-(ab)using young men whose view of masculinity is based on male dominance over weaker people, patriarchal power, and fixed gender as well as social roles, ramifications of what Sedgwick explains in the quotation above. But if we take a closer look at some of the features that characterize homosocial relations and the spaces in which they are lived in Meyer’s late twentieth-century Reudnitz, we can nevertheless discern how his characters perceive and confirm their masculinity (compare Meuser 2001, 14). 19  “Pioneers” were members of the Ernst Thälmann Pioneer Organisation that included almost all East German schoolchildren between the ages of six and fourteen.

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First, Daniel and his friends are in a gang who fight other gangs, and their “Machtspiele” (Meuser 2001, 22; power games)20 is where the majority of the violence that Daniel continuously talks about has its roots. Daniel’s gang can exercise this violence because they live in what they call “the ghetto” (Awt, 10), the area around the brewery, the “Eastside.” While this is a marginalized social space, his narrative also clearly highlights his friends’ (subconscious) aspiration to be a little bit more exciting than they actually are, of looking up to New York (the Eastside) or the West generally. (But they do not admire Leipzig’s west, the “Weststadt,” which is one of their “enemy territories”; indeed, the “Weststadt” is too affluent an area for them). By establishing their gang and using vocabulary that ascertains their gang culture, the boys seem to be trying to gain access to a global arena, to the masculine globalized world and, despite their pride in their local area, to go beyond their identity as East German boys from Reudnitz. As Connell makes clear: “The youth gang violence of inner-city streets is a striking example of the assertion of marginalized masculinities against other men, continuous with the assertion of masculinity in sexual violence against women” (2005, 83). Although being in a gang marginalizes the boys and their masculinity in German society, within gang culture they lose their roles as outsiders and become part of the global picture of rowdy masculinity. Still, despite fighting for a position of power among the gang culture of which they are now part, their access to “real” power, to hegemonic masculinity outside this culture, remains barred, as we shall see. The universal dimension of their gang just described goes hand in hand with the two clearly defined purposes the ghetto serves: firstly, and mainly, it excludes others, namely, those who either threaten or affirm the boys’ masculinity. In the case of Meyer’s protagonists, these others are politically differently minded people, that is, Neo-Nazis, who also live in Reudnitz and who often get in their way, as well as radicals on the left, the “Zecken” (literally “ticks”) who live in Leipzig’s south, in Connewitz; others also include supporters of the “wrong” football team, that is, 1. FC Lokomotive (Lok), also called VfB Leipzig for some time in the 1990s (Daniel and his friends are BSG Chemie Leipzig fans) (see Bach 2017, 138–39); and socalled foreigners as well as gay people are excluded, too. Above all, others are women: as most women and girls leave or are out of reach for the boys 20  Meuser’s argument is based on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the “serious games of competition.” Bach’s analysis of Meyer’s novel is influenced by Bourdieu and his notion of the habitus (2017, e.g. 177).

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(such as Dani’s school friend Katja, whose family move to West Germany [see Schäfer 2013, 55]), those women to whom they do have access only serve as an instrument of the boys’ pleasure (as sex workers [Awt, 161] or—and this is another frequently recurring theme—in the context of pornography) and of proving their masculine prowess. In fact, according to Sedgwick, “women ha[ve] a kind of ultimate importance in the schema of men’s gender constitution—representing an absolute of exchange value, of representation itself, and also being the ultimate victims of the painful contradictions in the gender system that regulates men” (1985, 134). Indeed, Meyer portrays his protagonists as what Judith Butler calls “compulsory heterosexuals” (1995, 31), which is the basis for their condescending manners and their belief in “acute structural gender inequalities” (Whitehead and Barrett 2001, 4).21 Or in Sedgwick’s words: “men’s homosocial and heterosexual desires need not be opposites but may be entirely complicit” (1985, 57). However, the narrative also introduces female characters in order to highlight how the male characters try to hide their insecurities as men. Their attitudes can be traced especially in prison, one of the most socially marginalized as well as gender-separated spaces, that is, “where women are present as an idea but not as a social reality” (Colvin 2008, 265). For instance, when playing a game of Monopoly with his inmates, Daniel records the following conversation about women: Jetzt stand Frank vor dem Puff und musste zahlen. Und er zahlte. “War ’ne gute Nummer,” sagte er, “war alles dabei, blasen, lecken und so weiter. War ’ne Schwarze, mehr so hellbraun. Mann, hat ihre Pussie geglüht!” Wir lachten. […] “[W]eißt du, wer am besten fickt? Die Fidschibräute [sic], die Vietnamesinnen, stimmt’s?” Er klopfte dem Fidschi [sic] auf die Schulter. “Du, ehrlich, ihr habt … na ja … schöne Frauen.” (Awt, 227) Now Frank stood in front of the brothel and had to pay. And he paid. “That was a shag,” he said, “all inclusive, sucking, licking, and so on. Was a black one, more sort of light brown. Man, her pussy was glowing!” We laughed. […] “Do you know who fucks best? Fidschi [sic; pejorative term for Vietnamese people, F.M.] chicks, Vietnamese women, right?” He patted the Fidschi [sic; Vietnamese inmate, F.M.] on the back. “Honestly, you have… well… beautiful women.” 21  Lynne Segal points out that “in jobs sex-typed as male, and with home lives which remain strongly male-dominated […] the lower working-class tends to produce sharper sexrole distinctions than other classes” (2007, 222).

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As women are not physically present in prison, the inmates can objectify them boundlessly and use them, above all, as a means to assert their manhood: they can boast with experiences they might not actually have had and make themselves a little bit more exciting in that way. “Exotic” women play an even more significant role in this context as they also bring the power relations between white men and “foreigners” rooted in racist thinking to the fore: by racializing women, orientalizing Black and Asian women, and stereotyping their sexual behaviour, the young lads are possessive towards them and, by extension, show their power over the “foreign,” that is, the racially other(ed) men in prison: they construct their manliness at the expense of “foreign” women who have sex with white German men. However, in prison this is only an imagined construction; the inmates are playing a game after all. This incident also exemplifies the significance of homosocial experiences, especially when separated from the rest of society (the inmates are laughing when talking about sex, thus showing, or pretending to show, that they all know what Frank is alluding to). Such homosocial experiences are, once again, strongly connected to compulsory heterosexuality. Gay men such as Daniel’s cellmate André are violently excluded from bonding with other inmates, from forming a male society.22 There is, therefore, every indication that the inmates in Als wir träumten regard their masculinity to be under threat; they feel anxious as men. Not having access to women in prison, they cannot physically prove their masculine prowess in that way. Secondly, while the ghetto may be another socially marginalized space, it is also an exclusive space; it enables the consumption of drugs, the organization of illegal techno-parties, and, above all, the exercise of violence23: “Straße ist Schule” (Awt, 509; the street is the school), one of the boys makes clear. According to Suzanne E. Hatty, clearly, violence is still the prerogative of the youthful male, especially when confronted by the contradictions and paradoxes of thwarted desire and ­personal and social disempowerment. Reaching deep into the historical and cultural storehouse of masculinity, a young man may still retrieve the ultimate tool of manly self-assertiveness: omnipotence through violence. (2000, 6)

 On characteristics of “Männerbünde” (male societies), see Mosse (1996, 142).  Bach has analysed the violence in Als wir träumten in 2017, 171–76.

22 23

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For Daniel and his friends, violence is what Anne Campbell has identified as “a measure of being someone in a world where all hope of success in conventional terms is lost” (1993, 132). Devoid of or denying any parental support, they can only find their masculinity through aggressiveness. Aggressiveness leads to fighting and thus requires strong bodies. The boys’ view of masculinity can therefore only be rooted in their corporeality and the display of their male bodies which the novel frequently thematizes. It is already introduced on the cover of the book through the image of a boxer. Rico’s boxing serves as the novel’s leitmotif; boxing prepares the readers for the real fights, the violent actions to come in the boys’ later lives that end up in prison. In that respect Meyer constructs violence as, according to Hatty, a “corporeal experience, involving the collision of bodies, the extension of touch (painful or injurious) into spaces and places where it is not welcome” (2000, 46). The body serves as an “instrument” (Hatty 2000, 119),24 a “weapon” even, which is only possible because of “the foreign character of their bodies” (ibid., 120).25 Intense emotion and experience are felt only through, and acted out through, the body, and physical violence becomes a way of compensating for emotional detachments elsewhere. The regular occurrences of street fights in the narrative, the frequent descriptions of their bodies in physical conflict, would also not allow for a tender relation to their bodies. Feeling pain is seen as effeminate; instead blood is swallowed and used as an incentive to land an even stronger blow on one’s opponent. Fighting “like a man” is, furthermore, closely tied to the idea of a code (inside and outside the prison), as well as dignity and honour. Physical toughness is needed to keep or defend a man’s (“unsere” [Awt, 271; our]) or the neighbourhood’s honour (Awt, 261). George L. Mosse points out that these notions of will power and courage that make up masculinity have changed little over time (1996, 4). This also holds true for Meyer’s protagonists who do not construct their manliness in an alternative way, but adhere to patriarchal concepts that favour men over women, and strong men over weaker ones. In effect they are complicit, in Connell’s sense, with certain ideals of hegemonic

24   Hatty refers here to Victor Seidler. 1997. Man Enough: Embodying Masculinity. London: Sage. 25  Hatty refers to Michael A. Messner. 1997. When Bodies Are Weapons. In Through the Prism of Difference: Readings of Sex and Gender, ed. Maxine Baca Zinn, Pierrette HondagneuSotelo, and Michael A. Messner, 257–72. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

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masculinity. The gradual emergence of this attitude reveals the protagonists’ development from boys to men and drives the narrative forward. It does not come as a surprise, therefore, that when in prison Daniel and his fellow inmates, then in their late teens or early twenties, give much attention to their and other inmates’ bodies which are endlessly described in an almost cinematic manner.26 Meyer looks at those bodies, and the (violent) actions they perform, with an eye of a narrative camera: he zooms in and out, focuses on particular stills, and manages to make his readers cringe with pain or disgust. In prison, the body becomes an even more significant “object” than in the outside world; it is the only thing the inmates have control over as they are, in fact, infantilized: like children they are told what to do and when. Furthermore, Yvonne Jewkes’ research shows that there also exists “fear among inmates and prison officials” which can be counteracted by building up a strong body; the inmates’ built bodies give them “presence and power” (2002, 51 and 19). Scars and tattoos play a significant role in this context (Tasker 1993, 2). Daniel observes his fellow inmates in prison: “[Der Geldeintreiber] war nicht ganz so groß wie der Riese und auch nicht so breit wie Klaus, er war einer von der zähen Sorte, kein Fett, das hatte ich beim Duschen gesehen. Er hatte jede Menge Tattoos, vor allem auf dem Rücken” (Awt, 235; [The debt collector] wasn’t as tall as the giant and he wasn’t as broad as Klaus either, he was of the tough sort, no fat, I had seen that in the showers. He had lots of tattoos, especially on his back).27 Tattoos and trained bodies give Meyer’s men respect from other, mainly weaker inmates; that is, by “endur[ing] the pain [and …] permanently altering [their] bod[ies] in the way that [they] dictate,” they not only “reaffirm the cultural idea of masculinity as control over the body” (Reeser 2010, 97), but also regain some control beyond their bodies in the prison community. Thus their socially marked bodies make them superior, more powerful, and, above all, (in their view) honourable men. Within their marginalization of the prison environment, they can gain hegemony via their bodies and the performativity of those bodies. As Smith puts it: “masculinity is built up through 26  As the novel is told from Daniel’s first-person perspective, readers only learn about his prison experiences. On Meyer’s “kinoariges Erzählen” (cinema-like narrating), see Schäfer (2013, 57–59 and also 62–65). See also Bach on the influence of film on Meyer’s style (2017, 64–65). 27  In this context, it is interesting to note that Meyer himself constructs, or was asked to construct, his masculinity by showing off his tattoos in the photograph on the dust jacket of Als wir träumten, as if to ensure the authenticity of his subject matter.

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embodied performativity. Individuals enact their gender in performative ways through bodily actions and interactions with other bodies. Masculine bodies are shaped by these actions, their limits are defined by interactions, and the body defines the bounds within which conformity with ideals is possible” (2020, 18). In the prison context of Meyer’s characters we can see here a nexus of the physical body and masculine ideals (as Smith has pointed out) or abstract values. Thinking further about this nexus we may be reminded of what Mosse says about “the stereotype of [modern] masculinity,” that is, masculinity from the eighteenth-century onwards, as “conceived as a totality based upon the nature of man’s body” (1996, 5). The boys have completely internalized this idea: conflicts are always resolved with fists, never with words. Winning as many conflicts as possible gives them pride and “value,” and bragging about their violent experiences and the prison sentences they earned as a result of those is a widespread hobby in prison. This “game” affirms their masculinity as it brings a certain degree of invincibility required in the rough prison environment in order to come out unscathed (Walklate 2001, 69). It has become clear that the boys’ perceptions of masculinity are based on features also to be found in what Jewkes refers to as “underclass cultures”: “intergroup loyalty, adherence to a ‘code of honour,’ a distinctive jargon, display of aggressive toughness, passing initiation rites, opposition to authority” (2002, 51). Their ideas of what makes them “real” men help Daniel and his friends create what I call a masculine counter-world—and a sense of (imagined) belonging. However, although Meyer’s characters are looking for a sense of belonging, it is not dependent on a political entity, a state, as a consideration of their background in the GDR, a country which no longer exists, might suggest. The notion of a “fractured identity” due to their “fractured history” is therefore less of a concern in Meyer’s novel (see Saunders 2007, 165). Meyer’s characters seek, and to some extent find, their belonging in their homosocial world of delinquency, one that links their local position to the global context of gangs and ghettos, as explored above. Yet the novel does also address the loss of a different sense of belonging related to their past: in the chapter “Abschied” (Farewell), significantly the penultimate chapter, Daniel finds Rico’s “Erinnerungsmappe” (memory folder), not long before Rico is caught by the police for the final time in the narrative:

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[Rico] hatte den Artikel ausgeschnitten und in seine Erinnerungsmappe gelegt, die er in seiner Reisetasche bei sich trug. […] Er hatte ein paar Fotos da drinnen, auf einem standen er, Pitbull, der damals noch Stefan hieß, Walter und ich vor einem Mercedes, wir hielten uns an den Händen und lachten, das war auf der Messe gewesen, Herbst neunundachtzig. Rico hatte auch die Todesanzeigen von Walter und Mark in der Mappe, eine von den alten Schülerzeitungen und seine Entlassungsscheine. [...] “’n Swingerklub, Danie.” […] Er kam zu mir rüber und zog sich sein Hemd an. “Ich hab doch gesagt, ich will’s nochmal krachen lassen, bevor sie mich kassieren.” (Awt, 474) [Rico] had cut out the article and put it into his memory folder, which he carried with him in his bag […] He had a few photos in it, on one of those there were him, Pitbull, who was still called Stefan back then, Walter and myself in front of a Mercedes, we held each other by our hands and laughed, that was at the Fair [the annual Autumn Fair in Leipzig, F.M.], autumn eighty-nine. Rico also had Walter’s and Mark’s death notices in his folder, one of the old school magazines, and his notices of dismissal. […] “a swinger club, Danie.” […] He came over to me and put his shirt on. “I said, you know, I wanted to have a big blast one more time, before they nick me.”

Looking at the photograph of the then still fairly innocent boys, Daniel seems to feel nostalgic. Yet his feeling of nostalgia does not relate to the GDR past: the photo happens to have been taken in the autumn of 1989, and the significance of the immense changes of the time does not appear to play a role in Daniel’s memories and Rico’s “memory folder.” The only indicator for the advent of Western capitalism may be the Mercedes as one of the symbols of Western consumerism that is being exhibited just before the fall of the Berlin Wall at the Leipzig fair, the biannual event that brought the world to the GDR. So, what is noticeable is that although the boy’s memories might still connect them, these memories are firmly in the past and the friends do not linger in them (perhaps also to avoid the pain of having lost their friendship, at least in the innocent form it once was). It seems “safer” to quickly turn to what they experience as “male” pleasure, like having fun at a swinger club one more time before confronting authority—here in the form of the police—again.

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Rico’s experience highlights that the world of Meyer’s characters is a world primarily created in opposition to any form of authority and hierarchy: against the law and the police (although, as we have seen, the boys frequently “lose” and have to go to the Police Station South-East and then to prison), but also against their fathers. In this way, Meyer thematizes the breakdown of patriarchy—a common theme in the GDR’s foundational novels as well as post-GDR literature, as Thomas C. Fox has explored (2010, 207–24), and a search for alternative forms of belonging, or families, in the form of male gangs. Meyer’s take on this trope, however, reveals the paradoxical development of Daniel, Rico, and their gang and, by implication, the author’s divergent depiction of East German youth from most of his contemporaries’ portrayals of their young central characters: his protagonists’ rejection of authority leads to their patriarchal behaviour. In their childhoods, the boys’ fathers appear as role models who initiate their sons into militarized manhood, namely, into drinking in their favourite pub (see Bach 2017, 149–50), into gambling and other forms of “masculine” behaviour, but also into clearly defined spaces, that is, above all into spaces devoid of women and thus based on traditional gender roles. Fathers also “teach” their sons to some extent “to be delinquent,” that is, to be tough and aggressive, and to act as risk seekers (Walklate 2001, 57).28 Rico’s father is even in the military, which was one of the most highly regarded workplaces for men in the GDR (Walklate 2001, 57).29 The boys have internalized this kind of militarized behaviour and in many ways they replicate their fathers’ behaviour (see Bach 2017, 141–42), but there is also a real rebellion against their fathers, because they do not exist anymore: neither as role models (some fathers have given in to alcohol, for instance), nor, quite literally, as a physical presence. Daniel’s father simply disappears. As mentioned earlier, one of the characters, Pitbull, even tries to dispose of his father himself. Furthermore, the world of their fathers, that is, the role of breadwinner, is denied to the boys (Walklate 2001, 67).30 Daniel and his friends also have to live with unemployment when they leave school. Although this might appear as a typical East German issue, Meyer does not give a politico-economic 28   Walklate refers to Edwin Hardin Sutherland. 1947. Principles of Criminology. Philadelphia: Lippincott. See also Bach who points out that violence connects the boys with their fathers (2017, 147). 29  On military education, see Saunders (2007, 58–68). See also Bach (2017, 147–48). 30  Walklate refers to Campbell, Out of Control.

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explanation for their unemployment. The boys’ lives in the “ghetto,” where, instead of at home, they learn how to become what they regard as “real men,” seem to be detached from time and place. Sandra Walklate’s comments on the social reality of the “street” in her study of the connections between gender and crime are thus useful when looking into the delinquent activities of Meyer’s characters: And whilst the street may have always been a male preserve for different forms of social activity, it takes on a crucial significance in the absence of work and the uncomfortable presence of the alternative: the domestic domain, for which they have no role which they can easily identify. The subsequent involvement, then, of these young men in crime, whether burglary, joy riding, drugs, or rioting, needs to be understood as a product of their economic and social location and their need to express themselves as men. (2001, 68)31

Although these developments can also be found in Meyer’s novel, his protagonists are shown to have developed something in line with what Connell describes in relation to working-class, especially ethnic minority boys and young men as “protest masculinity” (2002, 144; 2005, 109–12). James W. Messerschmidt uses a similar term with reference to “lower-­ working-­class, racial-minority boys”: “opposition masculinities [which] are based on a specific relation to school generated by the interaction of school authority with class, race, and gender dynamics” (1993, 117). This is not an “accommodating masculinity—a controlled, cooperative, rational gender strategy of action for institutional success” as white, middle-class males create it within the school (ibid., 95; Messerschmidt’s emphasis; see also Hatty 2000, 117–18). Meyer does not see any parallels between his characters and ethnic-minority delinquent boys (Gathmann and Hoch 2008); however, they do share a number of features. Meyer’s protagonists protest because they are marginalized and feel, to an extent, powerless (see Connell 2005, 111): they live in a socially less affluent area; have, for whatever reason, fewer chances in terms of education (or simply do not seize their chances because they do not want to be different, but part of the gang); have no real sense of belonging; and have dysfunctional fathers, if they have one at all. In effect, they are victims of the power relations amongst men: they are emasculated by the white, male, middle-class  Walklate refers to Campbell, Out of Control.

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society that shuns them. Yet Daniel and his friends desperately do not want to be feminized, that is, weakened, so they do what they can do best: show their fists. This becomes their means of “survival.” Thus the novel makes clear that their marginalization and their lives as violent criminals stand in a complex dialectical relationship of mutual reinforcement; they cannot be separated from each other. The novel closes by Daniel remembering the story of how it all began: namely, with the boys’ first encounter with Fred, “de[m] erste[n] Autoknacker Leipzigs” (Awt, 506; Leipzig’s first car burglar), whom they interview for their school newspaper and who later pulls them into the vortex of violence. In the last chapter, “Als wir Reporter waren” (When We Were Reporters), all the major themes are introduced to the reader retrospectively: ghettos, drugs, fights, and so on. Yet Daniel ends on a nostalgic note: “Draußen wurde es dunkel, Fred zündete ein paar Kerzen an, und wir rückten zusammen und aßen und tranken und waren glücklich” (Awt, 518; It was getting dark outside, Fred lit a few candles, and we moved together and ate and drank and were happy).32 Meyer’s character’s nostalgia for the last days of their childhood is rooted, somewhat paradoxically perhaps, in an active and physical homosociality that leads them away from the relative innocence of their childhood in the first place. Yet, as Als wir träumten suggests, this homosociality also gives them a new sense of belonging at times of personal and political change and uncertainty. The novel does not specify when the lostness that Daniel reflects on in the novel’s first chapter starts to overshadow their sense of belonging which concludes the last chapter. Instead, its final lines confirm that, having drawn the reader into the subjective experience of the boys’, later young men’s, milieu from within, Als wir träumten does not give a clear-cut, one-dimensional portrait of marginalized masculinity but rather presents its readers with complex and even conflicting ways of becoming men at the cusp of 2000.

Marginalized Masculinities—Local and Transnational: Im Stein A sense of melancholia, paired with an often matter-of-fact style, also sets the tone in Meyer’s second novel Im Stein. To complete my discussion a brief examination of this novel enables further elaboration of the analysis  On the novel’s ending, see also Bach (2017, 179–80).

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of the homosocial worlds that Meyer creates in his work as carriers of the relationship between the local and the transnational. Published seven years after Meyer’s debut novel, Im Stein is a polyphonic novel that revolves around organized prostitution and sex work in an unnamed city post-1989. This city is sometimes referred to as “Eden City,” perhaps a tribute to Reinhard Kriese’s science fiction novel Eden City, die Stadt des Vergessens (Eden City, City of Oblivion) published in the GDR in 1985, but references make clear that Meyer modelled this city on the conurbation formed by the two cities of Leipzig and Halle (Meyer 2013b). The narrative primarily comprises inner monologues spoken by the sex workers, the pimps, and other social outsiders whose memories, flashbacks, and sudden associations with, for example, childhood songs or films make these monologues often appear like streams of consciousness. This technique—reminiscent of the “dreaming,” the remembering and retelling of (unreliable and uncertain) memories in Als wir träumten33 (see Schäfer 2013, 54)—again creates a sense of immediacy. It also questions the notion of authenticity and “challenges memory discourse, the retrospective construction of the past, often associated with literature produced by writers socialized in the former GDR/East Germany” (Matthes 2018, 37; see also ibid., 37–38). Yet, in Im Stein, Meyer takes one step further in terms of style: the narrative’s montage-like character emerges from stage-­like dialogues between characters, reports, and extracts from official documents, for example, the Prostitution Act passed in 2002, which regulates sex work as a service and has improved the social and legal status of sex workers in Germany. Im Stein does not have a clear storyline as such, and narrative perspectives often change in quick succession, with a third-­ person narrator occasionally telling the characters’ stories or recounting their backgrounds and past experiences. The readers are required to piece the puzzle together. The titled chapters, which, again similar to the chapters in Als wir träumten, not only have the length of short stories but also share some of their stylistic and thematic features, above all the short story’s “fragmentary nature” with its ellipses and omissions, its “liminality, open-endedness, [and] ambiguity” (Marven et al. 2020, 7 and 12), guide

33  On the unreliability of Daniel’s narration and memories, see Bach (2017, 88–100). Pye discusses the “unreliability of memories” in Als wir träumten and explains that the recounting and immediately taking back of something recounted is a technique Meyer borrowed from F. Scott Fitzgerald (2011, 132 and 138n31).

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us to some extent.34 I have elaborated elsewhere on Meyer in a transnational literary context by examining his writing style adopted in Im Stein (Matthes 2018). This style takes inspiration from the modernist literature of the first half of the twentieth century and particularly from his literary predecessors, primarily major male literary voices such as Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos (Matthes 2018, esp. 26, 33–35, and 38–39). Meyer’s is also a style that, despite the novel’s thematic specificity, not only renders the city as a “transnational space” (Matthes 2018, 34), but also draws attention to the novel’s “singularity” and thereby “universalizability” (Matthes 2018, 34–35; see also ibid. 36).35 What is worth pointing out in the context of the current discussion is that Meyer’s style shapes, but also questions, the social marginalization of his characters. Above all it allows him to create the homosocial world of his male characters because although Meyer wishes the sex workers’ voices to take centre stage (Meyer 2013b), these women often remain nameless or have several (private and professional) names. This often makes it difficult to differentiate between the various female characters and so they come across as types rather than as characters with room to develop. The two main male characters who lead the reader through the plot— Meyer has called them antipodes (2013c)—are Arnold Kraushaar, also referred to as “Der Alte” (the Old Man), AK, AK 47, and Hans Pieszek, or “Schweine-Hans” (“Hans the Hatchet”; literally: pig-Hans),36 who run “the business” in the big city. Arnold owns a number of flats he rents out to sex workers; Hans runs various clubs and later becomes the head of the “Engel” (“Angels”), an organization modelled on Hell’s Angels, who are originally from Hanover and aim to control the market in Eden City. Meyer lets AK and Hans play out their (profitable) competition as they move from the violence that marked the 1990s to the calmer times of the 2000s (see IS, 37; BM, 49). Various other characters come and go and give the narrative some order, for example, the Bielefelder, or “Graf” (“Count”), a West German 34  As my bio-biographical outline of Meyer’s work earlier in the chapter has made clear, Meyer is also an accomplished short story writer, something which is reflected in his novel writing. See also Pye (2020). 35  My argument here follows Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “consideration of a work’s ‘singularity’ as a prerequisite for its ‘universalizability’” (Damrosch and Spivak 2011, 467–78; Matthes 2018, 29, see also 30). 36  People think Hans Pieszek was a butcher in the past, but he was actually a gardener (IS, 46 and 273; BM, 59 and 326).

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businessman who wants to expand his prostitution business to East Germany after 1990 and who teaches Arnold a great deal about “the market”; Reinhold, aka Randy, the only real pimp, who comes from the West German Ruhr area and uses the post-1989 “chaos” in East Germany to make money in the prostitution business; a policeman to whose thoughts we are privy as he visits his favourite prostitute; and, above all, a number of sex workers with their different views on their lives and work. The blurb on the back cover of the book announces Im Stein as “Gesang der Nacht” (song of the night), thus connecting the novel’s subject matter with a particular socially marginalized milieu that is associated with night-time activities. While this designation is certainly not far-fetched, many of the novel’s sex workers go about their business in rented flats during the day. The novel is first and foremost about the connections between all these different voices in a big city (Meyer 2013b, 2013c).37 AK and Hans hold the plot together and “conduct” these various voices, so Meyer gives them, as leading characters, a certain power over the narrative. Meyer has also mentioned Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz when discussing his style in an interview (Meyer 2013c). AK in particular can be regarded as a Franz Biberkopf-like figure, that is, one of the many voices that invites the reader to experience different views on the margins of city life. He appears as a “man of the public who knows himself to be of the public” (Tester 1994, 6). An association of these two main male characters with flânerie is therefore obvious. There is something of a flâneur’s enigmatic fleetingness (Tester 1994, 7) about the two protagonists. More significantly, though, they are frequently seen to be “observing but [are] not observed [themselves]” (Massey 1994, 234), unless a narrative voice follows them. Tellingly, Hans is also referred to as “der Mann hinterm Spiegel/hinter den Spiegeln” (e.g. IS, 141 and 117; “the man behind the mirror/s,” BM, 169 and 141): his male gaze can wander without being disturbed as he checks on the activities in his club from behind a mirror. Yet despite their central positions in the narrative, AK and Hans are in many ways also marginal in the chorus of voices. David Frisby’s comment on the “marginality of the flâneur’s location within the city (seeking asylum in the crowd) and within his class (marginal to the bourgeoisie and, presumably, downwardly

37  In 2013b, Meyer also refers to Im Stein as “Gesellschaftsroman” (social novel) whose “Welt der Nachtgestalten” (world of characters of the night) mirrors the present.

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mobile)” (1994, 87; Frisby’s emphasis) is thus a fitting one when describing AK’s and Hans’s position in the novel’s city as well as its narrative. Yet the two main protagonists’ resemblance to flâneurs is not the only reason why Im Stein can be read as a novel about the city (and the “stone” in the novel’s German title also serves as a synecdoche to refer to the city here).38 The novel addresses questions of access to the city and of the gendered occupation of public and private spaces (see, e.g., Massey 1994, 179). Reminding us of Doreen Massey’s exploration of “spaces of modernism,” of the modern city of the nineteenth century, especially Paris, Im Stein presents the public city as a “city for men” (Massey 1994, 233), as a male space with bars, nightclubs, and flats rented by sex workers; “the women who [do] go there [are] for male consumption” (ibid., 234). This gendered engagement with the city space thus adds another dimension to the novel: Im Stein is, namely, also a novel about capitalism (the flow of money and exchange of goods, including women), of the changing economic and social situation in Germany post-1989, of gender issues associated with those changes, and, above all, of masculine power. And it is precisely the exchange of women which cements the male protagonists’ homosocial bonds (Sedgwick 1985, 25–2639; see also ibid., 49). So, with its thematization of exchange—of capital, money, and woman—Im Stein emphasizes more strongly than Als wir träumten the transnational element of the capitalist environment of the newly unified Germany in which the characters initially find themselves in the early 1990s. AK comments on those “Zeiten” (IS, 44; “days,” BM, 56) at the beginning of the novel as times of violence. Yet the West German pimps such as the Bielefelder and Randy are primarily the ones who benefit from “[d]as große Chaos nach dem großen Knall” (IS, 419; “[t]he big chaos after the big bang,” BM, 493) as they quickly seize the opportunity to expand their business to East Germany with the potential to go even further east (see IS, 224; BM, 268). The narrative voice rather sarcastically refers to this post-Wende regeneration of the prostitution business as “Neuordnung” (IS, 31; “new order,” BM, 41): “Wo die Reviere abgesteckt umkämpft waren. Und wurden. Ost gegen West. Ost gegen Ost” (IS, 31; 38  Meyer mentions the synecdoche of the stone in 2013b and 2013c. In 2013b, Meyer calls Im Stein a “Großstadtroman” (city novel) as well as a “Wirtschaftsroman” (economic novel). 39  Sedgwick is referring to Gayle Rubin’s 1975 article “The Traffic of Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex” here. In Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter, 157–210. New York: Monthly Review Press.

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“Where territories were carved out and fought over. East versus West. East versus East,” BM, 42). Those new networks of pimps and club owners include, above all, the “weltweite Organisation” (worldwide organization) of the “Engel” (IS, 470; BM, 552), the “Outsiders,” “Los Locos,” and those pejoratively referred to as “Jugos” (IS, 425; “Yugos,” BM, 500) or “Kanacken” (IS, 448; a pejorative term primarily for those of a Turkish background, translated as “Turks and Arabs,” BM, 526). Their Monopoly game-like competition (IS, 454; BM, 534) for “territories” in the city keeps the transnational “Menschenhandel” (IS, 479; “[human] trafficking,” BM, 563) running. This “Import-­Export” (IS, 480; BM, 563) of “Frauen aller Nationen, auch Ostblock” (IS, 486; “women from all nations […], from the Eastern bloc as well,” BM, 571) is primarily associated with the “Engel,” something that Hans vividly denies (IS, 481–82; BM, 566). Despite their competition with each other, these “businessmen,” and a strong awareness of the East German men of being absorbed by the West (e.g. IS, 211; BM, 252–53), or, using Paul Cooke’s words, of the “colonisation of the east by global capitalism” (2004, 26), the men create their own homosocial world, a world rooted in a form of what Connell has termed “transnational business masculinity.” This kind of hegemonic masculinity, “institutionally based in multinational corporations and global finance markets,” “differs from traditional bourgeois masculinity by its increasingly libertarian sexuality, with a growing tendency to commodify relations with women” (2001 [1998], 369 and 370; Connell 2000, 52). This is “a masculinity marked by increasing egocentrism, very conditional loyalties (even to the corporation), and a declining sense of responsibility for others (except for purposes of image making)” (Connell 2001 [1998], 369; see also Connell 2000, 52). It is, one may add, also a masculinity linked to white men. As pimps and those otherwise involved in the prostitution business, Meyer’s characters find themselves at the margins of the bourgeois society that consumes the women who are at the centre of their business. Their somewhat unique position illuminates the relationship between hegemonic and marginalized forms of masculinities from a particularly fruitful angle. In many ways the men display a form of masculinism, which Arthur Brittan defines as “the ideology that justifies and naturalizes male domination. As such it is the ideology of patriarchy. […] [I]t sanctions the political and dominant role of men in the public and private spheres” (1989, 4). Brittan, like Connell, highlights the connection between masculinism and capitalism: “Moreover, masculinism takes on a distinctive flavour when

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associated with capitalism. […] [It] appears to lend itself very nicely to the ethos of industrialism and capitalism” (1989, 16). As “local production systems,” systems that rely on what Butler has referred to as “compulsory heterosexuality” (1995, 31), the pimps’ and club owners’ businesses “are [very much] linked into global markets” (Connell 2005, 199), as their connections with transnational organizations evidence. However, considering that their business is associated with the margins of society, the men are seen to negotiate their masculinity in the liminal spaces between hegemony and marginality, often questioning this distinction altogether. The men’s “transnational business masculinity,” while marginalized, goes hand in hand with a certain “Berufsstolz” (IS, 416; “professional pride,” BM, 490). As Ecki, an online radio show hosts, says: “beide [Arnold Kraushaar and Hans Pieszek] sind sie korrekte Geschäftsmänner. Wenn ihr mich fragt, Männer” (IS, 187; “they’re both upright business men. If you ask me, gentlemen,” BM, 223). Yet what makes them “korrekte Geschäftsmänner” ironically sets them apart from the rest of society. Hans explains thus: “Hier geht es nicht um Macht, hier geht es um ganz normales Geldverdienen. Und um gewisse Werte, die es so in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft nicht mehr gibt” (IS, 480; “We’re not talking about power here, we’re talking about making money, plain and simple. And about certain values that no longer exist in bourgeois society,” BM, 565). Here Hans holds the idea that society as a whole is chasing after power in a capitalist world and that he, somewhat ironically, pursues “honest work.” Hans does not take into account the fact that this work is dependent on the exploitation of women. Yet by setting himself apart, or marginalizing himself, from bourgeois society with his values, he is seen to exercise power and a level of hegemony, at least over the way he, and his business, wishes to be regarded. This is the same society that frequents Hans’s clubs and whose male members are perhaps dishonest about their activities or are exaggerating their masculine prowess to boast about them in front of other men. It is thus not surprising that Hans does not see himself as belonging to a certain “Milieu,” the social space or non-space he openly dismisses as “Unwort” (IS, 471; “monstrosity,” BM, 554; literally: non-­ word), following with the question: “Was soll das sein?” (“What’s it supposed to be?”). Towards the end of the novel AK comments on their inclusion by the society that accepts, if not frequents, their businesses, in a somewhat irritated way: “Ja, ja, wir gehören zur Gesellschaft […]” (IS, 544; “Yeah, yeah, we’re part of society […],” BM, 637). Meyer himself has referred to his protagonists as “Macher” (doers) who do not see

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themselves at the margins of society (Meyer in 2013c). Being portrayed as active, and at least in part successful, businessmen, Meyer’s “marginalized” protagonists challenge the periphery-centre divide, the clear distinction between marginalization and hegemony. And it should of course also not be forgotten that they make financial and social profit in/from bourgeois society (compare Fischer-Nebmaier 2015, 6), which again questions their marginalization from an economic point of view. I would like to continue my point about the challenging of clear-cut distinctions between marginalization and hegemony by returning to the interaction between the local and the global or transnational in Im Stein. I have already pointed out above that the pimps and managers of brothels are part of a transnational network or market of sex work. Thus their local business in Eden City, “im kleinen Metropolis der Bürger und Händler” (IS, 108–109; “in this little metropolis of citizens and traders,” BM, 131), gives men like AK and Hans access to the global arena. If we think the questioning of the hegemony-marginalization dyad further, then Im Stein also addresses the relation between the local and the global not as contradistinguished levels but as a blended continuum. Meyer has commented on “diesen speziellen Mikrokosmos der Jungs im Makrokosmos” (2015; the boys’ special microcosm in the macrocosm) with reference to the film Als wir träumten. Something similar can be said about Im Stein: the protagonists’ masculinity as businessmen is rooted in their awareness of their local position but within a wider global, transnational world of exchange and business. Magda, the sex worker whose voice we hear in the opening chapter, uses a phrase when reflecting on her work: “Die Stadt und die Welt” (IS, 20; “The city and the world,” BM, 29). And just as the novel’s voices intermingle and speak to each other, so do the local and the global enter into a dialogue that reflects the capitalist world Meyer’s protagonists inhabit in twenty-first-century Eden City. In many ways, they have, adapting Massey’s phrase, “a global sense of the local, a global sense of place” (1994, 156); in other words, they have “a sense of place which is extroverted, which includes a consciousness of its links with the wider world, which integrates in a positive way the global and the local” (Massey 1994, 155). On a meta-level Meyer is keen for his work to be read like that as well; as noted earlier, any pigeonholing of Meyer’s work as East German (alone) is counterproductive. Meyer has said about Als wir träumten: “Es ist kein ‘Ost-Buch,’ das man nur dort versteht, sondern eine Geschichte über Freundschaft, Liebe und Verrat nach großen gesellschaftlichen Umwälzungen” (2015; this is not an “Eastern book” that you can only

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understand there, but a story about friendship, love, and betrayal after deep social upheavals). The locality of Meyer’s work allows for its “universalizability,” as I explained briefly earlier with particular reference to the stylistic features in Im Stein (see Matthes 2018, 34–35; see also ibid., 36), and thus moves his novels from a narrow look at “native” masculinities to their transnational manifestations.

Men in Love, or Shifting Masculinities I would like to conclude this chapter by drawing attention to perhaps the most universal of all literary themes: love. Before we hear the voice of a sex worker in the final chapter again, the penultimate chapter, “Transfer (Bye bye, mein [my] Ladyboy),” focusses on tenderness and care rather than on violence and the exercise of masculine power that dominated so much of the novel’s narrative. This chapter seems to counteract Jack Halberstam’s observation that “[i]ndeed, this dual mechanism of a lack of care for the self and a callous disregard for the care of others seems to characterize much that we take for granted about white male masculinity” (1998, 274). Having also learnt about Meyer’s characters’ sense of masculine self and about the homosocial spaces in which they conduct themselves as men through the “legends” told about them—a genre that is closely linked to (Greek) heroism40—readers may be surprised to find the novel ending with a softer side of masculinity. In this chapter we follow an aged, somewhat defeated AK and a trans woman, a “Ladyboy” as in the chapter’s title, as they attend a Mahler concert in what appears to be Leipzig’s famous concert hall, the Gewandhaus, and spend time in a hotel room afterwards. The fact that AK spends time in an intimate setting with a trans woman is revealing as this chapter once again strengthens the link between the novel’s form and content, but with a twist in terms of gender construction. Like in previous chapters, Meyer blurs narrative lines, and the narrative voices change, often without noticeable markers, between AK, who reflects on his business over the years, and the trans woman, who thinks back to her upbringing as the son of an Italian guest worker and her experiences as a trans woman. We are also left wondering about the sustainability of white “transnational business masculinity” with its control of women from across the globe and its insistence on “compulsory 40   On “Legendenbildung” (building of legends) in Als wir träumten, see Schäfer (2013, 59–60).

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heterosexuality.” Needless to say our attention is also drawn to the instability of gender constructions, to a questioning of gender rigidity, not least in its emphasis on the body, and its changeability, in relation to gender. As Connell makes clear: “Gender is the way bodies are drawn into history; bodies are arenas for the making of gender patterns” (2000, 12). This trans women’s body throws into question many of the beliefs the pimps and club owners hold and that AK himself has held as his reflection on his ambivalent reaction to the “Ladyboys’” bodies he encountered on business trips to Japan and Thailand evidences (IS, 543; BM, 636–37). Having wondered about new business opportunities with trans sex workers back then, he now speaks from a position of what neither AK nor his lover dares to call love. They are, however, thinking about their feelings for each other (IS, 540 and 544; BM, 633 and 637), with AK acknowledging that a relationship with a trans woman may be his end, his business partner not likely to be accepting of it. So, similar to Daniel in Als wir träumten, AK ends on a nostalgic note as his love, although bringing out a new, more vulnerable side of his masculinity, does not seem to offer an alternative of a different life.41 Perhaps Im Stein does end with a “crisis of intimacy” (Lewis 2008, 137) after all, yet this “crisis” tells us more about shifting understandings of gender and masculinity, and the implications of those on the characters’ lives and livelihoods, rather than about changes in masculine patterns rooted in times of political upheaval as such. Be that as it may, love will remain a crucial factor in the constructions of masculinities that will be explored in the chapters to come.

References Bach, Susanne. 2017. Wende-Generationen / Generationen-Wende: Literarische Lebenswelten vor dem Horizont der Wiedervereinigung. Mit Autoreninterviews. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. Bilz, Simone. 2009. Der Wenderoman als neues Genre der jungen deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur: Clemens Meyers Als wir träumten und Thomas Brussigs Wie es leuchtet im Fokus der Betrachtung. In Transitträume: Beiträge zur deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur, ed. Andrea Bartl, 299–311. Augsburg: Wisner Verlag.

41  Compare Schäfer’s comment on heterosexual relationships in Als wir träumten that fail “als Horizont eines möglichen besseren Lebens” (2013, 55; as an option of a possibly better life).

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Brandes, Holger. 2007. Hegemonic Masculinities in East and West Germany (German Democratic Republic and Federal Republic of Germany). Men and Masculinities 10 (2): 178–96. Brittan, Arthur. 1989. Masculinity and Power. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Butler, Judith. 1995. Melancholy Gender / Refused Identification. In Constructing Masculinity, ed. Maurice Berger, Brian Wellis, and Simon Watson, 21–36. New York: Routledge. Campbell, Anne. 1993. Out of Control: Men, Women and Aggression. London: Pandora. Colvin, Sarah. 2008. Abziehen oder Abkacken? Young Men in German Prisons: Fiction and Reality. In Masculinities in German Culture, ed. Sarah Colvin and Peter Davies, 262-77. Edinburgh German Yearbook 2. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Connell, Raewyn [R.W.]. 2000. The Men and the Boys. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2001. Masculinity Politics on a World Scale. In The Masculinities Reader, ed. Stephen M. Whitehead and Frank J. Barrett, 369-74. Cambridge: Polity. Full article first published: 1998. Men and Masculinities. Men and Masculinities 1 (1): 3–23. ———. 2005 [1995]. Masculinities. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Polity. Connell, Raewyn [R.W.], and James W.  Messerschmidt. 2005. Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept. Gender and Society 19 (6): 829–59. Cooke, Paul. 2004. East German Writing in the Age of Globalisation. In German Literature in the Age of Globalisation, ed. Stuart Taberner, 25–46. Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press. ———. 2005. Representing East Germany since Unification: From Colonization to Nostalgia. Oxford: Berg. ———. 2007. “GDR Literature” in the Berlin Republic. In Contemporary German Fiction: Writing in the Berlin Republic, ed. Stuart Taberner, 56–71. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cosgrove, Mary. 2016. The Temporality of Boredom in the Age of Acceleration: The Car Crash in Contemporary German Literature. In Time in German Literature and Culture, 1900–2015: Between Acceleration and Slowness, ed. Anne Fuchs and J. J. Long, 204–17. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Dallmann, Tino. 2020. Clemens Meyer schürt mit neuer Erzählung Vorfreude auf nächsten Roman. mdr Kultur, 26 August 2020. https://www.mdr.de/kultur/ literatur/clemens-­meyer-­nacht-­im-­bioskop-­erzaehlung-­100.html. Accessed 9 July 2021; URL no longer available. Damrosch, David, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. 2011. Comparative Literature/ World Literature: A Discussion with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and David Damrosch. Comparative Literature Studies 48 (2): 455–85. Deutsches Literaturinstitut. 2021. http://www.deutsches-­literaturinstitut.de/ archiv-­gastdozenten.html. Accessed 29 July 2021; URL no longer available.

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Dresen, Andreas (dir.). 2015. Als wir träumten. Pandora Film. Evans, Owen. 2005. “Denn wir sind anders”: “Zonenkinder” in the Federal Republic. German as a Foreign Language no. 2: 20–33. Fischer-Nebmaier, Wladimir. 2015. Space, Narration, and the Everyday. In Narrating the City: Histories, Space and the Everyday, ed. Wladimir Fischer-­ Nebmaier. New York: Berghahn Books. Fox, Thomas C. 2010. Post-Communist Fantasies: Generational Conflict in Eastern German Literature. In Generational Shifts in Contemporary German Culture, ed. Laurel Cohen-Pfister and Susanne Vees-Gulani, 207–24. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Frankfurter Poetikvorlesungen. 2021. https://www.uni-­frankfurt.de/47809128/ ab_2013. Accessed 29 July 2021. Frisby, David. 1994. The Flâneur in Social Theory. In The Flâneur, ed. Keith Tester, 81–110. London and New York: Routledge. Gathmann, Florian, and Jenny Hoch. 2008. Unterschicht—was soll denn das sein? Interview with Clemens Meyer. Spiegel Online, 26 February 2008. http:// www.spiegel.de/kultur/literatur/0,1518,536352,00.html. Accessed 28 June 2014. Halberstam, Jack. 1998. Female Masculinity. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Hatty, Suzanne E. 2000. Masculinities, Violence, and Culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Hein, Jakob. 2001. Mein erstes T-Shirt. Munich: Piper. Hensel, Jana. 2002. Zonenkinder. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. ———. 2004. After the Wall: Confessions from an East German Childhood and the Life That Came Next. Trans. Jefferson Chase. New York: Public Affairs. Jewkes, Yvonne. 2002. Captive Audience: Media, Masculinity and Power in Prison. Portland, OR: Willan Publishing. Leeder, Karen. 2009. Introduction. Oxford German Studies 38 (3): 236–41. Lewis, Alison. 2008. Love and Survival and the Cold War: Imagining Masculinity in Michael Kumpfmüller’s Hampels Fluchten and Ingo Schramm’s Entzweigesperrt. Seminar 44 (1): 137–53. Martschukat, Jürgen, and Olaf Stieglitz. 2008. Geschichte der Männlichkeiten, Historische Einführungen. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Marven, Lyn. 2011. Introduction: New German-Language Writing since the Turn of the Millennium. In Emerging German-Language Novelists of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Lyn Marven and Stuart Taberner, 1–16. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Marven, Lyn, Andrew Plowman, and Kate Roy. 2020. Introduction to the Contemporary Short Story in German. In The Short Story in German in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Lyn Marven, Andrew Plowman, and Kate Roy, 1–16. Rochester, NY: Camden House.

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Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity. Matthes, Frauke. 2011. Clemens Meyer, Als wir träumten: Fighting “Like a Man” in Leipzig’s East. In Emerging German-Language Novelists of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Lyn Marven and Stuart Taberner, 89–104. Rochester, NY: Camden House. ———. 2018. “A Saxon Who’s Learnt a lot from the Americans”: Clemens Meyer in a Transnational Literary Context. Comparative Critical Studies 15 (1): 25–45. Mensing, Kolja. 2006. Trainspotting in Leipzig-Ost: Clemens Meyer: Als wir träumten. Deutschlandradio Kultur, 23 February 2006. http://www.dradio. de/dkultur/sendungen/kritik/471323/. Accessed 10 December 2009. Messerschmidt, James W. 1993. Masculinities and Crime: Critique and Reconceptualization of Theory. Lanham, ML: Rowan & Littlefield Publishing. Meuser, Michael. 2001. Männerwelten: Zur Konstruktion hegemonialer Männlichkeit. In Schriften des Essener Kollegs für Geschlechterforschung 1 (2), ed. Doris Janshen and Michael Meuser, 4-32. Meyer, Clemens. 2006. Als wir träumten: Roman. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer. ———. 2008. Die Nacht, die Lichter: Stories. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer. ———. 2010. Gewalten: Ein Tagebuch. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer. ———. 2011. All the Lights. Trans. Katy Derbyshire and intro. Stuart Evers. High Wycombe: And Other Stories. ———. 2013a. Im Stein: Roman. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer. ———. 2013b. Clemens Meyer Autorenseite, http://www.fischerverlage.de/ site/clemens_meyer/interview. Accessed 22 June 2016; URL no longer available. ———. 2013c. Clemens Meyer auf dem blauen Sofa: Hans Dieter Heimendahl unterhält sich mit Clemens Meyer über dessen Buch “Im Stein,” 9 October 2013. Link to video accessed via: ZDF, Aspekte, 11 October 2013, “Bordelle— Kathedralen des Lebens”: Clemens Meyer über seinen Rotlichtroman “Im Stein”. http://www.zdf.de/aspekte/Bordelle-­Kathedralen-­des-­Lebens-­30134932.html. Accessed 5 March 2014; URL and video link no longer available. ———. 2013d. Rückkehr in die Nacht, illustriert von (illustrated by) Phillip Janta. Leipzig: Connewitzer Verlagsbuchhandlung Peter Hinke. ———. 2015. Interview mit Wolfgang Kohlhase und Clemens Meyer. In Presseheft: Als wir träumten, unpg. Aschaffenburg: Pandora Film; Frankfurt: Filmpresse Meuser. ———. 2016a. Bricks and Mortar. Trans. Katy Derbyshire. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions. ———. 2016b. Der Untergang der Äkschn GmbH: Frankfurter Poetikvorlesungen. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer. ———. 2017. Die stillen Trabanten: Erzählungen. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer. ———. 2020a. Dark Satellites. Trans. Katy Derbyshire. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions.

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———. 2020b. Nacht im Bioskop. Leipzig: Faber & Faber. ———. 2021. Stäube: Drei Erzählungen und ein Nachsatz. Leipzig: Faber & Faber. Mosse, George L. 1996. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. New York: Oxford University Press. Pye, Gillian. 2011. Matter Out of Place: Trash and Transition in Clemens Meyer’s Als wir träumten. In Twenty Years On: Competing Memories of the GDR in Postunification German Culture, ed. Renate Rechtien and Dennis Tait, 126–38. Rochester, NY: Camden House. ———. 2020. The Liminal Space of the Short Story: Clemens Meyer’s Die Nacht, die Lichter and Die stillen Trabanten. In The Short Story in German in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Lyn Marven, Andrew Plowman, and Kate Roy, 118–36. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Reeser, Todd W. 2010. Masculinities in Theory: An Introduction. Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Rusch, Claudia. 2003. Meine freie deutsche Jugend. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer. Saunders, Anna. 2007. Honecker’s Children: Youth and Patriotism in East(ern) Germany, 1979–2002. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Schäfer, Martin Jörg. 2013. Die Intensität der Träume: Clemens Meyers Poetik des Kinos. In Inszenierung von “Intensität” und “Lebendigkeit” in der Gegenwartsliteratur, ed. Martin Jörg Schäfer and Niels Werber. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 43 (170): 53–66. Schmidt, Jochen. 2002. Müller haut uns raus: Roman. Munich: C. H. Beck. Scholz, Sylka. 2001. “Sozialistische Soldatenpersönlichkeiten” und “Helden der Arbeit”: Hegemoniale Männlichkeiten in der DDR.  Paper presented at the first conference of the Arbeitskreis für interdisziplinäre Männer- und Geschlechterforschung. Stuttgart. https://www.fk12.tu-­dortmund.de/ cms/ISO/Medienpool/Archiv-­Alte-­Dateien/arbeitsbereiche/soziologie_ der_geschlechterverhaeltnisse/Medienpool/AIM_Beitraege_erste_Tagung/ Scholz.pdf. Accessed 4 June 2021; URL no longer available. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1985. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press. Segal, Lynne. 2007 [1990]. Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men. 3rd, rev. edn. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Smith, Tom. 2020. Comrades in Arms: Military Masculinities in East German Culture. New York: Berghahn Books. Stubner, Thomas (dir.). 2018. In den Gängen. Zorro Film. Taberner, Stuart. 2007. Introduction: Literary Fiction in the Berlin Republic. In Contemporary German Fiction: Writing in the Berlin Republic, ed. Stuart Taberner, 1–20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Tasker, Yvonne. 1993. Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema. London: Routledge. Tester, Keith. 1994. Introduction. In The Flâneur, ed. Keith Tester, 1–21. London and New York: Routledge. Walklate, Sandra. 2001. Gender, Crime and Criminal Justice. Portland, OR: Willan Publishing. Whitehead, Stephen M., and Frank J. Barrett. 2001. The Sociology of Masculinity. In The Masculinities Reader, ed. Stephen M. Whitehead and Frank J. Barrett, 1–26. Cambridge: Polity. Williams, David. 2013. Writing Postcommunism: Towards a Literature of the East European Ruins. Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 3

Masculinity in Conflict: Maxim Biller

Masculinity and the (Negative) German-Jewish Symbiosis My reading of Clemens Meyer’s novels has already revealed the complexities of masculinity when we think of it not only in relation to others but also as relations among masculinities. Considering different forms of masculinity in interaction with each other undermines any assumptions about the homogeneity of masculinity and thus refutes, at least in part, the popular hypothesis that men and women are fundamentally different and their ideas, expectations, or experiences inevitably clash in the so-called battle of the sexes. However, by thinking this phenomenon and other forms of self-­ other divides within gender discourse further, I will throw into relief conflict as a significant shaper of masculinity. By drawing on the work of the German Jewish writer and journalist Maxim Biller in this chapter, I will reveal conflict as a particularly complex phenomenon in the context of gender: here conflict, or “battle,” can be taken quite literally as some of Biller’s male Jewish characters have experienced war and fighting between men first-hand, often with long-lasting consequences. “Battle” can also signify the tensions between different forms and perceptions of masculinity, even within the male characters that dominate Biller’s texts. Finally, “battle” is at times also a fitting term when describing how Biller regards the interaction, clash even, between Germans and Jews—both men and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Matthes, New Masculinities in Contemporary German Literature, Global Masculinities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10318-6_3

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women—in contemporary Germany (Biller 2020b [1994], 70–71). Yet Biller’s “battles” often play out in unexpected ways. Born to Russian Jewish parents in Prague in 1960, Maxim Biller moved to Germany in 1970. In the 1980s he started his career as a writer with his column 100 Zeilen Hass (100 Lines of Hatred) published in the lifestyle magazine Tempo and soon established his reputation as the enfant terrible of the (West German) writing scene.1 With these columns he started to “present[] himself as a contemptuous commentator on past and present-­ day Germany and German-Jewish relations” (Roca Lizarazu 2021, 75). It soon became clear that Biller would not be tempted by what Maria Roca Lizarazu refers to as “the reconciliation paradigm” between Germans and Jews (ibid.). Biller’s texts refuse to smooth over any controversies or difficulties in the German-Jewish symbiosis,2 an idea of which Biller is very critical3—on the contrary they often feed off them (compare Biller 2020b [2000], 163–64)—and thus regularly make for rather uncomfortable reading for his German audience.4 Biller’s decision to live and write as a Jewish person in Germany “in a particularly consciously Jewish way,”5 with what he sees as a peripheral,6 yet therefore “clear-sighted” (“hellsichtig[]”) perspective on life (2020b [1995], 109–110), has also led to a productive literary career. His first two collections of stories Wenn ich einmal reich und tot bin (2007b [1990]; When I Am Dead and Gone), especially the story “Harlem Holocaust” 1  A selection of Biller’s columns was published as Die Tempojahre (1991; The Tempo Years). The complete columns were published as Hundert Zeilen Hass (2017; A Hundred Lines of Hatred). 2  On the significance of the German-Jewish symbiosis and its development in German Jewish writing in the 1990s and early 2000, see McGlothlin (2007, 232). 3  Biller has commented on “die angebliche deutsch-jüdische Symbiose” (the alleged German-Jewish symbiosis) (2020b [2012], 215 and 218) in several publications. 4  For more on the complexity of German-Jewish relations in Biller’s work, see Roca Lizarazu (2017, 2020, and 2021). 5  Biller writes: “Dass man als Jude in Deutschland nicht leben und schreiben sollte, ist logischerweise gleich der erste und triftigste Grund dafür, warum man ausgerechnet als Jude in Deutschland besonders bewusst jüdisch lebt und schreibt” (2000 [1995], 109; The fact that as a Jewish person one should not live and write in Germany is, naturally, the first and most compelling reason why as a Jewish person in Germany one lives and writes in a particularly consciously Jewish way). 6  Erin McGlothlin has commented on the marginal position of Jews in Germany as follows: “Jews in contemporary Germany are caught between contradictory, competing claims, for they are accepted in German culture only provisionally and always as outsiders” (2007, 232). As noted above, Biller has seen his marginal position as a professional advantage.

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from this collection, and Land der Väter und Verräter (1994; Land of Fathers and Traitors) confirmed Biller’s reputation as a provocateur, now in the literary rather than journalistic world. He increasingly stylized himself as an opponent to what he regarded as “Schlappschwanzliteratur” (pussy literature) at the turn of the millennium, literature whose “lauwarme” (lukewarm) stories shy away from challenging received opinions, lack courage and morality, and present its readers with flat characters (Biller 2020b [2000], 174–75). Other works include the novels Die Tochter (2003a [2000]; The Daughter), which is the focus of this chapter, Esra (2003b), Biografie (2016; Biography), Sechs Koffer (2018b; Six Suitcases), which was shortlisted for the German Book Prize in 2018, and Der falsche Gruß (2021; The Fake Salute); several other story collections such as Bernsteintage (2004; Days of Amber) and Liebe heute (2007a; Love Today, 2009b); the novella Im Kopf von Bruno Schulz (2013; Inside the Head of Bruno Schulz, 2015); and Literatur und Politik (2018a; Literature and Politics), his collected Poetikdozentur lectures at Heidelberg University. Biller appeared briefly as one of four critics on the prestigious TV programme Literarisches Quartett (Literary Quartet) and continues to write for newspapers and magazines. The sheer volume of his oeuvre distinguishes him as one the most influential contemporary German Jewish literary voices, who has also left his mark on a younger generation of male German authors with a Jewish background such as Max Czollek and Oliver Polak (see Roca Lizarazu 2021, 80). Biller’s impact on younger male writers is not surprising considering that gender, or more specifically masculinity, plays a crucial role in the ambiguous relationship which both Biller and his male Jewish characters have with Germany. Through his exploration of masculinity Biller brings to light particularly well what Dan Diner has termed the “negative Symbiose” (negative symbiosis) between Germans and Jews after the Holocaust (Diner 1987).7 Biller has referred to this phenomenon as “[die] seltsamste[] Allianz [zwischen Tätern und Opfern], die es je gegeben hatte” (2020b [1995], 111; the most peculiar alliance between perpetrators and victims that had ever existed). With reference to German Jewish writing of the early 1990s, which also marks the beginning of Biller’s literary writing career as outlined above, Sander L. Gilman similarly speaks of

7  A large number of critical literature focusses on the “negative symbiosis” in Biller’s work, for instance Codrai on Die Tochter (2015, 189–240), Remmler (2006), and Schruff (2000).

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the “negative symbiosis” of culturally embedded Jews in the new Germany. The writers of these works feel themselves to be both part of this new Germany yet alienated from it. For these Jewish writers this new Germany existed in their fantasy. Their literature is marked not only along the expected line of demarcation between the “German” and the “Jew” (while calling that boundary into question), but it is also clearly marked by the gender of the author. There is a special status to the discourse of the Jewish male writer in contemporary German letters. (1994, 210)

Biller came to prominence at a time of political and cultural upheaval. As I already indicated in connection with Clemens Meyer’s work in the previous chapter, the early 1990s were marked by what Biller has termed “die lächerliche und vergessene Frage, was deutsch ist und warum einem deshalb einer abgehen sollte” (2020b [2001], 87; the ridiculous and forgotten question what German is and why one should pride oneself on it), something that Biller reads as a consequence of the new presence of “Deutsch-Ossis” (ibid.; German-Easterners),8 that is, East Germans with a greater sense of national pride. Claiming that, prior to 1990, “Wessis” were “vernünftige[], unnationalistische[] Leute” (Biller 2020b [2009], 96; reasonable, unnationalistic people) and therefore implying rather one-­ sided judgements of West but especially East Germans, Biller has nonetheless observed Germany’s post-unification desire to redefine itself, often to the exclusion of its others, with justifiable unease (2020b [2001], 87). The early 1990s also saw an increased migration of Eastern European and Russian Jews to Germany, of so-called Kontingentflüchtlinge (quota refugees) (see, e.g., Garloff and Mueller 2018, 3), who have drawn attention to the transnational dimension of Germany’s Jewish population. Simultaneously, many Germans started to become interested in the cultural and religious others in their midst.9 In the context of German-Jewish relations, Jack Zipes has seen in this the “German fascination for things Jewish” (1994); Stuart Taberner has described it as “cultural philo-­ Semitism” (2005, 166–68), which often goes hand in hand with an attempt to “normalize” German-Jewish relations (see Taberner 2005, 168; McGlothlin 2007, 230; Garloff and Mueller 2018, 5). It is perhaps 8  “Ossi” is short for “Ostdeutscher” (East German). The equivalent for West Germans is “Wessi.” 9  Biller has also commented both on the migration of Russian Jews to Germany and on what he has referred to as “falsche[] Judenfreude” (false pleasure in Jews) displayed by some Germans (2020b [2012], 216–17).

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no coincidence then that in the years following German unification German Jewish writing started to re-emerge (Steinecke 2002, 9),10 so much so that, as Taberner makes clear, “German-Jewish writers have become an indispensable part of the literary landscape of the Berlin Republic” (2005, 178). Biller certainly has become an indispensable voice in the post-­unification German literary landscape, not least as his writing has done anything but to “normalize” the relationship between Germans and Jews since the early 1990s. Instead he insists on the differences between them, the “Unmöglichkeit menschlicher Nähe” (Remmler 2006, 319; impossibility of human closeness). Biller’s male protagonists or narrators play a key role in the negotiation of what it means to be a Jewish man in Germany since its unification. They are often based on Biller’s own biography, that is, they tend to be authors or journalists on the verge of, or now deep into, middle age, who experience existential crises caused by relationship troubles, and, more importantly, who try to reconcile a Jewish identity and lifestyle with their lives in Germany.11 Yet their (self-)perceptions often lean on stereotypical notions of Jewish as well as German masculinity and femininity that, as will become clear later on in the chapter, partly rely on their own unreconstructed gender discourse. So, Biller is well aware of the often stereotypical German perception of Jewish men and its historical roots.12 In his autobiographical book Der gebrauchte Jude (2009a; The Used or Needed Jew), he thus writes: Woher weiß ich, was an mir jüdisch und was Frage meines Charakters ist? Die Gesellschaft, in der ich lebe, weiß es genau. Für sie bin und bleibe ich Jude, ob ich will oder nicht, und das macht mich sehr viel mehr zum Juden als das vielleicht wirklich Jüdische an mir—die Hypochondrie, das Radikale, das Weibliche—, das ich von meinem armenischen Großvater geerbt habe. (Biller 2009a, 141) 10  Katja Garloff and Agnes Mueller give an overview of the critics who have dealt with this re-emergence of German Jewish writing in the introduction to their volume German Jewish Literature After 1990 (2018, 1–2); Garloff also refers to this phenomenon in her contribution to the same volume (2018, 19 and 21). See also Gogos (2005, 15). 11  The two novels under discussion here, Die Tochter and Esra, were published shortly after the turn of the millennium. However, Biller’s more recent novel Biografie (2016) has a similar main character at its centre, suggesting that Biller remains true to his narratological approach. 12  See Gilman (1985, 32). Gilman is referring to Erik Homburger Erikson. 1950. Childhood and Society. New York: W. W. Norton, 301 and 311–15.

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How do I know what is Jewish in me and what is a question of my character? The society in which I live knows exactly. I am and remain Jewish for it, whether I like it or not, and that makes me much more Jewish that what is perhaps genuinely Jewish in me—the hypochondria, the radicalness, the femininity—, which I have inherited from my Armenian grandfather.

Wise to these German stereotypes of Jewishness, Biller is able to engage and play with them, especially with the notion of the creative, and allegedly effeminate, Jew (see Gilman 1991, 133). In much of his work, he thus puts a new spin on the aforementioned negative symbiosis between Germans and Jews. Roca Lizarazu has rightly pointed out that “Biller’s fixation on the ‘negative symbiosis’ […] seems potentially outdated” (2020, 94). Yet Biller’s binary thinking (see Roca Lizarazu 2021, 81 and 82–83), which informs his view of the negative symbiosis, is rather complex: while he is well aware of the historical German-Jewish opposition where “the Jew,” as the outsider figure, served as a counter-image—a necessity even—in the construction of Germanness (compare Mosse 1996, 178), he also relies on this division to explore German-Jewish relations. This is also the case in his texts that consciously embrace a transnational context. Biller regularly moves away from an exclusively German context to include the significance of Israel in his, and his characters’, self-­ perceptions as Jews living in Germany (see Biller 2020b [2014], 62). So, his work includes male characters of whom some are Jewish and some are Jewish and Israeli. Including Israel as a notable point of reference in many of his texts allows Biller to take (back) control over traditional or stereotypical discourses of Jewish masculinity and to construct a supposedly strong and self-confident, yet conflict-ridden masculine Jewishness, which, in its association with Israel, now loses its association with femininity, yet has a national dimension comparable to Germanness, its traditional counter-­image. Biller can thus explore the tensions between different facets of masculinity—such as hypermasculinity and “effeminized” masculinity—that are often overlooked in discourses revolving around the German-Jewish (negative) symbiosis. In order to understand Biller’s view of masculinity we should take a brief look into how ideas of masculinity have evolved in a German-Jewish context.13 As already hinted at, German-Jewish (gender) relations have a 13  For a discussion of Jewish masculinity, especially as a potential “counter-hegemonic masculinity,” see Eck (2020, 83–85).

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long, often biased history that put Germans and Jews in distinct categories. As Paul Lerner et al. point out: “The idea that Jewish men differ from non-Jewish men by being delicate, meek, or effeminate in body and character runs deep in European history” (2012, 1). This idea is only a short step away from “a common belief that Jewish men were deficient as men and possessed some womanly characteristics” (Gilman 1991, 133–34), that is, that “Jewish men suffered from a distorted masculinity” (Lerner et al. 2012, 1). This trope took hold in the late nineteenth century and goes hand in hand with the spread of “racialized anti-Semitism” and “Germany’s emergence as an imperial power […] and the [ensuing] spread of reactionary forms of military masculinity” (Lerner et al. 2012, 2). Simultaneously, the idea of “a new, ‘muscular Judaism’” emerged among Zionists, thus promoting images of “a regenerated, muscular Jewry” (ibid., 2), something which I will go into more detail below. In Germany, however, the dynamics between “[t]he categories ‘German’ and ‘Jew’” highlighted “a regime of power in which ‘Germans’ constitute the norm and ‘Jews’ mark sites of difference” (ibid., 5). This opposition between “German norm” and “Jewish difference” brings the complexities as well as the contradictions of the position of Jewish men in Germany at the time to the fore (see ibid., 5). It also points us to the question of how ideas of masculinity as markers of German nationality contributed to the separation, dehumanization, and ultimate elimination of the Jewish (male) other during National Socialism. It is a well-known fact that National Socialism produced a hypermasculine, masculinist culture which promoted the cult of the German nation (see Mosse 1985).14 In her examination of the close ties between nationalism and masculinism, Joane Nagel emphasizes the significance of specific values in this relationship: “the culture of nationalism is constructed to emphasize and resonate with masculine cultural themes. Terms like honour, patriotism, cowardice, bravery and duty are hard to distinguish as either nationalistic or masculinist, since they seem so thoroughly tied both to the nation and to manliness” (Nagel 1998, 251–52; see also Mosse 1996, 63). This is perhaps nowhere more noticeable than during National Socialism. According to Klaus P. Fischer, the Nazis even called National 14  See particularly Mosse’s chapter “Fascism and Sexuality” (1985, 153–80). There he writes that “[t]he Männerstaat symbolized an aggressive nationalism based upon the ideal of masculinity. It would crush all those who threatened respectability and the nation” (1985, 170).

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Socialism “a male event” (1995, 260). Andrea Dworkin points out that in the Third Reich “[b]rutality was a synonym for strength, order for society; respect for human life was a weakness, feeble and fatal” (2000, 89). In contradistinction to this hypermasculine construction the Jewish body was feminized, that is, subordinated (see Connell 2005, 78–79),15 and making “virile” anti-Semitism “a necessity for men in constant fear of descending—or being shoved—into the anti-Aryan abyss of the Jew, abhorrent and despised” (Dworkin 2000, 90). The other(ed) Jewish body was needed to affirm the “norms” of “German native” masculinity. This echoes what Lerner et al. have observed: “While some representations [of Jews in Nazi Germany] recycled notions of the alleged weakness and physical deficiency of male Jews, other attributed enormous powers to Jewish men, claiming that they controlled high finance and capitalism and commanded Soviet Russia, the United States, and international networks of spies” (2012, 14). Thus “negat[ing] the complexities and subtleties of German Jewish subjectivity” was a crucial step for the “systematic emasculation of Jewish men” (ibid.). Rejecting this alleged Jewish “antimanliness,” whose deep historical roots came to the fore particularly during the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust, appears as the starting point for Biller’s construction of Jewish masculinity in a negative symbiosis between Germans and Jews in a transnational context: Biller primarily asserts Jewish masculinity as anything but effeminate by linking a number of his protagonists to Israel, a country that has developed its own hypermasculine militarism. As Tamar Mayer points out, “militarism has become intimately connected to the construction of both Jewish nationalism and Israeli Jewish masculinity” (2000, 283). Following the “threat from the Arab world to Israel’s existence,” the “image of the Jewish warrior, whose masculine identity has become intertwined with Israel’s security,” needs to be justified, 15  Connell speaks of the subordination of homosexual men here. As “gayness is easily assimilated to femininity” (2005, 78), we can see parallels to the subordination of Jewish men in the context of anti-Semitic discourse as discussed in this chapter. Matthias Eck points out that “Jewish masculinity can be seen as both marginalized and subordinated masculinity, with the negative connotation given in the theoretical framework of Connell: Jewish men have been regarded as castrated and effeminate. However, in my [Eck’s; F.M.] study, Jewish masculinity will also be seen positively, as a ‘gentle’ masculinity which is not based on the subordination of women [an aspect strongly associated with hegemonic and complicit forms of masculinity; F.M.]; it could therefore serve as the basis for a positive alternative male gender identity” (2020, 11). See also ibid., 195.

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reinforced, and even sharpened (ibid.). Problematically, the construction of Jewish masculinity in opposition to its Arab other can be seen to hold parallels with the historical construction of German male self-identity. The link between militarism and masculinity is a “product of the initial Zionist project” that, according to Theodor Herzl, was supposed to “reclaim the masculine past of the nation” (Mayer 2000, 284–85).16 Biller’s construction of his Jewish or Israeli characters’ masculinity tends to be played out in relation to Germans but also to other Jews, that is, in their similarity to and difference from German men—both in historical and contemporary contexts—as well as Israel’s military masculinity. The novel Die Tochter is perhaps Biller’s most complex depiction of the intricacies of contemporary Jewish masculinity in that regard.17 In this work, the author interrogates the problematics of Jewish-Israeli masculinity by confronting an Israeli ex-serviceman with stereotypes of Jewish men in Germany, the country that had once persecuted them on the basis of its hypermasculine militaristic culture of a different kind. Die Tochter’s protagonist, the Israeli Motti Wind who is trying to create a life for himself in Germany, acts out a number of conflicts that can be traced back to the ultimate conflict between his people’s excruciating past and Israel’s militaristic present. The ensuing confrontations, or fierce encounters, with various others—the “Arab enemy,” Germans, women, and his title-giving daughter—manifest themselves in the tensions between Motti’s “effeminized” masculinity and his hypermasculinity, more precisely between his perceived “failed” masculinity and his perverse sexuality. Not only do these tensions frame the novel, but they also give a unique insight in the (negative) German-Jewish symbiosis.

Fierce Encounters: Die Tochter The main action of Die Tochter takes place in one day, but the novel covers about twenty years with flashbacks referring to various incidents in the life of its protagonist, Mordechai “Motti” Wind. Motti is an Israeli who moves to Germany after meeting his future wife Sofie on a plane that was meant to take him away from Israel. He had been on his way to India where he had hoped to find redemption after fighting in the 1982 Lebanon War, 16  See also Boyarin (1997), particularly the chapter “The Colonial Drag: Zionism, Gender, and Mimicry” (271–312). 17  Page references to Die Tochter will appear in the text, preceded by the abbreviation “T.”

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which had left him deeply traumatized. Motti’s life in Germany is determined by failure: he takes on a string of jobs as the owner of a clothes shop, as a porter in a Munich synagogue, and finally as an instructor for women who wish to convert to Judaism and with whom he has a series of affairs. In spite of all this, he never really finds his feet. Later Motti has a daughter with Sofie whom they call Nurit. At the age of six, as we gradually find out, she dies falling from a window. The single day of the action takes place ten years after Nurit’s death, and it opens and closes with Motti watching a pornographic video, the lead of which he mistakes for his dead daughter, now an adolescent. The narrator of Motti’s story is an unnamed German Jewish writer who tells us about his own somewhat similar life and reveals towards the end of the novel that he has been working on a “Motti-story” (e.g. T, 405).18 His German girlfriend, Marie, connects him to Motti: she takes lessons with Motti in preparation for her conversion to Judaism. In Die Tochter, German-Jewish relations are seen through the eyes of the distressed Israeli Motti and are mediated by a German Jewish man with Polish origins (T, 199), the narrator: Motti is troubled by his life in Germany, but also by Israel and the Lebanon War that still preys on his mind. These woes are significant for the construction of his masculinity. His name, Mordechai, which in the Old Testament is associated with vicissitudes of fate and fortune,19 also suggests that he is an unstable character. Initially, the geographical divide between the north (Germany) and the south (Israel) influences Motti’s self-positioning in relation to his German environs and his creation of his own negative symbiosis. To Motti, Germany appears to be the counter-image of Israel, not as political entities, but in terms of their location in Central/Northern Europe and the Middle East, respectively. This has consequences for his emotional perception of these countries. Quite simply, Israel is warm and Germany is cold; Israel is loud (therefore lively) and Germany is silent (therefore somewhat boring) (compare Chase 2001, 127). Yet Biller would make it too easy for his readers if he left them with this simple dichotomy: although Motti appears to be trapped between these seemingly opposite places, they take 18  In this chapter I focus on the portrayal of Motti’s negotiation of his masculinity. For a detailed analysis of the narrator’s negotiation of his position in Die Tochter, see Codrai (2015, 222–29). 19  Mordechai was of noble descent and had to serve as a gatekeeper for the Persian King Artaxerxes. He gained station and grandeur through loyalty and patriotism (Calvocoressi 1990, 188).

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on different, constantly shifting meanings for him throughout the novel. As readers learn about Motti’s former desire to leave Israel, “seine[] beengende[] Heimat, wo jeder jeden kannte, wo jeder über jeden alles wußte, wo jeder vom andern verlangte, daß er in diesem ewigen Krieg keinen Tag lang von der Seite seiner Leute wich” (T, 13; his claustrophobic home [country] where everyone knew everyone, where everyone knew everything about everyone, where everyone wanted everyone not to leave their people’s side, not even for a single day, in this eternal war), Biller portrays Motti’s masculinity as corrupted by the claustrophobia of this small country and its militarism, its ongoing wars, that have shaped Israel’s identity as a state (see Dworkin 2000, 99). This representation of Israel is based on a militaristic Jewish masculinity which stands in stark contrast with an allegedly weak and physically deficient Jewish masculinity that one part of Nazi propaganda focussed on (see again Lerner et al. 2012, 14). This is where the tensions between hypermasculinity and “effeminized” masculinity set in in Biller’s novel. Yet they are even more complex as this dichotomy is also reminiscent of the opposing images of the “New (Muscle) Jew” of the Zionist movement vs. the “ghetto Jew” of Europe once prevalent in Israel (Mayer 2000, 286). The fashioning of the “New Jew” as “tall, virile, close to nature and physically productive” goes hand in hand with the later construction of Jewish masculinity as militaristic and heroic. In this context Etan Bloom also points to a “distinction between Jews and Hebrews” among Zionists in Palestine (2012, 155; see also 155–57). This binary has its roots in anti-Semitic perceptions of Jewish masculinity as “deficient” to which Zionists responded with the production of “a new, virile Jewish male body” (ibid., 163). It also clearly distinguishes between “the traditional notion of a religiously defined Jewish community and the Zionists’ more secular conception of a Hebrew nation or race” (ibid., 156). As Bloom puts it: Indeed, the new Zionist culture of Palestine idealized the active and courageous fighter and the productive agricultural worker. […] Europeans traditionally conceived of Jews as greedy, materialistic, effeminate, and lacking in creativity, productivity, and courage, while Zionists saw the new Hebrews as masculine, brave, hardworking, active, creative, innovative, original, and following socialist ideals and other worthy goals. (ibid., 157)

The Zionist idealization of masculinity as physically strong and courageous translated with the founding of the state of Israel in 1947 into

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militarized masculinity and the mythologizing of male heroism: building the nation went hand in hand with building, and proving, its male citizens’ “strong” masculinity.20 As Mayer points out: “[t]he process of canonizing soldiers as heroes has acquired almost timeless status in Israel’s short history, as regardless of the war the mythologizing narrative is exactly the same” (2000, 294). In this view, Motti’s participating in the 1982 Lebanon War would have been a heroic contribution to the military actions of his country and its existence in the Middle East. Yet Biller creates a male Jewish character who returns from this war not as a hero, but rather as an emotionally broken man unable to fulfil the image of the strong Israeli soldier. One atrocious incident that involved the killing of an Arab leaves particularly deep wounds. The following quotation is an extract from a letter written by Motti’s friend Eli who still lives in Israel—or so the reader is initially led to believe: Wessen Idee was es eigentlich, mit ihm das Itzik-Spiel zu spielen? Ich kann mich nur noch erinnern, wie verrückt vor Angst wir waren, als er uns auf den Boden gerissen hat, und wie wir geschrien haben, als er versucht hat, den Ring von seiner Granate abzuziehen. Ich weiß auch, wie wir hinterher vor ihm standen, jeder mit seiner Galil im Anschlag, wie wir gebrüllt haben und wie es immer hin und her ging, einmal ich, einmal Du, und wie nichts passierte, wie es ewig Null zu Null stand. Ich glaube, ich hatte bald genug, aber Du warst so verwirrt. […] [E]s hat Dich noch wütender gemacht, Du Idiot, und dann bist Du mit bloßen Händen auf ihn losgegangen. Mein Gott, Motti, was haben wir gemacht? Was für eine Ausrede haben wir? Gar keine, verstehst Du, keine einzige! Wir waren verrückt, und wir werden zur Strafe unser Leben lang verrückt bleiben. (T, 186; my emphasis) Whose idea was it to play the Itzik-game with him anyway? I can only remember how mad with fear we were when he pulled us to the floor, and how we screamed when we tried to pull the ring from his grenade. I also know how we stood in front of him afterwards, both of us having our Galil at the ready, how we screamed and how it went back and forth, first me, then you, and how nothing happened, how the score was nil-nil forever. I think I soon had enough, but you were so confused. […] [I]t made you even angrier, you idiot, and then you went for him with your bare hands. My God, Motti, what have we done? What kind of excuse do we have? None, do

20  For a detailed analysis of Israel’s military in relation to gender, its historical background, and its impact on Israel’s politics, see Klein (2001).

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you understand, none! We were mad, and as a punishment we will remain mad for the rest of our lives.

The brutal murder of the Arab Muamar and the defilement of his corpse mark the end of Motti’s friendship with Eli who—as we later find out— commits suicide as he no longer was able to cope with the consequences of this act of cruelty. Instead of strengthening camaraderie, the Lebanon War ends Motti’s male friendships. It marks his exclusion from the homosocial space of militarized masculinity and the male bonds particularly over victories—over the “enemy” but also over one’s own alleged (physical) weaknesses—that come with it. Above all war causes Motti to leave Israel and, by implication, to escape its militarized masculinity to which he feels he cannot subscribe, but also to lose the potential to be, or become, a “strong” Jewish man. He is not able to attain what Mayer refers to as “[t]he communal goal of military victory [that] connects masculinity and nationalism in a militarized society like modern Israel” (2000, 298; Mayer’s emphasis). If triumph over the Arabs is supposed to turn Motti into a man, his failure to live up to the virile image of Israeli military prowess “emasculates” him. The opposition between Motti as victorious Israeli soldier and his vanquished Arab foe is thus deconstructed, drawing Motti back down—metaphorically speaking—to the enfeebled status of the “ghetto Jew” Israeli militarism supposedly annulled (compare Mayer 2000, 299). The complexities of Motti’s masculinity oscillating between hypermasculinity and weak, “effeminized” masculinity come to the fore when he is no longer in Israel. Away from home Muamar’s murder becomes ironically the link that ties Motti to Germany (Eke 2002, 99): Motti hopes to forget his war crime by escaping from its scene, but by chance he ends up in the country that had persecuted his parents. Thus the gulf between Germany and Israel described when the novel opens is revealed as far less clear-cut: Israel is war-ridden and Germany—seemingly paradoxically— promises peace for the Israeli Motti, whose previous brutal actions in the Middle East are frighteningly reminiscent of those committed in Germany forty years previous. In Germany Motti’s “difficult fate” as an Israeli and a Jewish man with German roots, the son of a Holocaust survivor from Germany, is compounded. In Munich he tries to forget about the Lebanon War and to start anew; Jefferson Chase connects this to the post-war German shunning of the Holocaust (2001, 126). Trying to forget also raises questions of guilt and of suppressing guilt (Eke 2002, 96). This

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complex issue is exemplified by Sofie’s parents, who, through Motti, are, one the one hand, reminded of the Holocaust and the brutality of the Nazis and, on the other, remind Motti of the cultural and religious sides of his Jewishness. Yet Motti’s presence also reveals their strange fascination with having a Jewish man, the formerly forbidden other, in their family now. Conversely, Motti is constantly reminded of the Lebanon War and his national identity as an Israeli as Sofie’s father keeps encouraging a bond with Motti over their shared war experiences, which reads, in George L. Mosse’s words, like “an invitation to manliness” (1985, 114). However, Motti rejects the possibility of a new male bond, a bond with a German man who had participated in a war that persecuted Jewish people such as his parents. His rejection implies that militarized masculinity, such as that encouraged by the Nazis and, in a completely different context, that of Israel, is bound to fail. Hence Motti is haunted by the guilt that he brought upon himself and he regularly dreams about Eli. The longer he stays in Germany, the more it becomes clear to him that if he wants to start anew, he has to “become German” (“letter” from Eli; T, 182) and discard the way Jews were constructed by Germans, including the fact that Sofie insists on regarding him first and foremost as a Jew, not as an Israeli or even simply as a man, husband, and father.21 It seems that only by denying his perceived otherness, his Jewishness, can he overcome his trauma. Yet this denial reinforces Motti’s emotional instability as he feels increasingly rootless. Motti literally stumbles through Munich, often aimlessly: he is simply lost. He never becomes a part of Germany; and although he explores the place of his abode, he remains a bystander and becomes increasingly disoriented (Eke 2002, 97). His surname, Wind, surely bears significance in this context: his name suggests that he is not meant to stay put and is just passing through, thereby seemingly answering to the stereotype of the wandering, rootless Jew (compare Gilman 1985, 33). Settling in does not seem to be an option.

21  In that respect, Sofie is not very different from most of Biller’s female German characters. Helene Schruff observes: “Gemeinsam ist diesen [nichtjüdischen] Frauen ihr attraktives Äußeres, eine Tendenz zur Hysterie und ihr Eindruck, daß die jüdische Herkunft der Männer ihrer Liebesbeziehung ein besonderes Aroma ver/leiht” (2000, 190–91; What those [nonJewish] women have in common is their attractive appearance, a tendency to be hysterical, and their perception that the men’s Jewish background lends their romantic relationship special flavour).

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Instead of “becoming German,” Motti becomes increasingly paranoid, “blaming his personal tragedy on Germans and German society” (Chase 2001, 124). He blames Germany for his inability to come to terms with his experiences of war; he feels hard done-by in his marriage to an— allegedly—cold wife (Eke 2002, 97),22 by the muteness of his daughter Nurit (to whom he gives the telling nickname “Buba,” which means “puppet” or “doll” in Hebrew), and by her eventual death. He reckons that in Israel, the country he had left due to its claustrophobia and a war that tore him apart, he will—paradoxically—feel complete again. For Motti Germany is now a “Totenland” (T, 11; country of death), but for different reasons: Germany appears dead due to boredom, apathy, and silence. These are all characteristics that are—ironically—represented by his daughter Nurit, despite the fact that her father is “southern.” Motti sees Nurit’s muteness to be the result of her growing up in Germany and having to speak German as her mother tongue, the language of his despised wife Sofie, “die Sprache, die nicht die ihre war” (T, 153; the language that was not her own). Yet with the gradual emergence of his narrator in the action, Biller raises the question whether what Motti experiences and feels is “real” or hallucinated (Chase 2001, 126; see also Gogos 2005, 157), that is, whether Germans are cold and apathetic creatures, whether Eli writes letters, and whether the story revolving around Nurit really happened that way (see also Remmler 2006, 314, and Taberner 2005, 184). With this shift in focus, Biller prompts us to ask whether the narrator simply projects his own traumata as an Israeli confronted with his Jewishness in Germany onto the artificial character Motti (Eke 2002, 98). Or we could read the narrator’s role differently, as Taberner does: “the narrator […] is simply another aspect of Motti’s schizophrenia, or Motti a dimension of his split personality” (Taberner 2005, 184).23 The increasing prominence of the narrator in the narrative highlights then the disintegration of the simplifying construction of Jewishness and Jewish masculinity in opposition to Germanness that has informed so much of the German-Jewish discourse. By questioning the reality of Motti’s experiences and his perception of Germans, the novel challenges the mirroring of Germans and Jews in the face of their respective others: 22  Eke draws parallels between the—allegedly—cold, pale mother Sofie and Bertolt Brecht’s “bleiche Mutter” (pale mother) in his anti-national-socialist poem “O Deutschland, bleiche Mutter” (1933; O Germany, Pale Mother). 23  For more on the narrator, see Taberner (2005, 184) and Codrai (2015, 222–37).

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Germany and Israel’s interconnection demonstrates that the war trauma which initially defines Motti’s masculinity as a failed Israeli soldier is the cause of his trauma in living as a perceived Jewish man in Germany, which makes him—literally—ill. Biller clearly subverts the notion of the mentally ill Jew here, something which was at the centre of scientific discussions at the beginning of the twentieth century and which went hand in hand with the practice of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis was seen by anti-Semites as a quintessentially Jewish practice for “trope of the inherent instability of the Jew”: it was regarded as a “Jewish problem” (Gilman 1995a, 90 and 159). Biller disproves the idea of an inherent Jewish “madness,” something which is attributable to heredity; Motti’s mentally disturbed appearance also cannot be related to a “trauma of civilization,” nor to his life in the diaspora per se (Gilman 1993, 116, 124, and 131). His mental illness—Taberner identifies it as schizophrenia (2005, 183–84), but it is also reminiscent of posttraumatic stress disorder—is far more complex as his adverse experience of Israel results in his equally unfavourable experience of Germany. Thus the two countries and the cruelties of their respective histories appear intertwined in Motti’s disturbed mind which points to the complexity of the German-Jewish symbiosis far beyond the Holocaust. Motti’s anxiety finds its fullest expression in his disturbed emotions and, above all, sexuality (compare Gilman 1995b, 11). His conflict between Germanness and Jewishness is decided within interpersonal, that is, mainly sexual, relationships, between himself, the Jewish man, and German women (Köppen 1995, 253). Motti is preoccupied with sex. He is frustrated by the almost non-existent sexual relationship with his (infantilized) wife Sofie, to whom he does not feel attracted anymore and for whom he can therefore no longer be a “real” husband (see Gogos 2005, 159); he sleeps with his students; he watches sex films; and he has an— excruciating and often painful to read—incestuous relationship with his daughter Nurit who seems to take the place of Sofie by fulfilling the sexual “duties” of a wife. However, the novel suggests that this is perhaps “a perverse fantasy invented by Motti to preserve the idea that his daughter is still alive” rather than part of the story world’s reality (Chase 2001, 126). By putting increased emphasis on his Jewish character’s active, even hyper-, sexuality, Biller initially seems to masculinize the Jewish body that was historically feminized or associated with homosexuality (as

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anti-Semitic discourse would do).24 But this is not at the centre of Motti’s concerns: his hypersexuality, which comes across as something distinctly non-German,25 can be read as his way of counteracting his previous emasculation when failing to be a heroic Israeli soldier, that is, of “remasculinizing” his now “ailing masculinity.” Motti’s is not a feminized, therefore weak and controllable, masculinity. However, his sexual behaviour also reinforces his otherness (see Gilman 1993, 158); that is to say, his markedness as culturally non-hegemonic masculinity is staked out by means of available shorthands: Motti tortures himself to an extent by sleeping only with German women who want to convert to Judaism and whose philo-­ Semitism Motti actually detests.26 More significantly, he is not even physically attracted to them, finding them disgusting. Thus Biller portrays Motti’s sexual behaviour as ambiguous, thereby revealing his protagonist’s own unreconstructed gender discourse: by sleeping with Germans/ Christians/would-be Jews Motti reveals his disturbed relationship to his heterosexual German-Jewish identity. He feels disgust for what may be German about him due to his parents’ background and feels enabled to deny it by sleeping with the personification of his hatred, these “fette deutsche K[ühe]” (T, 50; fat German cows). Motti displays a degree of self-hatred, an issue which Biller has been concerned with throughout his work.27 His self-hatred is the result of what Gilman refers to as the “fragmentation of [his] identity” (1986, 3). In the context of his hypersexuality, we can see how the fractures in Motti’s identity run along religious lines. By allowing him access to his object of hatred—pseudoreligious women who want his help to convert—his Judaism provides him with a 24  See Boyarin (2002, 280) or Gilman (1993, 135). See also Robertson (1999) and Mosse (1985). For a discussion of the perceived similarity between women and Jews in the modern age, see Paul (2009, 15–17). Paul is referring to Otto Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter (1903) in this context: “For Weininger, femininity/Jewishness embodies a form of behaviour—sexual and sensual concupiscence—that threatens at an individual level the boundaries of the rational and self-contained male subject of Enlightenment provenance” (ibid., 17). 25  Biller carries the notion of Jewish hypermasculinity to extremes in his short story “Harlem Holocaust” (in Wenn ich einmal reich und tot bin), in which the American Jewish writer Warszawski shows the omnipotence of the stereotypically hypermasculine Black man who reveals his claim to power by possessing the white man’s woman (Köppen 1995, 252). 26  Perhaps we can see here a critique of “the contemporary German fascination for things Jewish” which Zipes has identified for the early 1990s (1994) and at which I also hinted in my opening remarks to this chapter. See also Taberner (2005, 183). 27  See Biller (2008, 26): “wir Juden [sind] in Sachen Selbsthass einfach besser” (we Jews are just so much better at hating ourselves).

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source of perverse sexual satisfaction. This is his own negative symbiosis: Motti can do neither with nor without Germans (see also Taberner 2005, 183). At the same time, Motti—like many other Israelis—is not a religious man and his lack of faith causes him qualms of conscience. Although he does not want to “become German,” he finds his ethnic, cultural, religious, and national difference trying.28 However, his difference gives Motti a certain degree of superiority, because he seems to gain some pleasure when he indulges in frequent descriptions of—in his eyes—imperfect, fat, and pale female bodies. Although these descriptions relate to the sickness of Motti’s pleasure, by doing this, Motti shows that he plays with his student/lover’s desire for the Jewish body, the “forbidden other,” something which readers encounter in a similar way in Motti’s interaction with Sofie’s family discussed earlier. He exposes the oddity of their philo-Semitism as something serving merely to redeem an underlying anti-Semitism (compare McGlothlin 2007, 236). Thus Motti “owns” these women, and this, as Manuel Köppen points out, promises the solving of all sexual problems and, above all, seems to guarantee the solving of a conflict of identity (1995, 251).29 Motti feels empowered, but this power is only provided by the sexual control he has over these women, and, implicitly, over hegemonic expressions of masculinity in Germany. However, all Motti has is the bonus of appearing exotic: Was war noch gut gewesen? Er hatte, eine Weile zumindest, viele Frauen gehabt, auf jeden Fall mehr, als es zu Hause gewesen wären, denn so wie er, dunkel und fiebrig und ernst, sahen in Tel Aviv die meisten Männer aus— mit seinem kleinen trotzigen Gesicht hatte er bei den israelischen Mädchen nie große Chancen gehabt, ein Durchschnittstyp wie er war zu Hause bloß zum Heiraten gut, hier aber hatten sich die hastigen Begegnungen für ihn wie von selbst ergeben. (T, 90) What else had been good? He had, for a while at least, had lots of women, more, in any case, that he would have had at home, because most men in Tel Aviv looked like him, dark and fevered and serious—he never had good  For the notion of difference, see Gilman (1986, 4).  My rendering of “Als Komplementärfigur des omnipotenten Deutschen wird die andere, die nicht-jüdische Frau zum bevorzugten Objekt des Begehrens, das nicht nur die Entlastung von allen sexuellen Problemen verspricht, deren Besitz vor allem auch die Lösung des Identitätskonflikts zu garantieren scheint” (Köppen 1995, 251; Köppen’s emphasis). 28 29

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chances with the Israeli girls with his small defiant face, at home an average guy like him was just good for marriage, but here these brief encounters seemed to fall into his lap.

The meaning of the dark Jewish man—the quintessential other—has changed: Motti does not feel “crippled” or feminized when he is with German women. Here, being Jewish, that is, being circumcised is, at least in the first instance, no longer a lack or deprivation, but a gain for Motti (he succeeds with German women) (Boyarin 1997, 283).30 With his hypersexuality Motti has found a way of counteracting his mental weakness: by acting as a strong man in terms of his sexuality, he can temporarily forget that he failed as an Israeli soldier and became a traumatized man. However, with his sexual behaviour Motti does not solve any of the problems Köppen mentions in his study of attitudes towards Jewish sexuality (1995); nor can he arrest the fragmentation of his self. In fact, his hypersexuality only reinforces his disturbed relationship to his perceived Jewish-Israeli and masculine self. Biller turns sexuality into a highly problematic issue as his protagonist’s sexual urges progressively turn into something perverse.31 The novel’s title, Die Tochter, gives readers a clue: the narrative increasingly focuses on incest and the numerous descriptions of the sexual activities or, as mentioned above, fantasies between Motti and his daughter Nurit, the “emotionally disturbed Mißgeburt [freak],” but, according to Motti, by contrast to fat, pale German women, including his wife, perfectly shaped girl (Chase 2001, 124). The theme of incest allows Biller to engage with the significance of the family (Gogos 2005, 72) as “Träger solcher Fortschreibungen einer ‘jüdischen Identitätʼ” (ibid., 20; carrier of such continuations of a “Jewish identity”). As the novel gradually makes clear, however, Motti’s family in Germany is not a source of stability—for his position as a Jewish man in Germany or for his mental health—but one of anxiety that revolves around bringing out his daughter’s Jewishness as marked non-Germanness but ultimately leads to conflict in the family and to abuse. In many ways Motti takes his role as a father very seriously.32 In fact we can even speak of a 30  On circumcision and “the feminisation of the male body,” see Gilman (1993, 25). Gilman is referring to Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (1939) in this context. 31  On incest, see Gilman (1993, 192). Gilman is referring to Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism. 32   On fatherhood, see Segal (2007), chapter “The Good Father: Reconstructing Fatherhood,” 23–49.

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reversal of traditional gender roles: Motti looks after Nurit at home because Sofie’s work as a doctoral student is more important to her than her daughter (see T, 124). Yet Sofie “fails” as an academic as her male professor, on whom she is dependent, plagiarizes her work and ultimately rejects her thesis (T, 156–57). In Motti’s view, however, Sofie primarily fails as a (Jewish) mother, a mamme, who, with her “männliche Gesichtszüge” (T, 344; male facial features) and her “fast männlichen Kraft” (T, 346; almost male strength), even physically appears like a man. Yet it is not her, in his eyes, masculine appearance and behaviour alone that impacts Motti’s perception of Sofie as a mother: although Sofie converted to Judaism (her new name is Sarah), Motti questions whether she is a “real” Jewish mother—Motti still sees her as German—so the Jewish matrilinearity appears to be broken in their family.33 In his interactions with Nurit Motti appears to want to compensate for his daughter’s “lack of Jewishness.” Yet he does not succeed with his endeavour and she remains “[s]eine kleine stumme Prinzessin” (T, 142; his little silent/dumb princess). Thus Motti’s perceived “failure” as a (Jewish) father has devastating consequences: Ab und zu wurde er darum furchtbar wütend auf sie, so wütend, daß er aus dem Bett aufspringen, ins Badezimmer laufen und sein Gesicht mit kaltem Wasser vollspritzen mußte, um sich zu beruhigen—nur einmal hatte er nicht rechtzeitig gemerkt, daß es gleich losgehen würde, und da war es bereits zu spät gewesen. Sie hatte sich nicht gewehrt, sie hatte tapfer seine Schläge erduldet, und als er hinterher weinen mußte, war sie, obwohl sie Schmerzen hatte, im Bett zu ihm gekrochen, sie hatte sich an seine Seite geschmiegt, sie hatte sich wie eine Frau über ihn gebeugt, sie hatte versucht, mit ihren kleinen, warmen, ungeschickten Fingern seine Tränen wegzuwischen, und dabei hatte sie ihn mit ihrer brüchigen, kranken Stimme fast unhörbar getröstet, so schön und so lange, bis er ihrem Werben einfach nicht mehr widerstehen konnte. (T, 152–53; my emphasis) Every now and then he therefore became incredibly angry with her, so angry that he had to jump out of bed, run to the bathroom, and splash cold water all over his face to calm down—just one time he hadn’t noticed in time that it would start again and then it had already been too late. She hadn’t fought back, she had bravely endured his blows, and when he had to cry afterwards, she had crawled into his bed, despite her pain, she had  On motherhood in the Jewish context, see Schruff (2000, 55).

33

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snuggled up to him, she had lent over him like a woman, she had tried to wipe away his tears with her small, warm, clumsy fingers, while comforting him almost inaudibly with her fragile, ill voice, so beautifully, until he simply couldn’t resist her seduction any longer.

Motti clearly has an abusive relationship with Nurit, even if it is “just” a fantasy rather than something that really happens; he talks about her as if she were a grown-up woman, which seems to legitimize his behaviour and he does not see the need to accept any responsibility for it: Nurit apparently seduces him; and Sofie does not intervene and “lässt ihn ficken” (T, 264; lets him fuck [Nurit]), as he says later on. Motti thus distracts attention from his own guilt and moves it onto Sofie and even to his German environment34: because only Nurit, who, according to Motti, does not grow up “wo sie aufwachsen sollte” (where she should really grow up), is innocent (T, 153), thus suggesting their situation would be different if they did not live in Germany. Sofie’s refusal to acknowledge and confront the seriousness of this abusive situation can be read as a reference to the way in which ordinary Nazi-era Germans pretended not to notice the persecution of the Jewish people. Moreover, Motti is severely angry (something which already comes to the fore when he remembers Muamar’s murder), and the only way of expressing his anger, and, for that matter, his “hard” masculinity,35 is by punishing his weaker daughter: he wants to punish her for her apathy (for being—in his eyes—too German, as her listlessness resembles the silence of her mother) and later for her immodest, shame, and tabooless (compare Schröder 2008, 58), even pornographic, behaviour (such as when she—still a young child—puts on a show, naked, in front of her parents and grandfather [T, 311–21]). Nurit’s identity, as a German Jewish girl, is ambivalent: her apathy can be read as a further sign of German amnesia, but also as a marker of Jewish “victim” 34  Compare Codrai (2015, 238): “Die ‘Negative Symbiose’ ermöglicht es Motti, sich trotz seines (vermeintlichen) Verbrechens an Nurit als Opfer der Deutschen wahrzunehmen und seine eigene Schuld zu verdrängen” (the “negative symbiosis” allows Motti to perceive himself as the Germans’ victim and to suppress his own guilt, despite his [alleged] crime against his daughter). See also Remmler (2006, 314). 35  Although we can see here parallels between Motti’s anger and masculinity, this is of a different relationship than what Roca Lizarazu describes in her exploration of “bad feelings” in German Jewish writing, which largely function as a political/critical comment on GermanJewish relations (2020, see esp. 80–85). But it highlights again the significance of (negative) emotions in German Jewish writing.

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identity. Not only does Motti take advantage of his daughter’s emotional dependence, her “victimhood,” by sexually abusing or her or fantasizing about this abuse, but Nurit has, in Motti’s mind, learned to adopt abnormal sexual behaviour and, through that, assumed the role of Motti’s accomplice. The abusive, incestuous relationship they have or Motti imagines also does not appear as a taboo to them: they break what Sigmund Freud has described as the incest taboo, but, as explained before, the narrative is not clear about whether this happens in Motti’s fantasies, which would follow Freud’s understanding, or in the reality of the story world.36 Through her contradictory deportment, Nurit unsettles the demarcation between guilty, or guilt-ridden, German and victimized Jew. Thus the girl mirrors what Norbert Otto Eke calls the “state of emergency” (“Ausnahmezustand”) between Jews/outsiders and Germans by whom Motti feels constantly threatened (2002, 99–100). Feeling threatened rouses Motti’s anger and, consequently, leads him to behave abusively. Motti’s anger is also self-directed, and he punishes himself for being Jewish as well as for being a failed Israeli soldier, for wanting “to become German” as a way out of his trauma, and clearly for not being able to forget. Parallel to Muamar’s dead body, which Eli and Motti defile after killing him, Nurit, the outcome of an impossible German-Jewish relationship, becomes a defiled object too. She also dies—it is unclear whether Motti drops her from the window or whether she accidentally falls out of it (Chase 2001, 126)—her body deformed after hitting the asphalt, revealing, as the narrator observes, her genitals (Eke 2002, 97). With reference to the narrator’s account of Nurit’s death, which may or may not be a source for his “Motti-story” he is writing (T, 405–408), Chase makes the point that, instead of being part of Motti’s fantasies or hallucinations, the incest narrative may even have been invented by the narrator himself (2001, 128). Chase’s comment on the unreliability of the narrator’s telling the “‘truth’ behind the fiction” helps readers question the alleged stability of notions of Germanness and Jewishness in Die Tochter even further (2001, 128–29). Following the incest motive in literature (Benthien 2008, 79–81), we can read Nurit’s death as an act of “Selbstvernichtung aufgrund von Scham und Schuldgefühlen sowie eines irreversiblen Identitätsverlustes” (Benthien 2008, 80; self-destruction due to shame 36   On Freud’s incest taboo, see Benthien (2008, esp. 73–75). See also Gutjahr (2008, 19–50).

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and feelings of guilt as well as an irreversible loss of identity): Nurit wants to look down properly after all, asking her father to hold her over the window sill (“Ich will ganz heruntersehen, Vati, hältst du mich über den Fensterrand?,” T, 413; I want to look down properly, daddy, will you hold me over the windowsill?). Motti reads his daughter’s request as a wish to die and to reach ultimate salvation (“Sie will es auch, sie weiß, daß dies ihre einzige Rettung ist,” T, 413; she too wants it, she knows that this is her only salvation) (see Codrai 2015, 239). The German-Jewish symbiosis—personified in Nurit and expressed through Motti’s own behaviour— has failed: as mentioned earlier, Motti calls Nurit “Buba”; and apathetic, puppet-like, silent Nurit is now also externally silenced37; she is—quite literally—discarded like a broken doll. Although Motti criticizes German self-absorption resulting in ignorance for what happened in the past and what is now happening around them, is his own behaviour not that of a man who is only interested in himself, his pleasure and needs, and therefore not that much different from the Germans Motti detests? Moreover, Motti is assuming the role of “perpetrator” in the relationship to his daughter (as he does as an Israeli soldier in Muamar’s killing). We can read this as a further connection to the blurring of self/other boundaries between Germans and Jews. The novel closes with the confused and broken man Motti, alone in his bed, re-starting the sex film whose lead is—supposedly—his daughter but turns out to be a young Polish woman (T, 424). The novel’s end thus focusses the reader’s attention again on the function of the dichotomies that both Motti and his narrator draw on as soon as something goes wrong (see Chase 2001, 127) in order “to stabilize [their] shattered Jewish male identity” (Codrai 2015, 237)38: namely, the dichotomies between Germans and Jews/Israelis, persecutors and victims, men and women that fuel the self-other conflicts at the novel’s centre. And so the question remains whether there is a solution to such conflicts.

37  Compare Willeke (2002, 103): “These external silencing mechanisms—in Ingeborg Bachmann’s words, the ‘tearing out of the tongue’—are compounded by internal ones: shame, guilt, a sense of powerlessness, ambivalent feelings toward the perpetrator, and the burden of knowing that the relative stability of one’s family depends on silence.” 38  My rendering of “Der Ich-Erzähler flüchtet sich in eine dichotome Weltsicht, um seine erschütterte jüdische, männliche Identität zu stabilisieren” (Codrai 2015, 237).

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“Liebe in Deutschland”? The blurb on the dust cover of the paperback edition of Die Tochter prefaces the summary of the plot with the words “Eine Liebe in Deutschland” (a love in Germany). This may come across as an unsuitable, if not disturbing, description of the novel’s depiction of the protagonist’s abusive relationship with his daughter. Yet this phrase can also be read as yet another pointer to the complexities of the German-Jewish (negative) symbiosis that is so central in Biller’s work. While, as I already pointed out in the opening pages of this chapter, Biller could be accused of binary thinking in much of his writing (see Roca Lizarazu 2021, 81 and 82–83) and of a perpetuation of unreconstructed gender discourse when it comes to the relationship between men and women, in my concluding remarks I wish to draw attention to another emotion that shapes Biller’s male protagonist’s self-perceptions beyond the rage and (self-)hatred that dominated Die Tochter: love, or the desire to love (see also Roca Lizarazu 2017, esp. 113). Love often serves as “a powerful model or metaphor for German-­ Jewish relations,” as Katja Garloff has observed of German Jewish culture (2016, 171), and Biller’s writing too appears to respond to “a surge of interest in the topic of German-Jewish love” after 1990 (Garloff 2016, 180). In any case love complicates Billerʼs representations of Jewish life in contemporary Germany, but, despite the ambiguities and difficulties it highlights in the experiences of the self with the other, love may still alleviate conflict to an extent and take some of the edge off Biller’s provocative approach to his subject matter. At the end of Die Tochter Biller leaves his readers wondering why he constructs masculinity as oscillating so painfully between “effeminized” masculinity and hypermasculinity. Is deliberately sexualizing Jewishness a way of re-calibrating difference as something that challenges, even disturbs, German views of Jewish masculinity?39 Through the sexual encounters between his Jewish-Israeli protagonist and German women and, above all, the incest motif in Die Tochter, Biller scrutinizes both the “idealization of Jews” that Taberner identified in the early 2000s (Taberner 2006, 236) and the positive aspect of re-appropriated Jewish (hyper-)sexuality. Motti’s is a flawed, even perverse, sexuality, as is his perception of love for his daughter, and by displaying his strange fantasies, he insists on his 39  See Gilman (1995b, 19) for Dan Diner’s discussion of the Jews’ awareness of being different from Germans.

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self-otherness. Although Motti came to Germany to forget, to “become German,” that is, to silence his traumatic experience, the reader is forced to realize that his forgetting, or at least suppressing, of his war crime and, by implication, the betrayal of his Jewishness and denial of his role in Israel’s militarized masculinity is not possible. Biller’s approach to Jewish masculinity in a German context in Die Tochter rests on his protagonist’s paradox of living in Germany as a Jewish man, which also manifests itself as feeling of being torn between Germany and Israel as a possible “homeland.” This conflict is discussed in a number of German Jewish works, ranging from an earlier text such as Rafael Seligmann’s first novel Rubinsteins Versteigerung (1989; Rubinstein’s Auction) to Mirna Funk’s more recent novel Winternähe (2015; Close to Winter) (see McGlothlin 2007, 233 and 237).40 The transnational focus of representations of contemporary Jewishness that these texts have also confirms Garloff’s observation of the “international character” of recent German Jewish literature, with many texts being set outside Germany, especially Israel (2018, 19). The brutal, even perverse, consequences of Israel’s military policy41 on an Israeli now living in a country with a horrid militaristic history of a different kind are, however, Biller’s unique take on exploring the cultural, ethnic, and national tensions inherent in German-­ Jewish relations. The latter come across as the (im)possibility of a Jewish “normality” in both Germany and Israel (Taberner 2005, 184). Biller’s novel also establishes a parallel between the “perversion” of Israeli war crimes against Arabs and the “perversion” of Motti’s (possibly hallucinated) abuse of his daughter. In many ways this abuse, which Motti perceives as love towards Nurit, marks his divorce from his Jewish-Israeli background: although abusing his daughter is certainly not an expression of his having “become German,” it is still a comment on his separation from what, in his view, Jewish or Israeli people, for instance his parents, regard as “normal.” In an imaginary conversation with his parents in Munich, Motti angrily defends Sofie’s way of caring for their daughter by responding to his parents’ inquisitive comments: “weil jeder Mensch eben seine Art hat, seine Liebe zu zeigen, aber das versteht ihr [Motti’s parents] natürlich nicht, ihr glaubt, daß Liebe nur aus Enge und Streit und Lärm  See also Nolden’s observation of this phenomenon in Biller’s earlier work (1995, 55).  This topos is explored in a number of Israeli films as well as culture, as Ari Folman’s animated documentary Waltz with Bashir (2008) and Samuel Maoz’s film Lebanon (2009) demonstrate. 40 41

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besteht, aus ewigen Einmischungen und Vorwürfen!” (T, 103; because every human being has their own way of showing their love, but you [Motti’s parents] don’t understand that of course, you think that love only consists of narrowness and arguments and noise, of endless interferences and reproaches). Love in Germany becomes synonymous with quietness and softness, “effeminacy” of a different kind, that stands in contrast to the very vocal expression of emotion in Israel—even if Motti talks about it aggressively here, thus mirroring the rising anger he felt when committing his war crime or abusing his daughter described earlier. In other ways his love for Nurit, which should have been “die Liebe für ihr ganzes Leben […], für später, für Israel, wo sie endlich zu sich kommen würde” (T, 327; the love for her whole life […], for later, for Israel, where she would finally wake up), is a promise to escape his miserable existence in Germany: Israel now becomes the promised land where what Motti regards as genuine love is possible. Similarly to Motti’s own “betrayal” of his Jewishness in Germany, Nurit “betrays,” according to Motti, her Jewishness and, by implication, him (T, 327), thus destroying any way out of his disturbed and disturbing existence in Germany. Mistaking abuse and incest as love exceeds tolerable limits, but Motti’s “love,” which may or may not have its roots in his war experiences and ensuing mental health issues, brings up a revealing aspect of his masculinity. The intertwining of the political taboo of war crimes with the sexual taboo of incest thus enables Biller to open his readers’ eyes to the complexities and controversies surrounding contemporary Jewish-Israeli masculinity. The author goes far beyond those constructions of “the Jewish man” that are linked to historical emasculation and effeminacy. The mental decline of Biller’s protagonist suggests that the traits of the other—here the weak and therefore “feminized” Jew—are not inherent. Instead, the negative characteristics of the other are produced, and its power suppressed, in order to ensure the superiority of the hegemonic group. Biller thereby criticizes Israel’s militaristic masculinity as well as Germany’s perception and treatment of its others, which are still often enough characterized by lack of understanding, rejection, and ignorance, and not by openness, acceptance, and love. “Love in Germany,” as German-Jewish symbiosis, or love between an Israeli and his German family, but also as reconciliation of his past with his present, fails in Die Tochter (see Remmler 2006, 318, and Codrai 2015,

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222). In his controversial, and banned,42 novel Esra,43 Biller looks into a failed symbiosis of a different kind: here a Jewish-Turkish/imagined “Jewish” symbiosis, or what David Brenner describes as “what is at least a narrative of internal (i.e., Eastern Jewish-Western Jewish) symbiosis” (2010, 222; Brenner’s emphasis), equally fails in Germany. A brief look into this novel shall complete my considerations of masculinity in conflict—or in love. Esra centres on the relationship between the narrator, the writer Adam, a Jewish man born to Czech parents living in Germany, who, during the narrative, is working on a novel that bears similarities to Die Tochter (see E, 110 and 186; see Codrai 2015, 158–59), thus connecting the two texts, and his German Turkish lover, the title-giving Esra, an actor-turned-graphic designer. In his novel Biller clearly highlights the transnational links between the Jewish and Turkish minorities in contemporary Germany (Taberner 2006, 236–37).44 Yet Biller also explores what being Jewish in a transnational context, or belonging to Jewishness or “betraying” this Jewishness, means, here via a romantic relationship. By doing so he continues the conversation about the meaning, but also boundaries, of Jewish masculinity that he started in Die Tochter where being a Jewish man is scrutinized via the “failed strong Jew”45 who failed as a soldier in Israel; as a husband of a German, then converted wife; and as a father of a German Jewish child. In Esra, the narrator’s masculinity is played out via the relationship between Esra and Adam. Their love appears as a constant battle between 42  Maxim Biller’s ex-girlfriend and her mother thought they had recognized themselves in the novel and sued Biller for damages. They obtained a provisional order by the Landgericht München to prohibit the sales of the novel. Until a legally binding decision was reached, a second edition of Esra (2003) was published with certain omissions in the text (the Münchner Fassung) that were meant to protect the plaintiffs’ identities. (This is the edition I am using in this chapter.) The ban was confirmed by the Oberlandesgericht München in 2004 and by the Bundesgerichtshof in 2005 (see Eichner and Mix 2007, 186) and upheld by the Bundesverfassungsgericht in 2007. The ban attracted much criticism and debate about the freedom of literature in the German public/literary world (see Grüttemeier 2016). For more details, see Uwe Wittstock’s comprehensive study of the “case Esra” (2012); Eichner and Mix (2007), a detailed analysis of the judicial and literary contexts revolving around the ban of the novel; or Codrai (2015, 152–56). 43  Page references to Esra will appear in the text, preceded by the abbreviation “E.” 44  Taberner refers to Leslie A. Adelson’s study on the “touching tales of Turks, Germans, and Jews” (2000) in this context. 45  Taberner points out that “an idealized image of the ‘strong’ Jew” (2006, 241) is central in both novels.

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them, as lovers and as people of different ethnic backgrounds, who oscillate between distance and closeness (see E, 46 or 80) and who are well aware of the power dynamics that determine their relationship (see E, 139). For Adam love appears as, in Alain Badiou’s words, “an experience whereby a certain kind of truth is constructed. This truth is quite simply the truth about Two: the truth that derives from difference as such” (2012, 38). Importantly, “like many processes for finding the truth, the process of love isn’t always peaceful” (ibid., 61). Adam is obsessed with imagining Esra as Jewish, with trying to prove her Dönme46 background (see E, 46–48 or 92–93), which, to Adam, explains “diese tiefe, verwandtschaftliche Verbindung” (E, 48; this deep, familial connection) he feels with her,47 a connection that is, however, not without conflict. It is perhaps no coincidence that in Hebrew “Esra” is a male name, which may be another indicator for the fact that Adam wishes her to be like him, that is, Jewish. And we may also read her, in gender terms, ambiguous name as a challenge to traditional gender dynamics between heterosexual lovers.48 In any case Adam’s endeavour to prove Esra’s alleged Jewishness again raises questions of reality and imagination, echoing Motti’s imaginings in Die Tochter discussed earlier.49 However, here I would like to draw briefly on Sara Ahmed’s ideas on recognizing strangers to think through this significant element of Adam’s relationship with Esra and his self-construction as a “marginalized” Jewish man in Germany. Employing the male, objectifying gaze of the 46  The Dönme are “descendant[s] of the 17th-century followers of the ‘false messiah’ Shabbatai Zvi who, after their leader’s apostasy, outwardly converted to Islam while continuing to live as ‘secret Jews’” (Taberner 2006, 237). See also Wogenstein (2004, 83). See also E, 46–47. 47  According to Taberner, this may also be his way of “not violating the practice of endogamy, the habit of marrying within the group, by which a fragile Jewish existence is sustained” (2006, 239). 48  Sebastian Wogenstein reads Esra’s name as a reversal (“Umkehrung,” the translation of the Turkish “dönme”) of Esra in the Bible who not only chronicled the return from the Babylonian exile to Judaea but also enforced religious restauration by, for instance, condemning cross-cultural marriage. Wogenstein regards Biller’s book as his reversal: in Esra, “hybrid,” “diasporic” characters frequently make reference to their “fragmentierten und mehrschichtigen kulturellen Hintergrund” (fragmented and multi-layered cultural background). For them “eine mythische, reterritorialisierende Rückkehr aus jeder Art von Exil” (a mythical, reterritorialized return from any form of exile) is not a possibility (2004, 84). 49  As Taberner points out, “Esra [, too] refuses to differentiate between fantasy and reality” (Taberner 2006, 239). She lives in a “Tagtraumwelt” (E, 35; world of daydreams). Codrai also explores the relationship between fact and fiction in her reading of Esra (2015, 162–64).

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writer-narrator (see Taberner 2006, 238), that is, observing and describing her in often minute detail and thereby judging her, Adam not only exercises power over Esra but also thinks he “recognizes” her, the initially other and strange, as a “secret Jew”: borrowing Ahmed’s words, Adam “know[s] again, […] acknowledge[s] and […] admit[s]” (Ahmed 2000, 22). But Adam also knows what he is looking for (Ahmed 2000, 184n1) because his recognition relies on his own adopted racist stereotypes, which differentiate her from Germans (Taberner 2005, 95; Taberner 2006, 240; see also Codrai 2015, 164–65). Orientalizing Esra (see Taberner 2006, 237 and Codrai 2015, 172)—Adam literally, and frequently, uses the word “orientalisch” (oriental) to describe her (e.g. E, 91 or 115)—not only allows Adam to confirm his perceived male dominance over Esra (compare Taberner 2006, 238), but also, leaning on Ahmed again, to use her “strangeness” to include her in his own attempts to not be German, that is, in “his Jewishness.” I regard this as a “stranger fetishism” (Ahmed 2000, 4–5), partly in reverse. Making Esra a part of his Jewishness helps Adam to confirm his own identity as a culturally and ethnically “different” man, not least because it differentiates him from his rivals (E, 125), the German men with whom Esra has relationships. In fact, his obsession with Esra’s potential Dönme background is about him,50 not her, as he seemingly attempts to reconnect with his own “lost” Jewishness that had allowed him to integrate into Germany (Taberner 2006, 238 and 239). Adam’s attempts to confirm his Jewishness via Esra, to control her alleged Jewishness, go hand in hand with his constant battles with his Germanness, because being (too) German might threaten his, the writer’s/the intellectual’s, “productive marginalization” (Taberner 2006, 237; see also ibid., 242 and Codrai 2015, 171).51 So, Adam’s love for Esra

50  Compare Codrai (2015, 160): “Indem Billers Adam seine Esra-Geschichte erzählt und ihren Fall analysiert, bestimmt er, wer er selbst ist. Er bringt sich als deutsch-jüdischer, männlicher Schriftsteller durch das Andere—Esra, die deutsch-türkische, weibliche Schauspielerin—hervor, in dem er die verdrängten Anteile des Eigenen in seiner Repräsentation des Anderen erkennt” (By telling his Esra-story and analysing her case, Biller’s Adam determines who he is. He constructs himself as a German Jewish, male author via the other—Esra, the German Turkish, female actor—in which he recognizes the repressed parts of the self in his representation of the other). See also Codrai (2015, 160–64). 51  This reminds us of Biller’s own appreciation of his peripheral position which I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter.

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arises not only out of his perceived lack of Jewishness,52 but also out of his perceived excess of Germanness. Yet Adam’s attempts often fail as especially his use of German, which, of course, is also the language of his profession, and particularly his instinctive use of idioms reveal (E, 87 and 94). Indeed Adam sometimes has to perform his “Unzugehörigkeit” (non-­ belonging) to Germany (Codrai 2015, 166): for instance early on in their relationship he and Esra “play south” in her flat (E, 13), a game he is tempted to end due to the noise-level outside (noise being stereotypically associated with “the south”). Thus, as Bettina Codrai points out: Was in Adams Augen den Ausschlag für seine Identität als “same as” gibt, ist Esras Fremdheit, die seine Ähnlichkeit zu den Deutschen hervorbringt. Biller zeigt damit auch, dass die duale Struktur der “Negativen Symbiose,” die seit jeher ein Konstrukt gewesen ist, überholt ist. (2015, 175) What, in Adam’s view, decides his identity as “same as” is Esra’s foreignness which brings to the fore his resemblance to Germans. By doing so, Biller also demonstrates that the dual structure of the “negative symbiosis,” which has always been a construct, has become obsolete.

Ultimately, Adam needs to recognize that he can only live and work in Germany, or precisely in Munich (see Codrai 2015, 169). New  York, where he has not been for a long time; Israel; or Prague, his birthplace that he left thirty years ago, are not, or no longer, an option (E, 88–89) (Taberner 2005, 95–96; see also Wogenstein 2004, 82–83).53 The distance to those places simply seems to have grown too big. Adam’s othering of his lover occurs not only on a cultural, religious, and even national level, but also on a sexual one as he also “sees” her as an other in gender terms, that is, quite simply as a woman. He says: Ich konnte mir nicht vorstellen, daß es eine schönere Frau auf der Welt gab als sie. Ich betrachtete ihr Gesicht, ihre Haare, ihre Augen, aber bald schaute ich ihr nur noch auf den Hintern. […] Wenn ich ihn sah, wollte ich sofort mit ihr schlafen […]. (E, 138) 52  Helmut Schmitz explains in detail how “[f]or social theory, psychoanalysis, and classical philosophy love essentially arises out of lack” (2017, 6). Most relevant for my reading of Biller’s narrator Adam is the Freudian and Lacanian approach for which “love and desire of the other signify that which is lacking in the self” (ibid.). 53  This echoes the narrator’s position in Die Tochter (Codrai 2015, 195–96 and 224–26).

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I couldn’t imagine a more beautiful woman in the world. I looked at her face, her hair, her eyes, but soon I only stared at her butt. […] Seeing it, I wanted to sleep with her immediately […].

Having sex with Esra confirms Adam’s male sexuality, even hypersexuality, considering how it often functions as a form of communication in their relationship. Yet although Adam can “conquer” Esra sexually to an extent and turn “die abwesende, weggetretene Esra” (E, 44; the absent-­ minded, spaced-out Esra) into “meine kleine Sklavin” (E, 44; my little slave), he is not successful in capturing her. To him, she remains the elusive and instinctive Esra; he can never completely possess her (Taberner 2006, 238). Thus Adam reflects: “Warum liebe ich Esra überhaupt? Wahrscheinlich weil ich sie nicht bekommen kann” (E, 77; why do I actually love Esra? Probably because I can’t get her). The question is whether what Adam feels for Esra is really love or the mere desire to capture and own the woman whose, to him, intriguing difference confirms what he would like to see as “marginalized” masculinity in the culturally hegemonic German environs of which he is very much part and on which his existence as a writer depends. Ultimately, Adam “loses” the competition with his German rivals (Esra refuses to abort the baby she is having with Thorben, her new boyfriend54) and remains, according to Adam’s mother, “solange sie kein Kind von dir hat, ein Fremder” (E, 142; a stranger, as long as she doesn’t have a child with you). His “neoromantic belief in their [Adam’s and Esra’s diverse cultures’] spiritual oneness, or at least underlying complementarity” (Taberner 2015, 54), does not lead to the desired outcome. Adam “fails” as (sexually rather active) lover of “a sort of Jewish” woman (E, 200), which, in a seeming act of male defiance, ultimately leads him to dismiss his Dönme idea and to draw on stereotypes yet again to come to terms with the end of their relationship: Esra war keine Jüdin und auch keine Fast-Jüdin, sie stammte aus einer mehr oder weniger normalen Familie.55 Sie war am Ende genau wie Fatma, das Mädchen aus ihrem Film, das kein Recht auf eigenen Willen hatte. Auch 54  Similarly, in Die Tochter, the narrator’s girlfriend Marie is expecting a child, a daughter, by another man, which adds complexity to the meaning of the title (T, 402). See also Codrai (2015, 235 and 236–37). 55  This is an example of the omissions in the text of the second edition of Esra (2003; the Münchner Fassung) I mentioned in note 42.

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sie durfte nicht den lieben, den sie lieben wollte, auch sie mußte bis zur Selbstverleugnung ihrer Familie dienen. Ich hatte mir schon oft überlegt, daß es in Familien offenbar immer nur um Macht und Gehorsam ging, nie um Liebe. Jetzt war ich mir sicher, daß es so sein mußte. (E, 158–59) Esra wasn’t Jewish, or nearly Jewish, she came from a more or less normal family. At the end of the day she was like Fatma, the girl from her film, who didn’t have the right to her own free will. She too wasn’t allowed to love the one she wanted to love, she too had to serve her family to the point of self-­denial. I had often thought that in families it was all about power and obedience, never about love. Now I was certain that it had to be like that.

At the end, the narrator is on his own (like Motti and the narrator in Die Tochter). The cultural, national, and sexual battles dominating his romantic relationship with Esra and his exploration of her (alleged) identity, but above all of his own identity as a German Jewish man and writer, are over. Adam has to reconnect with his Jewishness, and masculinity, in different ways as the novel’s ending, Adam’s retelling of the legend, or myth, surrounding Shabbatai Zvi’s death suggests (Codrai 2015, 187–88): after his death Shabbatai Zvi was laid in a cave, which his brother Elija found empty, but filled with light after three days (E, 214). Pointing out the obvious parallel with the Christian story of Jesus’s resurrection Codrai concludes that Biller highlights here “die Künstlichkeit von Adams Rehabilitierung seiner jüdischen Identität, was auch die Künstlichkeit seiner ‘deutschen,’ ‘unheimlichen’ Identität und von Identität generell impliziert” (2015, 187; the artificiality of Adam’s rehabilitation of his Jewish identity, which also implies the artificiality of his “German,” “uncanny” identity and of identity in general). She thereby also points to the fictionality of reality and identity when “categories of the self and the other” are negotiated (Codrai 2015, 188).56 Considering Adam’s at times obsessive construction, or fictionalization, of Esra’s identity as Jewish, that is, the clash between fact and fiction (compare Codrai 2015, 188), it is, in many ways, not surprising that his imagined “transnationally Jewish” love or what David Brenner has termed “the utopia of love” (2010, 222) can only fail. 56   My rendering of “Realität und Identität sind also immer nur fiktionalisierte Momentaufnahmen von Verhandlungen der Kategorien des Eigenen und des Anderen bzw. deren Repräsentationen” (Codrai 2015, 188).

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Love, Conflict, and German Jewish Masculinities The loves of many of Biller’s characters fail (see Roca Lizarazu 2017, 113), but Biller keeps exploring love in a German-Jewish, transnational context both as a possibility for his texts’ Jewish men and as a source of conflict that shapes their masculine selves. This is the case in several of the stories collected in the tellingly entitled Liebe heute (2007a; Love Today, 2009b),57 for instance, where the predominantly male, urban, and largely privileged protagonists’ experiences of contemporary love greatly influence their masculine self-perceptions in relation, often contradistinction, to an other (a woman). Such contradistinctions rely, again, on a certain binary thinking, on racial and gender stereotypes, on “conquering” women with the male gaze, and on (hyper-)sexuality. They thus often reveal a self-centred, yet also curiously anxious masculinity whose construction is dependent on others and therefore on the conflict that attends interaction with these others. That love can, however, take other forms is central in a collection of previously published stories: Sieben Versuche zu lieben: Familiengeschichten (2020a; Seven Attempts to Love: Family Stories). (The collection’s title is taken from one of the stories published in Liebe heute.) Although the stories focus on family bonds, rather than on romantic love, and on the stories’ families’ transnational connections and often traumatic history, the publisher’s decision to draw the reader’s attention to love by its choice of title confirms Biller’s exploration of Jewish life in Germany and beyond against the backdrop of this emotion. Crucially, it also draws attention away from the notion of conflict as something necessarily destructive that often informs criticism of Biller’s depictions of German-Jewish relations. In the texts discussed here, perceptions and the realities of Germanness and Jewishness play out on the terrain of masculinity in conflict. By letting his male protagonists share their views on what being a Jewish man or an Israeli in Germany means, Biller does not shy away from employing, even often confirming, binaries in terms of culture, ethnicity, and gender that allow him then to set the scene for the conflicts which shape his characters 57  On Liebe heute, especially the story “Melody,” see McGlothlin (2010, 45–47). She optimistically suggests that “[i]n his depictions of the erotic connections between post-Holocaust Germans and Jews, Biller […] gestures toward the possibility of the development of a shared, if sometimes uneasy, relationship to the past” (ibid., 47; see also 36).

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and through which they navigate their worlds. These real or perceived conflicts allow Biller to play with fact and fiction and ultimately to mark constructions of Jewishness and “native” Germanness as well as those of masculinity as unstable concepts.

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Strategien des Erinnerns in der zweiten Generation. Sprache im technischen Zeitalter 33 (135): 250–59. Lerner, Paul, Benjamin Maria Baader, and Sharon Gillerman. 2012. Introduction: German Jews, Gender, and History. In Jewish Masculinities: German Jews, Gender, and History, ed. Benjamin Maria Baader, Sharon Gillerman, and Paul Lerner, 1–22. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Maoz, Samuel (dir.). 2009. Lebanon. Metrodome Distribution. Mayer, Tamar. 2000. From Zero to Hero: Masculinity in Jewish Nationalism. In Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation, ed. Tamar Mayer, 283-307. London and New York: Routledge. McGlothlin, Erin. 2007. Writing by Germany’s Jewish Minority. In Contemporary German Fiction: Writing in the Berlin Republic, ed. Stuart Taberner, 230–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2010. Generations and German-Jewish Writing: Maxim Biller’s Representation of German-Jewish Love from “Harlem Holocaust” to Liebe heute. In Generational Shifts in Contemporary German Culture, ed. Laurel Cohen-Pfister and Susanne Vees-Gulani, 27–55. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Mosse, George L. 1985. Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe. New York: Howard Fertig. ———. 1996. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. New York: Oxford University Press. Nagel, Joane. 1998. Masculinity and Nationalism: Gender and Sexuality in the Making of Nations. Ethnic and Racial Studies 21 (2): 242-69. Nolden, Thomas. 1994. Contemporary German Jewish Literature. German Life and Letters 47 (1): 77–93. ———. 1995. Junge jüdische Literatur: Konzentrisches Schreiben in der Gegenwart. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Paul, Georgina. 2009. Perspectives on Gender in Post-1945 German Literature. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Remmler, Karen. 2006. Maxim Biller: Das Schreiben als “Counter-Memory.” In Shoah in der deutschsprachigen Literatur, ed. Norbert Otto Eke and Hartmut Steinecke, 311–20. Berlin: Erich Schmidt. Robertson, Ritchie. 1999. The “Jewish Question” in German Literature, 1749–1939: Emancipation and Its Discontents. New York: Clarendon Press. Roca Lizarazu, Maria. 2017. Thomas Mann in Furs: Remediations of Sadomasochism in Maxim Biller’s Im Kopf von Bruno Schulz and Harlem Holocaust. In Love, Eros, and Desire in Contemporary German-Language Literature and Culture, ed. Helmut Schmitz and Peter Davies, 113-31. Edinburgh German Yearbook 11. Rochester, NY: Camden House. ———. 2020. Renegotiating Postmemory: The Holocaust in Contemporary German-Language Jewish Literature. Rochester, NY: Camden House. ———. 2021. Irreconcilable Differences: The Politics of Bad Feelings in Contemporary German Jewish Literature. In Politics and Culture in Germany

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and Austria Today, ed. Frauke Matthes, Dora Osborne, Katya Krylova, and Myrto Aspioti, 75–96. Edinburgh German Yearbook 14. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Schmitz, Helmut. 2017. Introduction: Love, Literature, (Post-)Modernity: On the Re-Emergence of Love in Contemporary German Literature. In Love, Eros, and Desire in Contemporary German-Language Literature and Culture, ed. Helmut Schmitz and Peter Davies, 1–22. Edinburgh German Yearbook 11. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Schröder, Hartmut. 2008. Zur Kulturspezifik von Tabus: Tabus und Euphemismen in interkulturellen Kontaktsituationen. In Tabu: Interkulturalität und Gender, ed. Claudia Benthien and Ortrud Gutjahr, 51–70. Munich: Wilhelm Fink. Schruff, Helene. 2000. Wechselwirkungen: Deutsch-Jüdische Identität in erzählender Prosa der “Zweiten Generation.” Hildesheim, Zurich, and New  York: Georg Olms. Segal, Lynne. 2007 [1990]. Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men. 3rd, rev. edn. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Seligmann, Rafael. 1989. Rubinsteins Versteigerung: Roman. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag. Steinecke, Hartmut. 2002. Einleitung. In Deutsch-jüdische Literatur der neunziger Jahre: Die Generation nach der Shoah, ed. Sander L.  Gilman and Hartmut Steinecke, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für Deutsche Philologie 11: 9–16. Taberner, Stuart. 2005. German Literature of the 1990s and Beyond: Normalization and the Berlin Republic. Rochester, NY: Camden House. ———. 2006. Germans, Jews, and Turks in Maxim Biller’s Esra. The German Quarterly 79 (2): 234–48. ———. 2015. Transnationalism and Cosmopolitanism: Literary World-Building in the Twenty-First Century. In Transnationalism in Contemporary German-­ Language Literature, ed. Elisabeth Herrmann, Carrie Smith-Prei, and Stuart Taberner. 43–64. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Willeke, Audrone B. 2002. “Father Wants to Tear Out My Tongue”: Daughters Confront Incestuous Fathers in Postwar German Literature. German Life and Letters 55 (1): 100-16. Wittstock, Uwe. 2011. Der Fall Esra: Ein Roman vor Gericht. Über die neuen Grenzen der Literaturfreiheit. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Wogenstein, Sebastian. 2004. Topographie des Dazwischen: Vladimir Verlibs Das besondere Gedächtnis der Rosa Masur, Maxim Billers Esra und Thomas Meinekes Hellblau. In Gegenwartsliteratur: Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch / A German Studies Yearbook 3, ed. Paul Michael Lützeler and Stephan K. Schindler, 71–96. Tübingen: Stauffenburg. Zipes, Jack. 1994. The Contemporary German Fascination for Things Jewish: Toward a Minor Jewish Culture. In Reemerging Jewish Culture in Germany: Life and Literature since 1989, ed. Sander Gilman and Karen Remmler, 15–45. New York and London: New York University Press.

CHAPTER 4

Masculinity and Religion: Navid Kermani

Difference, Islam, and Challenging Hegemonic Masculinity The conclusion to my chapter on Maxim Biller’s work, and especially my thoughts on his novel Esra, revealed the significance of ethnic, cultural, and religious difference, be it self-chosen or imposed. It also recognized such difference as a powerful, though controversial, shaper not only of masculinity itself but also of the relationship between Germans and their others. In contemporary Germany there is perhaps no other marker of difference as visible as religion, more precisely Islam.1 The early  Beverly M. Weber traces “the racialized construction of cultural difference as static and absolute” (2013, 5) in the relationship between Islam in Europe, what she describes as “the uneven juxtaposition of Islam and Europe” (ibid., 6), with a particular focus on Muslim women in her 2013 monograph Violence and Gender in the “New” Europe: Islam in German Culture; see esp. the introduction “Undoing the Connections between Muslim Violence, ‘Culture,’ and Secularism” (1–38).  For a discussion of difference in relation to Islam, masculinity, and sexuality, see the chapter “Islam, ‘Difference’ and Masculinity—Male Perspectives from the ‘Margins of Society’: Feridun Zaimoğlu’s Kanak Sprak and Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album” in my book Writing and Muslim Identity (Matthes 2011, 123–72). Here I discuss Islam as marker of difference from the German and British mainstream populations in the works mentioned in the chapter title. Difference is, in those texts, often regarded as a tool with which to negotiate the characters’ belonging to Germany or Britain. It is something proudly and consciously chosen, not rarely as an act of defiance against potential assimilation processes. 1

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twenty-­ first century has seen a move in Germany towards perceiving migrants and postmigrants largely in terms of their country of origin or culture, sometimes also ethnicity (for instances as Turks or Arabs). In short, those presumed as having a Muslim background are pidgeonholed primarily as just that: Muslims (Yildiz 2009; Chin 2010, 577). This development has been echoed in recent German-language writing, with Karin Yeşilada even speaking of a “Muslim Turn” in German literature (e.g. Yeşilada 2011, 146 and 160–63). Navid Kermani’s literary and wider intellectual work is often read in this context (Coury 2014; Twist 2018, esp. 141) as he carefully scrutinizes Germany’s relationship with its Muslim population and seeks out ways of understanding and accepting, yet also overcoming varying forms of difference in Germany. This shift of attention from country or culture of origin to religion2 in Germany’s interaction with its Muslim population has, unsurprisingly, its roots in the suicide attacks in New  York, Madrid, and London at the beginning of the twenty-first century which brought Islamist extremism right into the centre of the West.3 These acts of terrorism, whilst causing outrage among large sections of the Islamic community worldwide, have also had a profound impact on both perceptions and self-perceptions of Muslims living in Western Europe and the United States. Not only did these incidents reactivate a certain Western image of Islam as dangerous

2  Olivier Roy refers to this use of the term “Muslim” as “neo-ethnic,” “with no reference to faith and religious practice. When speaking of neo-ethnicity, ‘neo’ means that the culture of origin is no longer really relevant and ‘ethnicity’ that religion is not seen as a faith but as a set of cultural patterns that are inherited and not related to a person’s spiritual life” (2004, 124). Roy also points to the generalizations that come with the neo-ethnic sense of the term “Muslim”: “[e]very person of Muslim background is supposed to share a common Muslim culture […] which means that religion is seen as the main component of these cultures, a component that can be isolated and erected as a culture in itself. […] This culture is attributed to everybody with a Muslim origin, whatever his or her religious practice or level of faith (that is, without any link to religiosity). In this sense, one could speak of ‘non-believing Muslims.’ […] This culture differentiates a ‘Muslim’ from an ‘other,’ who, in the West, is defined as a member of a religious community, but of a pseudo-ethnic group […], reproducing patterns of colonial history” (ibid., 126). 3  Rita Chin dates this shift to the mid-1990s when European debates around migration drew attention to the fact that “the most visible migrants, country by country, were Muslim” (2010, 577). “As a result, Muslims quickly became the primary field against which Europe’s self-definition took place” (ibid.).

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other and as a global “threat to Western civilization” (Said 1997, 41),4 but Muslim populations in the West have, since then, had to renegotiate their position in what some would refer to as a “new world order” defined by the “war on terror” (see Roy 2004, 24). Further attacks such as the deadly shooting at the headquarters of the French satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo on 7 January 2015 or the attack on the Christmas market in Berlin on 19 December 2016 have reminded Europeans that “threats [such as terrorism] do not stop at national borders” (Taberner 2017, 141).5 That threats of political unrest and war outwith Europe’s borders have an impact on its political and social landscape has perhaps come into sharpest focus with the onset of the so-called refugee crisis in Europe in 2015, following the failed “Arab Spring” of 2011 and the ensuing civil wars and regional instabilities in the Middle East and North Africa. After the migration of Gastarbeiter from southern European countries and especially Turkey to northern Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, of Iranian migrants and refugees, many of whom left their country after the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and of those fleeing the Gulf Wars in Iraq in the 1990s and the military invasion in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003 as well as the wars in ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Europe, and Germany in particular, has seen high numbers of migrants from predominantly Muslim countries, above all at present from Syria.6 The newly increased presence of visibly different others on German streets since 2015 has brought to the fore renewed tensions and discussions revolving around integration and the negotiation of difference in German society. Such tensions find, at least in part, nationalist and right-wing populist expression in the party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD; Alternative for Germany), which was established in 2013 and, after the federal election in 2017, entered the German Bundestag as its third-largest party, and in the Islamophobic 4  For a detailed discussion of the representations of Muslims in the media since 9/11, see Morey and Yaqin (2011). Compare also Kermani’s essay “Eine bürgerliche Ideologie” (A Bourgeois Ideology) in Wer ist Wir? (2009, 28–52) and Machtans (2018, 301–304). 5  Taberner’s comment follows his reference to Ulrich Beck’s “world risk society” that he reconsiders in: 2002. The Terrorist Threat: World Risk Society Revisited. In Theory, Culture & Society 19 (4): 39–55, here 39. 6  In 2018 there were 813,000 Syrians or those with Syrian parents living in Germany (i.e. 1% of the population), 89% of those arrived in Germany in the five previous years (Pfündel et  al. 2020, 16 and 25). See Pfündel et  al. (2020) also for further statistics on Muslim migrants and the Muslim population in Germany. For details on “people on the move” such as refugees who bring to the fore “the interaction of, and tension between, the local, the regional, and the global” in Germany (and beyond), see Taberner (2017, 8–9).

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organization PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident), which emerged towards the end of 2014. Gender has long served “as a primary difference” (Weber 2013, 12) in such debates. Fatima El-Tayeb has also drawn attention to the fact that in “the discourse around European Muslim difference […], seemingly paradoxically, gender and sexuality take center positions, while religion remains comparatively marginal” (2011, 81). Beverly Weber specifies that “constructions of cultural difference” have tended to focus on “[t]he figure of the unenlightened Muslim woman oppressed by her culture” (Weber 2013, 11), thus “linking […] gender violence to an unchangeable Muslim culture and the persistent construction of the Muslim woman as victim” (ibid., 10). Weber’s observation chimes with Rita Chin’s conclusion that in West Germany, which had attracted a large number of guest workers from Turkey, “Turkish women quickly became a central trope for representing the apparently incommensurable cultural difference between Turks and Germans,” their “oppression” and “victimization” evidencing this “unbridgeable chasm” (2010, 558). However, I argue that a shift in attention has recently taken place. In the wake of the terrorist attacks mentioned above, the media, but also cinema, literature, and pop culture have become more interested in the image of the male terrorist, in what Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin have termed the “Islamic Rage Boy” (2011, 23; see also Matthes 2011, 123). This figure with its presumed fixed idea of Islam that goes hand in hand with anti-Western sentiment and illiberal attitudes towards gender and sexuality is used not only to “cement the threatening strangeness of the Muslim Other” (Morey and Yaqin 2011, 3) but also to serve as a counter-­ image to “masculinities of patriotism,” to use Jasbir K. Puar’s term (2007, xxiv).7 As she puts it: “Masculinities of patriotism work to distinguish, and thus discipline or incorporate and banish, terrorist from patriot” (ibid.). I would like to draw on one example to illustrate this point. On New Year’s Eve 2015–2016, groups of men with migrant or refugee and largely Muslim backgrounds sexually assaulted (German) women in central 7  In his study Muslim Masculinities in Literature and Film: Transcultural Identity and Migration in Britain, Peter Cherry uses the “Islamic Rage Boy” stereotype, observing how “Morey and Yaqin’s reading of [this] image and its emergence in the post-9/11 cultural landscape” corresponds with, for instance, Puar’s work, as a springboard for his analysis of cultural representations of “Muslim men as racialized and gendered subjects and bodies in contemporary Britain” and of “the relationship between migration, diaspora and masculinity” (2022, 2).

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Cologne and in other German cities. While these men were by no means terrorists, in accordance with Puar’s conceptualization, their behaviour could be deemed “non-patriotic.” That night their behaviour, their perceived difference and otherness, represented a threat to Germans/ Germanness, personified here by German women. This of course echoes the age-old gendered discourse revolving around the protection of the nation by protecting its women. Yet these men’s other, that is, “non-­ German” masculinities, expressed as sexual entitlement to these (German) women’s bodies, assault, and thus violation of their right to be and feel safe in a public space also triggered other debates about “Arab and Muslim sexism” and “the Arab man” (Ulrich 2016).8 So, when exploring masculinity in relation to, or as, difference and, in this chapter, with a particular focus on religion, the dichotomy of Islam and the West is impossible to avoid, as this emotive dyad continues to dominate public discourse on Islam in Germany, and the issues associated with it, as my example of the events at New Year’s 2015–2016 goes to show. Kermani himself has often addressed this dyad in his work, often in relation to questions of belonging, social marginalization and exclusion, and, not least, difference both as an obstacle to mutual understanding based on tolerance and as a virtue (compare Jordan 2012, 247–48). This is not surprising considering his background and professional interests. Kermani was born of Iranian parents in 1967 in Siegen (Germany). Not only is he well known for his literary work, but he is also a widely regarded academic and public intellectual. Kermani gained a PhD in Islamic Studies in 1998 and completed his Habilitation (postdoctoral degree) in 2006, and he has held a number of fellowships and visiting professorships. He was a member of the Deutsche Islamkonferenz (German Islam Conference), a forum for dialogue between the German state and Germany’s Muslim communities, between 2006 and 2009. Kermani’s academic, journalistic,9 and fictional writing consistently engages with the interactions between Germans and their Muslim neighbours, but also more generally between religions—Christianity, Islam, 8  Bernd Ulrich opens his critical article with the media’s initial reluctance to acknowledge that the majority of offenders at New Year’s 2015–2016 were indeed of Arab backgrounds. He argues that this reaction echoes an unhelpful unwillingness in parts of German society to confront (potential) issues associated with migrants or refugees of Arab and Muslim backgrounds (such as sexism). 9  Kermani has published a large number of newspaper articles and given many interviews. They can be found on his website at www.navidkermani.de.

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and Judaism—in Germany (see Machtans 2018, 305). He has published widely on a variety of topics, including political issues in the Muslim world,10 the situation of refugees in Europe or those affected by wars and political unrest,11 and theological explorations such as the aesthetic perception of the Qur’an or Christianity.12 Unsurprisingly, religion is a recurrent theme in his fictional work, as the titles of his early collections of short stories indicate: Vierzig Leben (2004; Forty Lives) is a play on the number forty which is highly symbolic in Islam as well as in the Judaeo-Christian tradition;13 and Du sollst (2005a; Thou Shalt) is a provocative erotic interpretation of the Ten Commandments. Kurzmitteilung (2007a; Short Message) tackles religion via its hypermasculine protagonist in the aftermath of the London bombings on 7 July 2005, as I shall explore below. Masculinity also plays a crucial role in his novel Dein Name (2011; Your Name), where Kermani combines “discussing the ravages of neoliberalism on gender identity” with “his own transgenerational ‘Herkunftsbewältigung’ [coming to terms with one’s ethnic, cultural, and religious background] via its inclusion of unpublished biographies of his grandfather and mother” (Druxes and Machtans 2016a, 8). The author has also become a prominent voice in the oft-cited “dialogue” between the West and Islam, especially in his essays Wer ist Wir? Deutschland und seine Muslime (2009; Who Is We? Germany and Its Muslims). Here, but most notably in his essay “Lob der Differenz” (In Praise of Difference; in Wer ist Wir?), Kermani outlines his disbelief in any form of purity when it comes to identity: for Kermani, who is well aware of 10  For example, Iran: Die Revolution der Kinder (2000; Iran: The Revolution of the Children); Schöner neuer Orient: Berichte von Städten und Kriegen (2003; Brave [literally: Beautiful] New Orient: Reports on Cities and Wars). 11  For example, Einbruch der Wirklichkeit: Auf dem Flüchtlingstreck durch Europa (2016a; The Onset of Reality: On the Refugee Trek across Europe; translated into English as Upheaval: The Refugee Trek through Europe, 2017a); Entlang den Gräben: Eine Reise durch das östliche Europa bis nach Isfahan (2018; Along the Trenches: A Journey through Eastern Europe to Isfahan, 2020). 12  Gott ist schön: Das ästhetische Erleben des Koran (1999; God Is Beautiful: The Aesthetic Experience of the Quran, 2015b); Ungläubiges Staunen: Über das Christentum (2015c; Wonder Beyond Belief: On Christianity, 2017b). 13  For instance, in Islamic belief, Muhammad was forty years old when he first received the revelation delivered by an angel; the universe is supported by forty pillars. Many incidents in the Bible such as Noah’s flood last forty days, and the Jews spent forty years in the wilderness; the number forty symbolizes trial or testing; thus many rituals such as fasting during lent cover a forty-day period or are to be repeated every forty days.

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the history of migration in Germany, it is possible, indeed desirable, to combine one’s cultural difference with one’s belonging to the (German) nation (Machtans 2018, 299). Following on from those affirmative ideas, in Vergesst Deutschland! Eine patriotische Rede (2012b; Forget about Germany! A Patriotic Speech), Kermani discusses the NSU (the far-right neo-Nazi terrorist group “National Socialist Underground”) murders and pleads for an open-minded, cosmopolitan Germany rooted in Enlightenment values. For Kermani this is also a Germany whose cultural history Kermani reads, according to Karolin Machtans, “as a quarrel with its own culture and [so]—with reference to the Enlightenment writer and philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing—[he] pleads for tolerance and a patriotism that challenges one’s national self-image” (2018, 291; see also Baldwin 2020, esp. 296–99). Essays about the political and cultural entanglement between “East” and “West” have continued to take a central position in his oeuvre: in Zwischen Koran und Kafka: West-Östliche Erkundungen (2014b; Between Quran and Kafka: West-Eastern Affinities, 2015a), Kermani questions the often ideologically driven literary borders between “Orient” and “Occident” and thereby explores the meaning of world literature in today’s political climate. In 2010 he held the prestigious Frankfurt Poetics lectures, published as Über den Zufall: Jean Paul, Hölderlin und der Roman, den ich schreibe (2012a; About Coincidence: Jean Paul, Hölderlin, and the Novel I Am Writing), in which he develops his own poetological programme by reading two somewhat ambiguous figures in German literary history in conversation with his own work. Kermani’s work has been widely recognized by awards such as the Hessian Cultural Prize in 200914 and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2015, and he was invited to address the Bundestag on the 65th anniversary of implementation of the Grundgesetz (German constitution) on 23 May 2014.15 That same year Kermani published his novel Große Liebe (2014a; Great Love), a sequel of which came out as Sozusagen Paris (Paris, As It Were) (Kermani 2016b). 14  Kermani was temporarily stripped of this prize. The reason was an article by Kermani about an altarpiece by seventeenth-century Italian painter Guido Reni in which he expressed his discomfort at the sight of the cross until he saw Reni’s painting of the crucifixion. The Catholic Cardinal of Mainz, Karl Lehmann, and the former president of the Lutheran Church in Hesse, Peter Steinacker, two of the other joint award recipients, heavily criticized Kermani for this article. The issue was later resolved and Kermani received the prize. See Taberner (2017, 147). 15  Kermani’s speech was published in Zwischen Koran und Kafka (2014b, 341–49; Between Quran and Kafka [2015a, 247–53]).

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In this chapter I am concerned with the value and use, but also strain and ambiguity, of difference in the self-positioning of the male protagonists of Navid Kermani’s novels Kurzmitteilung16 and Große Liebe.17 I am particularly interested in the productive negotiations of ethnic, religious, cultural, as well as physical difference in relation to hegemonic forms of masculinity. Difference that is rooted in Islam and the West’s perception of it is of particular significance in Kurzmitteilung as the novel specifically addresses the “new world order” in the aftermath of the London July bombings in 2005 and the significance of religion within this “new world order.” Kermani chooses as his subject matter precisely those Western anxieties about Islam that intensified at the beginning of the twenty-first century and how they influence cultural, religious, and national self-perceptions. These self-perceptions are closely tied to the demonization of Muslim identity and Islam for a German audience, as Islam has been fashioned into the frightening, yet fascinating opposite and “bogeyman” of the West (Kermani 2008), increasingly so, as I have already pointed out, since 9/11. This demonization has a paradoxical effect: non-Muslim Western intellectuals seem to crave “authentic” Muslim voices in order to understand Islam in a more profound way (compare Jordan 2010, 166), perhaps also in an Orientalist way to gain power over it by “knowing” it (Said 1995), to learn about this religion (see Matthes 2010 and also Matthes 2011, 219). This openness to Islam is only superficial and utilitarian, however, as Muslim voices are only noticed, it appears, so that the West can be enabled to deal with radical Islamism, and non-Muslims can thus position themselves in opposition to it. On the other hand, there is something that one might call “Muslim self-justification” which started to emerge after 9/11 in Western countries with Muslim populations: this is the concern of some Muslims to disprove what Islamic extremists want the West to think about Islam (namely, that it is a religion to be feared) and, consequently, to challenge the West’s negative image of Islam. Against this backdrop, Kurzmitteilung explores the deeply ambiguous identity of the hypermasculine, professionally successful, and somewhat 16  Page references to Kurzmitteilung will appear in the text, preceded by the abbreviation “K.” 17  References to Große Liebe will appear in the text, preceded by the abbreviation “GL.” As the novel is separated into a hundred sections of various, non-paginated lengths, each of which representing one day of the narrator’s writing of the story, I can only refer to the sections rather than to individual pages. An English translation of Große Liebe was published in 2019  as Love Writ Large (translated    by  Alexander Booth). Unfortunately, I only became aware of this translation when the chapter was already completed. This chapter  therefore includes my own translations.

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hegemony-craving German Iranian narrator, the event manager Dariusch: Dariusch claims a residual cultural identity as an Iranian Muslim, yet he is not a practising Muslim; he criticizes the Western commercialization of Islam, thereby making his own reverse division between the hypocritical West and misconstrued Islam, but is complicit with this commercialization both in his professional life and in his relationship with women.18 The novel opens with a text message that he receives from his former associate, Korinna, informing him of the death of her colleague, Maike Anfang. This coincides with the terrorist suicide attacks in London in July 2005. Although death and the dealing with loss by both the main protagonist and the “native German,” Christian characters are significant themes in the novel,19 here I am concerned with what these events, the death of innocent people, trigger in the protagonist, that is, Dariusch’s engagement with the largely negative perceptions of Islam in the West since 9/11, primarily in his rather ambiguous job, event management. To that end, Kurzmitteilung asks important questions about inclusion and exclusion, that is, how much difference is acceptable. I will therefore also look into the consequences those events revolving around death have for him personally: the realization that he in fact craves the stability, or, to use Taberner’s term with reference to the novel, belonging (2017, 146–57, 87), religion can give, a realization that paves the way for Dariusch’s surprise conversion to Scientology at the novel’s close. The relationship between Islam and the West takes on a more subtle meaning when it comes to love (and not only sexual satisfaction as in Kurzmitteilung) as Kermani explores in Große Liebe. The novel offers a seemingly unlikely setting for an engagement with religion, now with a particular focus on mysticism/Sufism and its literature. Große Liebe is set in the early 1980s in a provincial town in West Germany, during a time of great concern over nuclear energy which resulted in Germany’s peace movement. Although the novel does not engage with terrorism as a global concern and conflict that also manifests itself at a personal level, the real danger of nuclear energy triggers a different self-other conflict. This conflict impacts the narrator’s sense of masculine self as he experiences his first 18  Jordan also stresses Dariusch’s confused and contradictory attitude towards his Iranian background, his Germanness, and Islam (2010, 166–67; see also Jordan 2012, 254–55). 19  For a detailed analysis of death in Kurzmitteilung, see Hoffmann (2016, esp. 123–32). Hoffmann regards “the literary treatment of death” in the novel as “problematic, on ethical as well as aesthetic grounds” (ibid., 122). See also Anz (2018, esp. 9), and Twist (2017, esp. 86 and 92–95).

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love, the title-giving “great love,” amidst the political tensions that reflect his own personal struggles and ambiguous relationship towards love. The narrator of Große Liebe, a Kermani-like figure,20 remembers how, as a teenager, he fell in love with an older German girl, Jutta. The novel connects the now adult narrator’s reflections on his self—past and present—or losing this self, with those on Islamic mysticism and its implications for his love. Cultural or religious difference therefore has a more nuanced meaning and potential to challenge hegemonic masculinity than in Kurzmitteilung: no longer something to be used strategically in order to enhance commercial as well as interpersonal success, difference, particularly gender difference, plays a crucial role in the male narrator’s journey to, or rather loss of, a self that experiences, and tries to come to terms with, new emotions through the lens of Islamic mysticism in an environment seemingly unfavourable for love. So, in this chapter I argue Kermani reassesses and challenges the significance of hegemonic masculinity and what is perceived as “normal,” or normative, in terms of masculinity (see also Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 832) through negotiating, and playing with, difference in relation to religion. I read this as an attempt to re-appropriate authority, that is, power and agency over oneself, by those in German society who are associated with marginalization due to their ethnic, cultural, or religious backgrounds. My argument relies on Raewyn Connell’s point that “[i]t is the successful claim to authority, more than direct violence, that is the mark of hegemony (though violence often underpins or supports authority)” (2005, 77). This is an important aspect in the context of religion as the protagonists of both of the novels discussed here are far from embracing the violence associated with the “Islamic Rage Boy” mentioned above. Authority is claimed by other means, which, as we shall see, also manifests itself in an authority over one’s self, that is, a choice to “be” different. However, such a choice is largely dependent on the protagonists’ “successful integration” into German society that also allows them to refuse to be marginalized by others, that is, to be “made” different. In this book’s introductory chapter I have already engaged with the term “hegemonic masculinity.” Here I would like to take up two points of criticism that have surrounded the term and explain how drawing on hegemonic masculinity in my exploration of difference in Kermani’s novels is useful. Firstly, the term has been criticized for being unclear in its  On the autofictional elements in Kermani’s writing, see Hoffmann (2018).

20

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meaning (Hearn 2004, 58), that is, for being somewhat slippery (Beasley 2008, 171), and, secondly, for being rather Western-centric. Thirdly, several critics have noted a failure to address the agency of subordinated and marginalized groups in the construction of masculinities,21 something that Connell and Messerschmidt themselves have recognized (2005, 847 and 848). Interlinked, these three points of criticism open up fruitful avenues of inquiry in this chapter. In her work, Connell has repeatedly emphasized the historical dimension of hegemonic masculinity such as here: “Hegemonic masculinity can be defined as the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women” (2005, 77; my emphasis). This historical aspect allows then for a questioning of the status quo or, as Stephen M.  Whitehead has put it: “For while the fundamental premise remains that male power is a ‘hegemonic project’ (Connell 1995), embedded in ideological and material structures, there is space for ambiguity—and change” (2002, 90). Such change in what Jeff Hearn has termed “the hegemony of men,” rather than hegemonic masculinity, is particularly noticeable if we consider what Hearn refers to as “global and regional transformations, such as Europeanization, as through the European Union” (2004, 65). Globalizing and transnationalizing developments, which include the migration movements referred to at the opening of this chapter, thus leave a lasting mark on societies as they put into question what is perceived as “natural,” “normal,” or “the way it is” as represented by hegemonic forms of gender and masculinity (Hearn 2004, 61).22 So, by acknowledging “the significance of transnational arenas [such as world politics and transnational business and media23] for the construction of masculinity” (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 849), I will scrutinize the notion of difference 21   Feminist criticism has of course long emphasized the agency of subordinated groups/women. 22  Hearn is referring here to: Mark Surman. 1994. From VTR To Cyberspace: Jefferson, Gramsci & the Electronic Commons. www document cited at: http://www.ncf.ca/ip/ freenet/conferences/com-net94/conference_papers/vtr/vtr7.txt [URL no longer available]; and Raewyn [R.W.] Connell. 1998. Men in the World: Masculinities and Globalization. Men and Masculinities 1 (1): 3–23. 23  These are the areas Connell and Messerschmidt focus on, but I am specifically thinking of the movement and migration of people across the globe here.

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in relation to forms of hegemonic masculinity that determine those masculinities perceived as marginalized (for instance migrants or children of migrants). Reading masculinities not just at local or regional/national levels, but also globally (see Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 849) allows me then to discuss with greater depth the self-perceptions of Kermani’s characters who are living their masculinities in an environment that keeps drawing attention to their supposed difference. I will thereby also bring in the notion of agency and ask whether, or how, difference may contribute to the protagonists’ agency. In the following, I will demonstrate the manner in which this is being played out in Kurzmitteilung and Große Liebe and how the protagonists use their difference to appropriate, negotiate, and/or challenge hegemonic forms of masculinity.

Marketing Difference: Kurzmitteilung Kurzmitteilung introduces Dariusch as an Iranian-born Westernized Muslim who is estranged from his cultural and religious heritage. According to Jim Jordan, this should be read as “ironic denial”: it is Kermani’s strategy to “open up new avenues of exploration and address issues present but unarticulated surrounding the position of second-­ generation migrants in German society” (2010, 170). Although Dariusch comes across as an “atypical” migrant child (Jordan 2010, 175; see also Taberner 2017, 148), he shares with Germans of a similar background some of their dilemmas: Klar, ich war einige Male in Iran, zuletzt 2001. Als Kind war das Land eine Selbstverständlichkeit für mich, die Menschen, die Sprache, das Essen, Teheran. Dann konnte ich lange Zeit nicht mehr dorthin reisen, weil ich wehrpflichtig geworden war. Während des Studiums fing ich an, mich nebenher für die iranische Kultur zu interessieren, für das Kino vor allem, Musik, Mystik, Literatur. Ich habe auch Persisch-Kurse belegt, um lesen und schreiben zu lernen. Allerdings fehlt es mir bis heute an Übung. [...] Der Islam hat mich immer genervt. Für mich war das alles bigott. Wäre es freier gewesen, hätte ich mir vorstellen können, in Iran zu leben. (K, 32) Of course I’ve been to Iran, the last time was in 2001. When I was a child I took this country for granted, the people, the language, the food, Tehran. Later I wasn’t able to travel there for a long time because I had become liable for military service. As a student I developed a side interest in Iranian culture, especially for Iranian cinema, music, mysticism, literature. I also

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took Persian courses to learn how to read and write. But to this day I lack practice. [...] Islam has always got on my nerves. For me the whole thing is hypocritical. If it had been a more open county, I could have seen myself living there.

Though the Iran of his childhood is something Dariusch has always taken for granted, he had actively to try to learn this country’s language as an adult.24 Unable to speak Farsi, Dariusch will always remain distanced from Iran and its culture. His “lack of connectedness” (Taberner 2017, 152), which Taberner locates in “a more profound anxiety about rootlessness that is ultimately related to neoliberalism’s erasure of local context and located meaning,” something which “Islamist terrorism, the novel implies, obscures” (ibid., 156), leads him to experience a similar alienation from his “roots” as “German Germans” (ibid., 152, also 156 and 176). Dariusch thereby stands in opposition to certain fellow Germans with an ethnically non-German background to whom Dariusch compares himself: “Mir fehlte der Ehrgeiz meiner iranischen oder türkischen Altersgenossen, Islamwissenschaft zu studieren, um die eigene Kultur, meine Identität! kennenzulernen. […] Der Persischkurs an der Volkshochschule genügte als Ausrede, um mich weiterhin mit etwas anderem als Deutschland zu identifizieren” (K, 47–48; I lacked my fellow Iranians’ and Turks’ ambition to read Islamic Studies as university to get to know my own culture, my identity! […] The Persian course at the Centre for Lifelong Learning was excuse enough to be able to identify with something else than Germany). In fact Dariusch mocks people who try to find their own “identity” by reading Islamic Studies or other Area Studies at university and, by the time of the diegetic present, has degraded his Iranian background to an accessory. One could read Dariusch’s distance from his heritage as his criticism of identity politics or simply—and this is perhaps the more likely scenario, as my ensuing analysis will demonstrate—as his cultural

24  Warda El-Kaddouri points out that the Iranian communities in Europe and North America, whose members’ migration had an “intellektuellen und politischen Charakter[]” (intellectual and political character), tend to identify themselves as “secular” and often as “Persian” rather than “Iranian,” “mit dem Ziel, ihre religiöse Zugehörigkeit auszublenden und den präislamischen Character des Persischen Reichs zu betonen” (2016, 140–41; with the aim to blank out their religious belonging and to emphasize the pre-Islamic character of the Persian Empire). I thank Warda El-Kaddouri for the permission to quote from her PhD thesis in this chapter.

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ignorance that has become his personal and professional agenda, a useful tool he can employ as a somewhat “different” German. Nonetheless, despite his total immersion in German culture, Iran does play a significant role in Dariusch’s self-perception: it differentiates him from what he does not like, namely, “scheiß” (shit) Germans (K, 80 and elsewhere) whose hated image (Western, capitalist, bland, and disconnected from their roots, religion, and morality), ironically, fits exactly the picture of Dariusch we get in the novel. This ambiguous position as insider/outsider enables him to develop a form of “double vision” (Bhabha 1994, 37–39) to identify and thus play with what these despised Germans regard as his “exotic” features. This has first and foremost consequences for his relationship to women and sex. Dariusch regards German men as “bleiche Konkurrenz” (K, 126; pale competitors) in various senses: it is not simply the colour of their skin he refers to but also the blandness of their personality and their lack of emotion and passion,25 both with regard to their relationship with women and in their jobs. We could think that by showing how Dariusch exploits his Oriental origins as a means to an end, namely, to be successful with women and in his job, Kermani underlines the stereotype of the hypermasculine, that is here, sexually forward and passionate, “foreigner.” However, this depiction could equally be seen as a reversal of the traditional role of “the Oriental” as a “weak partner for the West” (Said 1995, 208). Rana Kabbani and Edward W. Said have discussed how feminizing the Oriental was a powerful tool in the establishment of imperial power (1994, 67, and 1995, 182, respectively). This power, which was strongly connected to “a male power-­ fantasy,” was primarily based on dichotomies such as male/female, whereby the former is physically and intellectually, but also metaphorically “stronger” than the latter (Said 1995, 207; see also Matthes 2011, 130–31). Linking this self-other divide more closely to issues of race as they also feature in Orientalist discourse, Connell’s comment helps us understand even more fully why some masculinities are “worth” more than others. Connell writes: “‘Race’ was—and to a large extent still is— understood as a hierarchy of bodies, and this has become inextricably mixed with the hierarchy of masculinities” (Connell 2000, 61). Such hierarchies of masculinities still determine the way “different” masculinities 25  Here we can see some parallels with the way Motti, the protagonist of Maxim Biller’s novel Die Tochter discussed in the previous chapter, perceives Germans, especially German women.

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are used, and disempowered, in “national discourses [which] attempt to stabilize the essence of the other and make the other into what the West wants it to be” (Reeser 2010, 185). Orientalist gender discourse and its associated hierarchies of masculinities provide the context for understanding Dariusch’s hypersexuality as at least in part a reaction to this disempowerment of the Oriental, a challenge of essentialized and fixed perceptions of the (here racialized) other, and hence an undermining of “the rule of hegemonic masculinity” (Reeser 2010, 149). Dariusch explains: Als Orientale ist mein Schwanz nicht so groß—das einzige Klischee über uns, das stimmt. [...] Dabei ist Größe im allgemeinen nun wirklich nicht mein Manko. Geschätzt zwei Dritteln der deutschen Männer schaue ich auf den Scheitel. Über die paar Zentimeter, die in der Unterhose fehlen, hat sich noch keine Frau beschwert. (K, 79) Being an Oriental I don’t have a big cock—the only cliché about us that is correct. […] But generally size really isn’t a shortcoming of mine. I look down on about two thirds of German men. No woman has ever complained about the missing centimetres in my underpants.

By commenting on his perceived Orientalness, via his body, which he, contrary to his own criticism of ignorant Germans to be discussed below, conflates with his Muslim identity, Dariusch suggests different interpretations of what it means to be Muslim. Here he appears to allude to the significant role sexuality plays in Islam: sexual fulfilment is encouraged; however, “sexual fulfilment within marriage for both partners” is “the ideal state” (Esposito 2004, 284). In disavowing Islam’s conservative attitude towards sexual interaction, Dariusch shows himself clearly not to be a religious Muslim, and he dismisses the clichéd Western perception of him and his fellow Middle Easterners (a group in which he—seemingly contradictorily—includes himself) as a homogenous group of religious reactionaries. We can read Dariusch’s sexual behaviour as a re-­ empowerment as he challenges (Western) hegemonic forms of masculinity: he not only gains authority/hegemony over ignorant Germans but also, or especially, over German men as he displays clear aspects of Connell’s “transnational business masculinity” introduced in the chapter on Clemens Meyer’s homosocial worlds. Indeed, as Torsten Hoffmann explains, “Dariusch feels entitled to exploit others sexually” (Hoffmann 2016,

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130). While Dariusch’s sense of entitlement certainly plays a crucial role in his appropriation of hegemonic masculinity, as an ethnically and religiously other he defies any Western perceptions of “Oriental failure or lack” (compare Reeser 2010, 150) of, here, personal success that, as we shall see below, also translates into professional success. Dariusch’s re-empowerment, or, as Taberner reads it, his “ostentatious—even hyperbolic—performance of Western social and sexual mores” that “suggests his need to prove his belonging” to Germany (2017, 295), is thus rooted in his ambiguity. The description of his protagonist as ambiguity personified (although possibly carried to extremes in Kurzmitteilung) can also be related to Kermani’s criticism of a widespread German conflation of Middle Eastern cultures with Islam. As he said in an interview: Es ist die deutsche Öffentlichkeit, die die Menschen seit einigen Jahren zu Muslimen “macht.” Tatsächlich sehen sich die Iraner, Türken oder Libanesen gar nicht so sehr als zugehörig zu einer Gruppe, sondern sind eben Iraner, Türken oder Libanesen, zumal die sozialen Verhältnisse und der Bildungsgrad unter den muslimischen Einwanderern ganz unterschiedlich ist. Die Menschen sind Muslime, aber ihr erster Bezugspunkt ist nicht der Islam, sondern ihre kulturelle Herkunft und die deutsche Gegenwart. Sie sind auch Muslime, so wie Christen auch Christen, aber gleichzeitig auch so vieles andere. Die Reduzierung der Muslime oder gar der gesamten Integrationsdebatte auf den Islam ist mehr als nur gedankenfaul; sie ist im Kern selbst fundamentalistisch. (2007b) It is the German public that has “turned” people into Muslims over the past few years. In fact Iranians, Turks, or Lebanese people don’t regard themselves as belonging to one group, but are just that: Iranians, Turks, or Lebanese people, especially as the social conditions and the levels of education differ greatly among Muslim immigrants. These people are Muslims, but their first point of reference is not Islam, but their cultural background and the German present. They are also Muslims, just as Christians are also Christians, but simultaneously they are so many more things. The reduction of Muslims, or even of the whole debate around integration, to Islam is more than just lazy thinking; it is at its core itself fundamentalist.

In Kurzmitteilung, Kermani initiates an interesting debate with regard to the marketing of Islam, which is connected with the fact that German audiences expect writers and artists with a Muslim background to be practising Muslims, or even Islamic, and to comment on Islam-related issues

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in their work. However, Muslim voices are only heeded insofar as they are native informants. As Dariusch proves, a transnational heritage does not guarantee intercultural competence and awareness of cultural sensitivities (compare Cheesman 2007, 102–107, esp. 104 and 106). Although Dariusch expresses concerns about the undifferentiated “hyperinformation” (Baudrillard 2001, 214) regarding the Middle East and Islam in the Western media, his emotional distance from his Middle Eastern, more specifically Muslim, background enables him to use, indeed exploit, his roots for his job, event management (see also Jordan 2010, 173, and Jordan 2012, 256). Dariusch says: Außerdem gab es seit 9/11 derart viel Islam, daß es sich finanziell nur lohnen konnte, mich auf dem Feld zu profilieren. Allerdings wehrte ich mich gegen das Wort selbst. Islam waren meine Großelten, nette, warmherzige Leute. Die Künstler, die ich für das Festival vorschlagen wollte, hatten mit Islam so viel oder so wenig zu tun wie Gerhard Richter mit dem Christentum; keiner unter ihnen war ein islamischer Dichter, Musiker, Maler.26 Das hatte ich schon zu Beginn meiner Recherche begriffen. Es hatte mich viel Energie gekostet, das Attribut islamisch aus dem Titel des Festivals zu streichen. Wollt ihr einen Dialog mit dem Islam, oder wollt ihr Kunst, Literatur, Musik? hatte ich die Beamten im Kulturministerium gefragt. Wenn ihr Dialog haben wollt, ladet ein paar Mullahs ein und setzt sie neben einen Pfarrer. Wenn ihr aber Kultur haben wollt, nennt sie bitte nicht islamisch. Das machen schon die Fundamentalisten, hatte ich gesagt. Das Argument hatte ich aus einem Aufsatz in Le Monde diplomatique. (K, 34; emphasis in original) Besides there had been so much Islam around since 9/11 that it could only be financially worth my while to establish myself in that area. But I was against the word itself. Islam were my grandparents, nice, warm-hearted people. The artists who I wanted to suggest for the festival had as much or as little to do with Islam as Gerhard Richter with Christianity; no one amongst them was an Islamic poet, musician, fine artist.27 I already got that at the beginning of my research. It had cost me a lot of energy to get rid of the attribute Islamic in the title of the festival. Do you want a dialogue with Islam, or do you want art, literature, music? I had asked the officials at the Ministry for Culture. If you want a dialogue, invite a few Mullahs and put a priest next to them. If you want culture, please don’t call it Islamic. The  See also Kermani on this aspect in an interview with Der Standard (2005b).  See also Kermani on this aspect in an interview with Der Standard (2005b).

26 27

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fundamentalists already do that, I had said. I’d got that argument from an article in Le Monde diplomatique.

On the one hand, Dariusch appears to want to educate the non-Muslim German public, to reveal “the truth” about Islam, as his name suggests,28 by ensuring that they understand what the term “Islamic” means (for Dariusch “Islamic” seems to imply Islam as a religion only, not as a culture)—he exercises a certain amount of power over them; yet, on the other hand, he sees the financial benefits of marketing Islam on a commercial level. He might therefore be uncomfortable with the way non-­ Muslims unreflectingly use the term “Islamic” without knowing what they are referring to, but he also indulges their voyeuristic desire to get to know “Islam,” or to “understand” Islam in order to combat their potential fear of its radical manifestations, by staging a festival concerning “the Orient.” The novel thus also addresses issues of Dariusch’s hypocritical relationship to the labelling of the unknown, even feared, yet simultaneously fascinating object. The commercialization of this object is a way of subsuming it, of coming to terms with it, as an other. This also reminds us of what Fredric Jameson has pointed out as the “spatialization of culture under the pressure of capitalism” in a globalized world (1991, 48–49 and elsewhere): the Orient, its cultural values, and important social meanings (which include Islam) are fixed in time and place in order to ensure recognizability and, as a result, to generate economic profit. Dariusch is angry about how stereotyped images of the Muslim world, even myths that might not be recognized as such, are used in both the media and the culture industry in order to attract readers and visitors (and ultimately to gain profit); he is also angry about the fact that the media lump together Arabs who plant bombs and non-Arabs like himself (K, 35)—this dedifferentiation shatters his vanity as an Iranian and as a Shiite—and removes him far from the “Muslim self-justification” discussed earlier: Dariusch does not see any need for an individual apology for the London bombings on behalf of Islam. In fact, Dariusch is afraid of “having a commitment thrust upon him which he has not chosen” (Jordan 2010, 176; see also Jordan 2012, 28  Taberner comments on the meanings of the name Dariusch, one of which is “he who loves truth,” in connection with “his drive to unmask the hypocrisy of contemporary discourses of tolerance and multiculturalism” (2017, 148). El-Kaddouri also notes that Dariusch’s name refers to the pre-Islamic king of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, Dareios the Great (2019, 141). This may be another indicator of his emotional distance from Islam mentioned above.

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257), and hopes that the IRA will turn out to be responsible for the bombings (K, 53). Here we need to consider a further element in this dedifferentiation between those “who appear ‘Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim.’ This consolidation reflects a racialization wherein members of this group are identified as terrorists, and are thus dis-identified as citizens” (Volpp 2002, 1576, quoted in Puar 2007, 38). According to Puar, [t]his disidentification is a process of sexualization as well as of a racialization of religion.29 But the terrorist figure is not merely racialized and sexualized; the body must appear improperly racialized (outside the norms of multiculturalism) and perversely sexualized in order to materialize as the terrorist in the first place. Thus the terrorist and the person to be domesticated—the patriot—are not distant, oppositional entities, but “close cousins.” (2007, 38)

Despite, or perhaps precisely because, having physically something of a “terrorist look-alike” (Puar 2007, 119)30—Dariusch assumes he is perceived as “ein[] unrasierte[r] Araber, obwohl ich keiner bin” (K, 53; an unshaven Arab, although I’m not one)—Dariusch shows all the signs of wanting to meet the norms of hegemonic masculinity: he actively displays his heterosexuality. Indeed, as I have shown above, he proves his masculinity by accessing, having sex with, and even sexually exploiting German women (compare Reeser 2010, 209); he is professionally successful and leads a transnational, somewhat hedonistic, lifestyle (see Taberner 2017, 148). In short: Dariusch is what would be widely regarded as a fully integrated, even assimilated, child of migrants. Yet his hegemonic behaviour can in some ways be read as a “reracializ[ation] [of] [his] own non-­ hegemonic masculinity to move toward a dominant white or white-like masculinity” (Reeser 2010, 158; see also ibid., 209). Dariusch actively tries to overcome the difference that relates him to terrorists: “Mich selbst widert die Hetze der Medien gegen den Islam so an, daß ich mir immer wieder ins Gedächtnis rufen muß, gar nicht besonders islamisch zu fühlen” (K, 47; I myself am disgusted by the Islam-baiting in the media, so much so that I have to keep reminding myself that I don’t feel particularly 29  Myra Marx Ferree has also noticed that “a growing process of racialization of Islam began to erase attention to the real differences in national origin and religious practice among European Muslims to define them as a uniformly unassimilable group” (2012, 197). 30  Puar references Volpp’s article (2002) here.

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Islamic). As Warda El-Kaddouri points out, Dariusch feels connected to Islam, but he tries to convince himself that he feels differently, at least a little bit, so he can distance himself from the form of Islam, Islamism, that is associated with terrorist attacks and that might make his fellow Germans dismiss him (2019, 138). However, Dariusch has some sort of “relation” with terrorists because his self-differentiation from them would not be possible without them as a counterpart. Indeed it relies on forms of homonationalism that Puar has identified in a US context: Aspects of homosexuality have come within the purview of normative patriotism, incorporating aspects of queer subjectivity into the body of the normalized nation; on the other hand, terrorists are quarantined through equating them with the bodies and practices of failed heterosexuality, emasculation, and queered others. This dual process of incorporation and quarantining involves the articulation of race with nation. Nation […] becomes the defining factor in disaggregating between upright, domesticatable queerness that mimic and recenter liberal subjecthood, and out-of-control, untetherable queernesses. (2007, 46–47)

Puar’s approach to the function of “queerness” in the construction of the nation, especially the “queering” of terrorists, provides useful vocabulary for my interpretation of Dariusch’s position. His differentiation from those “queered other” Muslims, terrorists, allows Dariusch to prove his “normal” or “normalized” masculinity that not only display his Western liberal values but that also brings him the required professional and personal success to be accepted in German society (see also Taberner 2017, 151). This is despite being sometimes seen and “read” as an other (see Puar 2007, 183) due to his ethnically different appearance that may “betray” his Germanness and thus emasculate him. Dariusch’s somewhat unique position as a “normalized other” in Germany allows him to profit from the devastating post-7/7 images, and he identifies Sufism as a particularly marketable object at the beginning of the twenty-first century, by contrast to the images of “Muslime gleich Zwangsheirat gleich Ziegenficken” (K, 143; Muslims = forced marriage = goat-fucking). For the West, Sufism represents a positive, peaceful aspect of Islam. Dariusch himself was once interested in mysticism as a student (K, 47). He thereby brings a general Western malaise to the fore: the lack of religion, yet the need for belief. With its esoteric elements Sufism attracts Westerners who have lost their faith in Christianity (like Buddhism

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or New Age religions in the 1960s and 1970s). New believers, who emphasize the mystical element of Islam, create a particular kind of Islam which—to borrow Jean Baudrillard’s words—“masks,” even “perverts,” the reality of Islam (2001, 217), and this perverted form of Islam (which disguises the need for belief) can be commercialized for the culture industry. Dariusch has recognized that the splitting of Islam into two separable halves allows “Bad Islam” (fundamentalism) to be demonized and “Good Islam” (Sufism) to be commercialized, while using the interest generated by negative images of Islam: “Finanziell hätte der Sufismus in Deutschland Potential auch außerhalb der Esoterik, nicht zuletzt als Onanie für linkssozialisierte Rassisten, die nichts gegen Muslime haben wollen, sondern nur etwas gegen den Fundamentalismus” (K, 100; Financially, Sufism also had potential beyond esotericism, not least as masturbation for left-socialized racists who claim not to have anything against Muslims, just against fundamentalism). It is clear that the image of Islam as mystical Sufism is based here on a fashion for change and novelty which is an extension of the consumer-oriented, image-saturated, channel-surfing society that, according to Jameson, late capitalism has created (1991, 70–72 and 276–78). Dariusch, whilst declaring himself a Shiite (K, 138), is sceptical of any form of Muslim belief; he even despises his sister Minu for her hypocritical, fashionable interest in Sufism and in Iran (K, 38 and 99). Dariusch is shown to be as disillusioned with Islam as Westerners who turn away from their religious traditions and whom he used to target with his commercialization strategy. It is now—rather surprisingly—the event manager Dariusch who craves faith as a way of gaining stability. Towards the end of the novel, he reflects on religious faith as provider of support and relief (K, 138), especially at times of loss. Yet Islam, even in its more mystical manifestations, cannot offer much more than “ein[] Stück Holz, das zu klein ist, um mich über Wasser zu halten” (K, 24; a piece of wood that is too small to keep me above water). This disposition prepares us for the rather surprising turn to another “religion,” with which the novel closes. Kermani lets his protagonist come to a life-changing decision after the events of July 2005: that is, the London bombings, his enhanced self-­ perception as Muslim and his struggles caused by the attacks, and Maike Anfang’s death. The last incident predicts, through the dead person’s name and its religious connotations, one religion’s ending and another religion’s beginning (“Anfang”). Maike is the Frisian diminutive of Maria (Mary) and draws attention to “old” religions, the “religions of the book” (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) and their changing position at the

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beginning of the twenty-first century. That position seems contradictory: while religion in the West recedes from the public sphere, in the rest of the world it seems to become increasingly an instrument of politics. This is often only noticed in the form of fundamentalism, when the turn to religion is connected with political demands or physical violence (Kermani 2009, 15), but also—as the novel exemplifies—in the search for alternative forms of belief such as Scientology as a way of finding clarity in a world full of ambiguities. The last chapter is an e-mail Dariusch has composed for Patrick Boger, Korinna’s boss, in the spring of 2006, saying that the chapters the reader has just read are a book Dariusch finished writing a moment previously. In this e-mail we learn that Dariusch has started a new life altogether31: he has turned to the Church of Scientology (although not specifically named) and that Patrick Boger, boss of Ford and a proselytizing member of Scientology, has helped Dariusch convert.32 In his study Die Vereindeutigung der Welt (The Disambiguation of the World) Thomas Bauer has discussed “Religionen zwischen Fundamentalismus und Gleichgültigkeit” (2018, 31–40; religions between fundamentalism and indifference) in recent times. He notices a reduction of what he refers to as “traditionelle Religiosität” (2018, 33; traditional religiosity) and—and this is significant in the context of my reading of Kurzmitteilung—“eine Tendenz zu weniger traditioneller Religion, die entweder religiöser Gleichgültigkeit oder religiösem Fundamentalismus weicht, in letzterem Fall oft einhergehend mit einer Politisierung der Religion”) (ibid.; a tendency towards less traditional religion which gives way to either religious indifference or religious fundamentalism; in the latter case this often goes hand in hand with a politicization of religion). I read Dariusch’s turn to Scientology, which could be regarded as another “less traditional religion,” not as a sign of indifference in Bauer’s sense but as another form of politicization as Dariusch’s conversion offers him a way out of the ambiguities, his insider/outsider position outlined above, which have shaped his life in Germany as a child of migrants with an Iranian background so far and with which he now appears uncomfortable. In many ways this is comparable to what fundamentalism can offer (compare 31  Hoffmann’s view of Dariusch’s communication of his “new life” is that it “turns Dariusch into a caricature of a bumbling macho” (2016, 131). 32  Jordan does not identify the “religion” Dariusch finds at the end of the novel as Scientology, but vaguely refers to it as “the US-based personality cult founded by Boger” (2010, 171; see also Jordan 2012, 255). Numerous allusions to this “cult” suggest, however, that Dariusch joined Scientology.

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Bauer 2018, 38–39). Dariusch thinks that he “has found” (“Ich habe gefunden” [K, 156] he says) inner stability and what he calls “purity,” that is, peace with himself and with other people. Stability provides an “identity” (see Kermani 2009, 15), which for Dariusch becomes a necessity for his self-positioning in the increasingly complex, manipulated, and commercialized world around him.33 Whether Dariusch has really come to the end of his quest for stability or an identity the reader is not told. In any case, he has found a way to come to terms with Islam beyond its ­commercialization, namely, to dismiss it altogether and to sound like one of the commentators who appeared on television programmes in the aftermath of 7/7 and whom he did not approve of back then (see Twist 2017, 96). These are his words: Der Islam ist eine grausame, blutige Religion. Er bringt keinen Frieden, er erzeugt keinen Respekt, sondern immer nur neuen Terror. [...] Da ist nur Haß. Ich wundere mich nicht mehr über die Zustände in Iran und sonstwo. Wo so viel Intoleranz und Aggression ist, kann sich die Gesellschaft nicht positiv entwickeln. Erst wenn die Menschen dort zu einer wahrhaften, zu einer angstfreien Spiritualität gelangen, werden sie Frieden und Wohlstand finden. Der Islam muß verschwinden. So wie ich das verstanden habe, werden es noch viele Muslime verstehen. Sie müssen sich nur vergleichen mit anderen Menschen, dann werden sie den Grund ihrer Zurückgebliebenheit erkennen. (K, 150) Islam is a cruel, bloody religion. It doesn’t bring peace, it doesn’t generate respect, but only new terror, over and over again. [...] There’s just hatred. I’m no longer surprised by the conditions in Iran and elsewhere. Where there’s so much intolerance and aggression, society can’t develop positively. It’s only when the people there have reached authentic spirituality devoid of fear, they will find peace and prosperity. Islam needs to disappear. Just as I’ve understood that, many more Muslims will understand that. They only need to compare themselves with other people; then they will recognize the reason for their backwardness.

33  Taberner’s reads Dariusch’s embrace of Scientology as a move towards ambiguous global citizenship rather than belonging to Germany: “In his enthusiasm for Scientology’s cultish propaganda of redemption through commerce, Dariusch has simply achieved a more complete internalization of the forces that caused his dislocation in the first place. He has become a global citizen, but only through his interpellation into the transnational circulation of products and his assimilation of capitalism’s globalist rhetoric” (2017, 156).

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Dariusch displays the extreme longing for—in his words—“spirituality” in a Western world that presents itself largely as secular, and where religion often does not represent more than a cultural element in people’s lives. However, Dariusch chooses a religious movement which is associated with profit and perceived as a business by critics,34 including governments.35 This point is also significant for Dariusch: his belief in Scientology ensures his success (he is a businessman, after all) because he has learnt about more effective ways of dealing with people and getting them to work for him, and being successful is something on which Scientology puts great emphasis (see also Twist 2017, 95);36 in that respect Scientology suits Dariusch, who has not changed with regard to his business mentality and his perception of (Western hegemonic) masculinity that stands in clear contradistinction to archaic forms of masculinity such as those represented by fundamentalist groups, for example. Furthermore, Scientology does not allow any cultural or doctrinal influence from outside (see Rigal-Cellard 2009, 330–31). This is another reason why Dariusch can now completely deny his Islamic roots, which he associates with backwardness. In Kurzmitteilung, Kermani critically explores both his narrator, a Western Muslim, and the situation that produced him, a Western Europe where religion is replaced by a collective fear and threat of but also voyeuristic view of the other (namely, Islam) after 9/11 and 7/7, and the profitable exploitation of this fear and this curiosity by the culture industry and the media. In the novel, Islam (apart from, possibly, mysticism) is rejected as a religion that is not suitable for a Western, progressive lifestyle; indeed, it is only needed as an other. Interestingly, the pseudo-Muslim Dariusch is now satisfying this need for the other. In his fulfilment of this role, he breaks down the polarization between Islam and the West: 34  See Cowan (2009, 57). Bernadette Rigal-Cellard specifically mentions “the belief of the Church that one should not depend on societal aid but triumph through one’s hard labor” in relation to Scientology’s missionary activities (2009, 332). 35  For instance, in Germany, Scientology has been indicted several times in relation to its tax-exempt status. See Richardson (2009, 289). 36  In the Scientology Handbook (based on the works of L. Ron Hubbard 1994), much space is devoted to issues related to work, organization, public relations, success, and setting targets and reaching goals. See, for example, Chap. 15 “Tools for the Workplace” (539–73), especially the section “Reach and Withdraw” (ibid., 549–53), which puts emphasis on the notion of control in business situations, and “The Importance of Work” (ibid., 567–73). Here, the success rate of Scientologists at work is quoted of being at 91% as opposed to 66% for the general US population. This statistic is accompanied by the statement: “Those who use Scientology in their careers have the tools to prosper and achieve their goals” (ibid., 571).

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although throughout the narrative Dariusch claims to hate everything German, he is the epitome of everything he finds fault with, and he himself contributes to the portrayal of Islam as anti-Western and non-modern. At this point Kermani is most obviously distanced from his protagonist: by converting to Scientology, a hyperwestern religion, Dariusch now ironically welcomes the very West he used to criticize. By highlighting Dariusch’s ambivalence, Kermani criticizes the distinctions between the West and Islam that people have created and, over time, internalized. These distinctions do not leave any room for diversity, an issue which Kermani explores further in Wer ist Wir?: “Daß Menschen gleichzeitig mit und in verschiedenen Kulturen, Loyalitäten, Identitäten und Sprachen leben können, scheint in Deutschland immer noch Staunen hervorzurufen—dabei ist es kulturgeschichtlich eher die Regel als die Ausnahme” (2009, 12; The fact that people can simultaneously live with and in different cultures, loyalties, identities and languages still seems to cause astonishment in Germany—even though historico-culturally this situation is rather the norm than the exception). Kermani objects to Germany’s widespread attitude towards its others’ fellow citizens who may have a non-German background but cannot be labelled easily are suspicious. This reminds us of how the Orient was perceived as a “closed system” in the nineteenth century; it was “fixed in time and place for the West” (Said 1995, 70 and 108) and consequently easily consumable. Yet Kermani is aware of the fact that dyad between self and other is a flimsy construction, for he himself is not a clear-cut European or German, Middle Easterner or Iranian, and therefore asks: Gehören wir, die wir hier aufgewachsen sind und uns als Europäer verstehen, dem Westen an oder dem Islam? Diese Konzepte schaffen Identifikationen, die in der Realität sehr kompliziert sind. Indem wir diese Konzepte annehmen, verfestigen wir sie. Das heißt, Leute wie wir fühlen sich dann plötzlich primär als Muslime, denn zum Westen gehören wir ja scheinbar nicht. (2007c) Do those of us who grew up here and understand ourselves as Europeans belong to the West or to Islam? These concepts generate identifications which, in reality, are very complicated. By embracing these concepts, we reinforce them. That means that people like ourselves suddenly feel primarily Muslim because apparently we don’t belong to the West.

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Kermani aims to dissolve such clearly identifiable characterizations (2007c); he sees himself as a Muslim and—as he has pointed out—as “auch vieles andere” (Kermani 2009, 19; many other things as well). In his public persona Kermani seems to be able to reconcile the identity conflict that so troubles Dariusch, as the latter’s desire for an unambiguous identity and for belief (in the form of Scientology) shows. The question remains, however, whether the simplistic, unequivocal designation of identities, such as the idea that all Muslims have certain characteristics and attitudes in common, has not moved on from nineteenth-century Orientalist practices of capturing the Orient. This aspect ties in with how Jordan reads Kermani’s protagonist: as a “cautionary tale” to second-generation migrants, because, according to Jordan, Dariusch’s “subscription to a vapid, materialist, postmodern, post-ethnic and post-­political lifestyle is only a postponement of his personal day of reckoning” (2010, 177). Kurzmitteilung ends with a bombshell: Dariusch’s profile of antagonistic acculturation to the country of his birth and ambivalent alienation from yet personal attachment to his Islamic roots is not dissimilar to that of some Western-born Islamists. Yet Dariusch reflects: Die vier Attentäter sollen britische Staatsbürger sein, sämtlich in England geboren. [...] Ich kann vieles verstehen, und daß sie die Amerikaner hassen, was soll’s, das gibt’s, das ist heute normal [...]. [A]ber daß die sich dauernd selbst in die Luft sprengen, begreife ich nicht. Das ist nicht normal. Normal ist, wenn ich mit Stefanie schlafe. Letztlich bin ich normal, sowenig mir das paßt. (K, 88–89) Apparently, the four bombers are British nationals, all of them born in England. [...] I can understand a lot, and the fact that they hate Americans, so what, that’s possible, that’s normal these days [...]. But I don’t understand that they keep blowing themselves up. That’s not normal. What’s normal is when I sleep with Stefanie. Ultimately, I’m normal, even if I don’t like it.

Dariusch’s insistence on his difference from the London terrorists, his “normality,” “that is, being like other German men” (Taberner 2017, 151; Taberner’s emphasis), which manifests itself in his heterosexual relationship with a German woman here, can be read as his repeated “invocation of the terrorist as a queer, nonnational, perversely racialized other [that] has become part of the normative script of the U.S. war on terror” (Puar 2007, 37) and that, one might wish to add, has been adopted by the

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mainstream. As already pointed out above, Dariusch is not “one of them”: he is the accepted other (citizen) in Germany/the West with its insistence on heterosexual normativity (see Taberner 2017, 151) that forms the basis of hegemonic masculinity. But he needs to convince himself of what is “normal” (El-Kaddouri 2019, 145). Reminding us of Puar’s words, Dariusch has “managed” his difference “carefully,” that is, “difference within sameness, and […] difference containing sameness” (Puar 2007, 25), not only in his personal life, but also in his professional life. Puar continues, with reference to Rey Chow, what little acceptance liberal diversity proffers in the way of inclusion is highly mediated by huge realms of exclusion: the ethnic is usually straight, usually has access to material and cultural capital (both as a consumer and as an owner), and is in fact often male. (2007, 25)

In many ways, Dariusch fits that description as he confirms the very cultural hegemony that surrounds him and, according to Taberner, ultimately “his belonging to German society” (2017, 151). His difference is acceptable. In Sara Ahmed’s words: The others can be different (indeed, the nation is invested in their difference as a sign of its love for difference), as long as they refuse to keep their difference to themselves, but instead give it back to the nation, through speaking a common language and mixing with others. (2004, 134; Ahmed’s emphasis)

As a transnational businessman, who, despite his Muslim and migrant roots, has access to the German hegemonic system, he represents the opposite of the “hardline masculine fundamentalism [such as that embodied by terrorists that] goes together with a marked anti-internationalism” (Connell 2001 [1998], 370), which can be the response to gender instabilities caused by globalization and can manifest itself in the “reaffirm[ation] [of] local gender orthodoxies and hierarchies” (ibid.).37 So, in the end, rather than embrace an extremism violently opposed to Western values, Dariusch instead enrols in a sect whose core values are consonant with, indeed perhaps based upon, those of market capitalism and, as a close ally 37  The full sentence in the original reads: “Response to such instabilities, on the part of groups whose power is challenged but still dominant, is to reaffirm local gender orthodoxies and hierarchies” (Connell 2001 [1998], 370; Connell’s emphasis).

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of it, hegemonic masculinity. Dariusch, it seems, does not appear to have the third choice of becoming, like his creator Kermani, a writer who can reconcile his Iranian and Muslim background with his German present.38 His inability to accept, using Bauer’s words, “das Widersprüchliche, das Vage, das Vieldeutige, das Nichtzuzuordnende, das Nichterklärbare als der Normalfall der menschlichen Existenz” (2018, 79; what is contradictory, vague, ambiguous, what cannot be attributed to someone or something and what cannot be explained as the norm of human existence) is, in many ways, Kermani’s literary critique of a German society that struggles with ambiguities caused by difference in a transnational world.

Negotiating Difference: Große Liebe In Große Liebe Kermani shifts his attention from an exploration of the relationship between Islam and the West in the relatively recent context of terrorism to its subtler reflection in the form of its male narrator’s first experience of love in the context of the West German peace movement of the early 1980s. The novel is told with hindsight by a wiser, more experienced man who tries to piece together his memory of his one-week-long relationship with Jutta, an older girl, who, in the narrator’s memory of his teenage self, was “auf allen Schulhöfen der Welt die Schönste” (GL, 22; the most beautiful girl in all the worlds’ schoolyards) or simply “die Schönste des Schulhofs” (e.g. GL, 34; the most beautiful girl in the schoolyard). The time difference of thirty years between experience and memory is crucial as the now adult man can also use his younger self’s “great love” as a vehicle to reflect back on his sense of masculine selfhood amongst the gender norms and constructions of the time. This is where Kermani’s considerations of difference come in: Kermani couples the 38  Compare Taberner’s reading of the novel’s ending: “For Kermani’s Iranian-German, the choice was only ever between two equally detrimental instantiations of fake globalism, and two similarly devastating kinds of self-distortion. Dariusch must confirm his fellow Germans’ suspicion that all Muslims embrace global jihad, or he must be a robot-like cheerleader for global capitalism. For Muslim citizens, there is not only no comfort in the nation, but also no productive orientation from the nation toward the world” (2017, 157). While I agree with Taberner that Dariusch does not appear to have another choice, my reading puts less emphasis on Dariusch’s struggle to belong. I do not see Dariusch’s position and ultimate choice as dependent on his German surroundings as Taberner does and grant him greater autonomy in his decision to join a sect that reflects his values. See also Coury (2014, 17 and 2013, 145).

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setting of a provincial, conservative town in West Germany with the West German peace movement whose aim was the prevention of nuclear armament and the preservation of post-war peace in the West. Kermani intersperses his narrator’s memories with references to religion, more specifically mysticism and Sufi writing, that help the narrator make sense not only of the course of this equivocal love, but also of his role as a young male lover, of his coming-of-age in times of personal and political upheaval. This emphasis on Sufism, regarded as “(neben dem schiitischen Islam) der Hauptfeind der Salafisten” (Bauer 2018, 40; (beside Shiite Islam) the main enemy of the Salafists), makes for an interesting comparison with Kurzmitteilung where Islamic fundamentalism determined the perception of Islam in the West. Große Liebe negotiates difference on various levels: the aforementioned difference between older narrator and younger remembered self, of whom he speaks in the third-person singular “[a]ls sei ich ein anderer” (GL, 91; as if I was a different person; see also GL, 16), brings to light a clash between reality and illusion (Hobus 2016; see GL, 77 and GL 91). This narrative trick allows Kermani to let his narrator reflect his younger self’s perception of the ambiguity of love, a love which makes him “experience[] [its] beauty and terror […] simultaneously” (Machtans 2016, 95; Machtans refers to GL, 48; see also GL, 8, Twist 2018, 137, and von Stosch 2016, 81). With this ambiguous love come his nearly unachievable expectations regarding the role of the male lover and his inability to meet them. Focusing on those sets of differences and leaving cultural and religious differences as markers of other masculinity largely aside invites then a reassessment of hegemonic masculinity in Große Liebe as something which is, as we shall see, as constructed as its narrator’s memory of his younger self’s sense of masculinity. I will thus also draw attention to hegemony as “a historically mobile relation” (Connell 2005, 77) among masculinities. Critics (such as Machtans 2016; Hofmann 2018; Twist 2018) have largely focussed on the influence of mysticism on the novel’s negotiation of the relation between worldly love and divine love and on its love story in analogy to the legend of Layla and Majnun.39 In my reading of Große 39  Twist has read Große Liebe in parallel with The Story of Layla and Majnun by the Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi (1192) (2018, 130–38). In section 29, the narrator lists the stations of (his) love, leaning on Layla and Majnun’s love, and explains how many pages he would like to dedicate to each station (GL, 29). See also Machtans (2016, 91–92).

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Liebe I would like to pay closer attention to the narrator’s remembered younger self’s perception of hegemonic masculinity, his oscillation between attempting to conform and rejecting this model of masculinity at this specific time in German history, and its assessment by the adult narrator years later. By doing so, I will include more consciously the notions of agency and choice, or lack thereof, but, similarly to my reading of Kurzmitteilung, without interpreting this as “Oriental failure or lack” (compare Reeser 2010, 150), if we consider that the protagonist is of Iranian heritage. As just mentioned, Große Liebe is set in the political and social context of the early 1980s, in 1983 (GL, 40) to be precise. It was a “post-­1970s-­ hippie” era that felt the implications of the Cold War particularly strongly, not least following the “NATO Doppelbeschluss” (see, e.g., GL, 56; NATO Double-Track Decision) of December 1979 that would allow the deployment of American middle-range missiles in Western Europe. What followed was “die Zeit der Massenproteste gegen atomare Aufrüstung” (GL, 20; times of mass protests against nuclear armament) in West Germany. The narrator remembers this period as thus: Es war eine Zeit oder jedenfalls ein Milieu, in dem Männer an sich etwas Verbrecherisches, man konnte durchaus sagen: Faschistisches hatten, gleichsam eine Urschuld an allem, erst recht an den Kriegen, entsprechend an der atomaren Aufrüstung und gegebenenfalls am Weltuntergang, der wegen des sogenannten Doppelbeschlusses unmittelbar drohte. (GL, 59) It was a time or at least a milieu in which there was something about men as such that was rogue, one could even say: fascist. They were, so to speak, originally guilty of everything, above all of wars, consequently of nuclear armament and, if need be, of the apocalypse, which was impending due to the so-called Double-Track Decision.

The narrator’s observation highlights the close ties between the peace movement and the 1970s feminist movement (see GL, 46), at the core of which was “self-emancipation: how women acting on their own could help other women realize their autonomy” (Ferree 2012, 84) and the rejection of “‘male-defined’ principles and practices, such as hierarchy, power, and the state” (ibid., 87–88). This is a significant reason why, as Myra Marx Ferree points out, the two biggest established parties in Germany, SPD (Social Democrats) and CDU and CSU (Christian

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conservatives), which “[b]oth supported NATO-led militarization and male-breadwinner families,” were not attractive to feminists and, one could argue, to those concerned about the environment and remilitarization more broadly, so “the alternative […] was found in movement politics: environmental consciousness, antiwar sentiment, and feminism intertwined with ‘60s radical’ values that questioned economic and political hierarchies and rejected economic success as a measure of personal growth” (2012, 114). Thus somewhat unsurprisingly, Die Grünen, Germany’s Green Party, founded in January 1980, offered an attractive platform for feminists and those supporting “[p]articipatory democracy, valuing nonmarket work, and women’s empowerment in society […,] the three issues the Greens addressed in feminist-friendly terms” (Ferree 2012, 116) more broadly. Needless to say, they were closely associated with the peace movement. An understanding of this social and political context is crucial in order to approach the novel’s engagement with violence or rather anti- or nonviolence. In late 1970s West German feminist discourse violence was associated with maleness (Ferree 2012, 103–104). By contrast anti- or nonviolence was closely linked to femininity: Ferree refers to pacifism as “a feminist principle” (2012, 104–106). This principle spilled over into the peace movement, of which the novel’s young lover briefly becomes part, and this has an impact on the gender relations that he experiences first-­ hand. The narrator suggests: “Daß das Geschlechtliche geradezu negiert, als eine Repression abgetan wurde, die man überwunden habe, macht die Zeit nicht sympathischer, die man vielleicht zu Recht nur noch ihrer kuriosen Moden wegen erinnert, strickender Männer und ebenso unförmig gekleideter Frauen” (GL, 81; that the sexual was downright negated, dismissed as repression that needs to be overcome, doesn’t make those times more likable, times that are perhaps rightly only remembered for their peculiar fashion, knitting men, and equally shapelessly dressed women). Here we can see the difference between the adult narrator, who seems to have reverted back to more traditional gender values over time as the underlying ironic tone of his comment suggests, and the young man who appears to have fully embraced the contestation of a traditionally hegemonic norm of masculinity. As we shall see, this openness to reinterpreting hegemonic, here authoritative masculinity is key to the young lover’s personal agenda. The focus on anti-violence also needs to be seen in the context of the protagonist’s home town’s conservative protestantism and Bürgerlichkeit

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(compare GL, 59; bourgeois way of life) where “in den meisten Elternhäusern mindestens so strenge Moralvorstellungen herrschten wie vor der sexuellen Revolution im restlichen Land” (GL, 42; in most families moral values were at least as strict as in the rest of the country before the sexual revolution). Thus being anything but bürgerlich (GL, 65; bourgeois), aiming to “authentisch […] leben” (GL, 68; live authentically), that is, not like their parents (see GL, 80), is at the core of the youth’s rebellion, even if, as the narrator points out in one of the few instances when he mentions his background, his parents are not Protestants or German. This is also a factor when it comes to the rejection of different “Lebensideale, die bürgerliche Familie als solche, Profitdenken, Karrierebewußtsein und Mercedes-Benz Limousinen” (GL, 56; ideals of life, the bourgeois family as such, profit-oriented thinking, being career-­ driven and Mercedes-Benz limousines), which, to the protesters, had an air of Fascism. Not only does the narrator draw connections here with the 1968 student revolution that only seems to have had a belated impact on the town’s youth, but also mentions in passing his parents’ migration to Germany (GL, 56), that is, their non-German history, and thus raises the question of their historical responsibility in post-war Germany. So, the boy embraces non-violence and antiauthoritarianism (compare Ferree 2012, 87) and rejects any form of “Spießertum” (being petit-bourgeois) and “Sekundärtugenden” (secondary virtues) such as “Pünktlichkeit, Disziplin und Ordnung” (punctuality, discipline, and order) (GL, 25 and 55) for various reasons: there is certainly the global threat of nuclear power and its impact on the (male) individual but there is also the collective local rebellion against the authority of the older generation and their values (which includes the protagonist’s parents, despite their cultural and historical difference) as well as the youngsters’ sense of historical belatedness. The rejection of values traditionally associated with Bürgerlichkeit and its conservative gender roles and the appreciation of those values connected with femininity, “das Gutmeinen, die Sanftmut, der Altruismus und selbst die Schwäche” (GL, 41; meaning well, gentleness, altruism, even weakness), work in the inexperienced boy’s favour. Jutta’s interest in the boy is namely prompted by these new, redefined masculine values. The latter also reflect the mixed up (“durcheinandergewirbelt”) gender roles in Jutta’s overly kind and well-meaning commune (GL, 59), even if, as the narrator ironically states, this only means that women also do not do any housework (GL, 59). The narrator comments on Jutta’s affection for him as follows:

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Ohne das Feuer der Liebe als eine politische Botschaft, das zehn oder fünfzehn Jahre nach den Hippies noch einmal aufleuchtete, hätte die Schönste des Schulhofs das Heiligste kaum dieser Vogelscheuche von einem Galan aufgetan. Denn mehr und mehr wird mir klar, daß ihrer überraschenden Zuwendung auch ein emanzipatorisches Moment zugrunde lag, den Kerlen einen Hüpfer vorzuziehen, in der Naivität die Arglosigkeit wertzuschätzen und gerade in der Unsicherheit eine Stärke zu sehen. (GL, 41) Without the fire of love as a political message, which lit up once more, ten or fifteen years after the Hippies, the most beautiful girl on the schoolyard would hardly have opened up her holy of holies for this scarecrow of a beau. Because it’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that an emancipatory aspect was also underlying her surprising affection, to choose a spring chicken over those lads, to appreciate the innocence in his naivety and to see precisely in his insecurity a strength.

The narrator’s realization is a first indicator for the political dimension of his personal experience. Yet the narrator only recognizes this in hindsight: as a boy of fifteen he somewhat pretentiously reads the “politische Dimension” (political dimension) of his love as more than “persönliche Gefühle, nämlich [als] die Verwirklichung einer Utopie, die modellhaft wirken könne” (GL, 95; private feelings, namely, as putting into practice a utopia that could be exemplary). However, despite this utopian outlook on his relationship, when it comes to his emotions, his love for the older girl, and his ambivalent reactions to that love, he appears to be struggling with the redefined male virtues mentioned above that could make this utopia a reality. Instead the young lover is struggling with the insecurities (GL, 27), which he experiences for the first time in that way, with his awareness of his “Unbedarftheit” (GL, 54; simplemindedness) and doubt (GL, 55), particularly in terms of sexuality. Simultaneously, he appears to feel the need to look for and live up to models of masculinity that mark him as a “successful” lover. Thus he frequently leans on elements of hegemonic masculinity, which, following the “mixed up” gender norms of his peers, he should be rejecting, to combat those, for him, somewhat unmanly reactions. This becomes most apparent when the narrator remembers his younger self observing and, then later, describing Jutta like an object as his male gaze lingers on her gap between her front teeth or her blond hair, for

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instance (e.g. GL, 6 and 10).40 Despite his inexperience—Jutta has to initiate him into love after all (GL, 44)—the young lover wishes to play an active part when having sex with her for the first time (GL, 50), and, more generally, as a “conqueror” who is finding his “strategy” beyond the literary role models that have so far shaped his behaviour (GL, 16 and 24). Thus it transpires that his participation in the peace demonstrations has the main purpose of accessing the woman he desires (Twist 2018, 135). So, like in Kurzmitteilung, though under different circumstances, the female character, here lover, simply serves as a means to expose the protagonist’s self-centredness, an “Ichsucht” (GL, 63; obsession with oneself), which the adult narrator recognizes and from which he is able to distance himself to an extent (see Hobus 2016, 115). It thus becomes clear that the “great love” of the title is his great love only (Machtans 2016, 93). In the words of the mystic Ibn Arabi: “Nur deswegen wollte er ihre Liebe, damit sich seine erfüllte” (GL, 32; he only wanted her love so that his love could come true). Or in Joseph Twist’s words: “the openness that previously characterized the boy’s experiences of love turns into a wilful desire for union, and a search for the self” (2018, 135). However, while the boy, as “conqueror,” tries to cling to some form of agency in his relationship, he is not in a “normal” state of mind and being in love comes across as a state of exception. He experiences “die Unordnung, die den Geist des Liebenden erfaßt” (GL, 18; the disarray that seizes the mind of the lover), as he refers to Ibn Arabi, and has lost agency over his self: “Man könnte religiös gedeutet auch sagen, daß er im Begriff war, närrisch zu werden” (GL, 13; one could also say, in a religious interpretation, that he was about to become mad) or “verrückt,” “wie Madschnun übersetzt heißt” (GL, 48; crazy which, translated, is the meaning of Majnun; see also GL, 83). The narrator’s references to Layla and Majnun highlight “the narcissistic nature of love” (Machtans 2016, 91–92) already hinted at above. They also bring to the fore the power issues inherent in the lovers’ relationship: the boy’s oscillation between his need to dominate in the relationship and his submission to Jutta (see also Kermani in Druxes and Machtans 2016b, 39), that is, his incipient lack of control over himself, 40  The objectification of women is not uncommon in Kermani’s work. Most noticeably, in the sequel to Große Liebe, Sozusagen Paris, the narrator objectifies the now older Jutta, describing her appearance and body (e.g. Kermani 2016b, 7 and 33–34), her smile and disappearance of the gap between her teeth (ibid., 46), or her age (ibid., 259).

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even over his gaze (GL, 15), over her and her body (GL, 44), and over the development of their relationship. His age is certainly one of the reasons why his desired status as dominant male lover is shattered, for instance when, early on, he is sent back to his own classmates in the schoolyard, leaving him feeling “deklassiert” (GL, 15; downgraded), or when he is among Jutta’s older flatmates (GL, 71). His lack of control is also apparent when he remembers Jutta “wie eine Priesterin, die erst im letzten Augenblick entscheidet, ob sie Einlaß ins Heiligste ihm gewährt” (GL, 39; like a priestess who only decides in the last moment whether she will allow him into the holy of holies; see also Twist 2018, 134). However, lack of control and agency is also part of what the young lover experiences as “the dissolution of the self […] [through which] men can come close to the nature of divine love” (Machtans 2016, 87–88; see also ibid., 93). This dissolution of his self also draws attention to the insignificance of difference in the encounter. Thus the narrator observes: […] ist auch der Liebende in der höchsten Verzückung nur noch Erleben: Obwohl er den Vorgang doch in jeder Zehntelsekunde selbst steuert, nimmt er weder links noch rechts etwas wahr, wird sozusagen eins mit der Situation und vergißt sich so weit, daß er nicht mehr Ich und Du unterscheidet. (GL, 66; see also GL, 23) the lover is only experience in the highest ecstasy: even though he himself controls the process in each tenth of a second he does not notice anything on the left or right, becomes, so to speak, one with the situation and forgets himself to the extent that he can no longer differentiate between I and You.

And so the “sexual experience, [that Islamic mystics envision as] the real event, as something religious, something sacred, and as a medium of revelation” (Kermani in Druxes and Machtans 2016b, 40) is at the core not only of his loss of self but also of his religious experience that transpires through his worldly love. Or as Machtans explains: “not only does human love serve as a metaphor for divine love, it also—more importantly—functions as a medium of the beauty and terror of divine love” (2016, 87; Machtans’ emphasis). The novel’s engagement with the experience of divine love through worldly love, its boundlessness (GL, 52) as well as despair (GL, 76), draws

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of course on Sufism and Islamic mysticism.41 As already hinted at early on in my reading of Große Liebe, on a formal and aesthetic level, the frequent references to mystics and the “parallel[s] between Islamic mysticism and first great love” (Machtans 2016, 88) are the narrator’s way to comprehend his younger self’s feelings (see Twist 2018, 136) and explain the greatness of his love (GL, 66). His ultimate loss of “subjective autonomy” (Twist 2018, 138) and control, however, puts into question the young lover’s ability to consciously influence his behaviour. This also holds true for the rejection of traditional, bourgeois (gender) norms expected in the peace movement’s milieu as I pointed out earlier on. The question is, namely, how much agency and choice the young lover actually has, how much he is “himself” in his love relationship, if he wants to access the woman he desires, and how much performative masculine behaviour, in Judith Butler’s sense (1999), the boy has partly unthinkingly, partly consciously adopted in order to conform to the new gender norms and thus to reach his goal, to be with Jutta. On another level, the references to Sufi thinkers are also the only way the reader is able to tell that the narrator has Iranian heritage: his experienced difference as outlined above does not generally refer to the boy’s religious or cultural background. This observation is not insignificant, however, as “das Land seiner Lieblingslektüren” (GL, 56; the country of his favourite literature, that is, Iran) brings up a moral conundrum for the young lover in 1983 West Germany: Iran may be antifascist, but it “[verletzte] offensichtlich das Gebot der Gewaltfreiheit” (GL, 56; obviously infringed the imperative of nonviolence). In addition, as has become clear, Sufism cannot simply be “equat[ed] with love and tolerance,” but “feelings of terror […] often accompan[y] the Sufi’s love” (Twist 2018, 140). Considering all this the young lover’s embrace of nonviolence as a (new male) virtue is regularly tested as his experience of love, both in a worldly and a religious sense, is often not as peaceful as his commitment to the peace movement, and its associated relations between the genders mentioned above, might suggest. Ultimately the lover’s experience is very real, and anticipated, loss (compare Machtans 2016, 87) rather than the loss of subjectivity alone: the relationship with Jutta ends after one week (GL, 38). It also results in 41  The Islamic mystics/early writers of the Sufi tradition that feature are Ibn Arabi (1165–1240), Ahmad Ghazali (c. 1061–1123), and Abu Bakr al-Wasiti (d. c. 932). Machtans summarizes their approaches to divine and wordly love (2016, 89–91).

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disillusionment, at least in hindsight, because “[f]rei war die Liebe nur in der revolutionären Theorie” (GL, 83; love was only free in revolutionary theory). This goes hand in hand with the fact that the West German peace movement “rückstandlos verpuffte,” “als der sogenannte Doppelbeschluß dennoch durchgesetzt wurde. Und heute schreiben die Historiker dem Doppelbeschluß auch noch rechtfertigend den Fall der Mauer zu!” (GL, 41; fizzled out without any trace when the so-called Double-Track Decision was pushed through nonetheless. And today historians even attribute apologetically the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Double-Track Decision!). Both—the boy’s love and the West German peace movement that are so intertwined in the narrator’s memory—now belong to a different era, a different self, and even a different country (GL, 99). His personal, local concerns have given way to global history. These last observations (mentioned in the novel’s penultimate section) leave the reader with the questions of how easily social norms can be renegotiated, how successful “claims to authority” (Connell 2005, 77) by those perceived as different can be, and how challenges to hegemonic or authoritative forms of masculinity—both on a personal and on a political level—can be effective and bring change in the long term. Große Liebe, so it seems, is not very optimistic on this score.

Experiencing Difference in Politicized Worlds While Kurzmitteilung and Große Liebe do not seem to have much in common at first sight, they reveal how difference can become a challenger of established hegemonic masculinity and/or a negotiator between a masculinity perceived as different and the German hegemonic mainstream. This is not least the case as both novels are set during times of transnational political and social upheaval: the time after the 7/7 London bombings and the West German peace movement of the early 1980s, respectively. Both novels explore personal reactions to the specific forms of violence that threatened the perceived peace of those times: the threat of Islamist terrorism or of what some would subsume under “Arabs” in the West in Kurzmitteilung and the perhaps less tangible nuclear threat of the 1980s Cold War in Große Liebe. The novels thus make an examination of “normality,” both as a wish to establish it and as a challenge of it, particularly fruitful. Longing for belonging and “normality” (Taberner 2017, 146–57) by turning difference into something marketable in Kurzmitteilung and for love, for “the dissolution of the self” (Machtans 2016, 94), by

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negotiating difference in contradistinction to traditional (gender) norms in Große Liebe is also marked by loss: death (the death of a colleague as well as that caused by the London attacks) and the end of love and the peace movement, respectively. Despite this, the novels also make clear what we can gain from their stories. While the novels may not naively embrace celebratory discourses of diversity that largely omit potential frictions and conflict, by using difference to look behind hegemonic forms of masculinity, to expose their constructedness and point out their flexibility, even if the latter may only be temporary, they can highlight the diversity of Islam and demonstrate that Islam is not the monolithic religion the media would often have us believe. Thus both novels, while occasionally playing with the dichotomy of Islam and the West, especially in Kurzmitteilung, go beyond this dyad (compare Twist 2018, 139, and Hofmann 2018, 28). They do so by emphasizing its (literal and metaphorical) mobility: in Kurzmitteilung it becomes part of a transnational-neoliberal market world; in Große Liebe the reader’s attention is drawn to the religion’s mysticism (compare Twist 2018, 139, and Hofmann 2018, 28) and thus away from “the German equation of Islam with sexual conservatism through allusion to the nondualist deconstructive elements of Sufism” (Twist 2018, 138). However, I would like to go beyond this already well-established observation and close this chapter by pointing to the fact that both novels display a conscious literariness. They are both accounts of the respective narrators: Kurzmitteilung ends with the reader’s realization that they have just read an e-mail in which Dariusch is recounting the events around his colleague’s death and the 7/7 bombings; and Große Liebe deliberately points the reader to its metatextuality throughout the novel by letting the narrator reflect on the writing process of his memories in the form of a book (starting in GL, 4), which we are reading as Große Liebe. Thus both novels can be described as what Machtans refers to with reference to Große Liebe “memory projects.” She writes: “his [the narrator’s] overarching memory project is intent upon recapturing the past and unifying it with the present into the narrative of a coherent self” (Machtans 2016, 104). Furthermore, Twist, in an analysis of Kurzmitteilung, highlights how this novel, and, I would argue, also Große Liebe, “raises questions surrounding the very possibility of ‘capturing’ reality by emphasising both the inventive aspect of writing […] and the complexities of everyday lived experience that exceed representation” (2017, 87; see also ibid., 97). The consciously literary dimension of the novels; their drawing attention to the constructed

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nature of not only their narrators’ memories and stories, but also of identity and (hegemonic) masculinity, of belonging and love; and their negotiation of the nuances, ambiguities, and contradictions in these concepts’ meanings perhaps make a questioning of the status quo and an exploration and affirmation of the impact of difference on “normality” or “normativity” possible in the first place. This kind of literary agency is especially significant considering the current presence of right-wing, nationalist, and/or populist movements and parties. The literary discourse encountered in Kermani’s novels counteracts those movements’ rhetoric of simplicity and undermines their clear-cut ideas of “normality,” “native German” identity, and belonging in/to Germany.

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Hoffmann, Torsten. 2016. Literary Cemeteries: Recalling the Dead in Kurzmitteilung and Dein Name. In Navid Kermani, ed. Helga Druxes, Karolin Machtans, and Alexandar Mihailovic, 121–42. Contemporary German Writers and Filmmakers 3. Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang. ———. 2018. Trennungsprobleme: Navid Kermanis Autofiktionen. In Navid Kermani. TEXT + KRITIK.  Zeitschrift für Literatur no. 217, ed. Torsten Hoffmann, 14–22. Munich: edition text + kritik. Hofmann, Michael. 2018. Scheitern und Glück: Navid Kermanis Liebesdiskurse. In Navid Kermani. TEXT + KRITIK.  Zeitschrift für Literatur no. 217, ed. Torsten Hoffmann, 23–31. Munich: edition text + kritik. Hubbard, L. Ron. 1994. Scientology Handbook. Los Angeles: Bridge Publications. Also accessible via: http://www.scientologyhandbook.org/index.html. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso. Jordan, Jim. 2010. Identity, Irony and Denial: Navid Kermani’s Kurzmitteilung. In Aesthetics and Politics in Modern German Culture: Festschrift in Honour of Rhys W.  Williams, ed. Brigid Haines, Stephen Parker, and Colin Riordan, 165–77. Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang. ———. 2012. Für eine kämpferische Toleranz: Der Islam in Navid Kermanis literarischen Schriften. In Islam in der deutschen und türkischen Literatur, ed. Michael Hofmann and Klaus von Storch, 247–57. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh. Kabbani, Rana. 1994 [1986]. Imperial Fictions: Europe’s Myth of the Orient. London: Pandora. Kermani, Navid. 1999. Gott ist schön: Das ästhetische Erleben des Koran. Munich: C.H. Beck. ———. 2000. Iran: Die Revolution der Kinder. Munich: C.H. Beck. ———. 2003. Schöner neuer Orient: Berichte von Städten und Kriegen. Munich: C.H. Beck. ———. 2004. Vierzig Leben. Zurich: Ammann. ———. 2005a. Du sollst. Zurich: Ammann. ———. 2005b. Interview with Der Standard. Das Paradies ist kein klinisch reiner Ort. Der Standard, 11 March 2005. https://www.derstandard.at/story/ 1974055/das-­paradies-­ist-­kein-­klinisch-­reiner-­ort. Accessed 5 July 2021. ———. 2007a. Kurzmitteilung: Roman. Zurich: Ammann. ———. 2007b. Interview with ResetDOC [Dialogues on Civilizations], 4 June 2007. http://www.resetdoc.org/de/Kermani-­interview.php. Accessed 2 June 2009; URL no longer available. ———. 2007c. Interview with Ali Fathollah-Nejad. “Den Onkel Tom, den spiele ich nicht!” Ein Gespräch mit dem deutsch-iranischen Schriftsteller und Orientalisten Navid Kermani. Eurozine, 27 July 2007. https://www.eurozine. com/den-­onkel-­tom-­den-­spiele-­ich-­nicht/. Accessed 26 July 2021.

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———. 2008. Interview with Donja Noormofidi and Thomas Wolkinger. Die Verräter der Aufklärung. Falter 38, 17 September 2008. https://www.falter. at/zeitung/20080917/die-­verraeter-­der-­aufklaerung/1732400090. Accessed 26 July 2021. ———. 2009. Wer ist Wir? Deutschland und seine Muslime. Munich: C.H. Beck. ———. 2011. Dein Name: Roman. Munich: Hanser. ———. 2012a. Über den Zufall: Jean Paul, Hölderlin und der Roman, den ich schreibe. Munich: Hanser. ———. 2012b. Vergesst Deutschland! Eine patriotische Rede. Berlin: Ullstein. ———. 2014a. Große Liebe: Roman. Munich: Hanser. ———. 2014b. Zwischen Koran und Kafka: West-Östliche Erkundungen. Munich: C.H. Beck. ———. 2015a. Between Quran and Kafka: West-Eastern Affinities. Trans. Tony Crawford. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2015b. God is Beautiful: The Aesthetic Experience of the Quran. Trans. Tony Crawford. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2015c. Ungläubiges Staunen: Über das Christentum. Munich: C.H. Beck. ———. 2016a. Einbruch der Wirklichkeit: Auf dem Flüchtlingstreck durch Europa. Munich: C.H. Beck. ——— 2016b. Sozusagen Paris: Roman. Munich: Hanser. ——— 2017a. Upheaval: The Refugee Trek through Europe. Trans. Tony Crawford. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2017b. Wonder Beyond Belief: On Christianity. Trans. Tony Crawford. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2018. Entlang den Gräben: Eine Reise durch das östliche Europa bis nach Isfahan. Munich: C.H. Beck. ———. 2019. Love Writ Large. Trans. Alexander Booth. London: Seagull Books. ———. 2020. Along the Trenches: A Journey through Eastern Europe to Isfahan. Trans. Tony Crawford. Cambridge: Polity. ———. Navid Kermani’s personal website. www.navidkermani.de. Accessed 5 July 2021. Machtans, Karolin. 2016. The Beauty and Terror of Love: Große Liebe and Du sollst. In Navid Kermani, ed. Helga Druxes, Karolin Machtans, and Alexandar Mihailovic, 87–105. Contemporary German Writers and Filmmakers 3. Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang. ———. 2018. Navid Kermani: Advocate for an Antipatriotic Patriotism and a Multireligious, Multicultural Europe. In Envisioning Social Justice in Contemporary German Culture, ed. Jill E.  Twark and Axel Hildebrandt, 290–311. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Matthes, Frauke. 2010. “Authentic” Muslim Voices? Feridun Zaimoğlu’s Schwarze Jungfrauen. In Religion and Identity in Germany Today: Doubters, Believers, Seekers in Literature and Film, ed. Julian Preece, Frank Finlay, and Sinéad

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Crowe, 199–210. Leeds-Swansea Colloquia in Contemporary German Literature 2. Oxford: Peter Lang. ———. 2011. Writing and Muslim Identity: Representations of Islam in German and English Transcultural Literature, 1990-2006. igrs books 6. London: Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies. Morey, Peter, and Amina Yaqin. 2011. Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation after 9/11. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pfündel, Karin, Anja Stichs, and Nadine Halle. 2020. Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund aus muslimisch geprägten Ländern in Deutschland. Analysen auf Basis des Mikrozensus 2018. Working Paper 87 des Forschungszentrums des Bundesamtes. Nuremberg: Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge. https://www.bamf.de/SharedDocs/Anlagen/EN/ Forschung/WorkingPapers/wp87-­musl-­laender-­mikrozensusbericht.pdf?__ blob=publicationFile&v=7. Accessed 4 April 2021. Puar, Jasbir K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Reeser, Todd W. 2010. Masculinities in Theory: An Introduction. Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Richardson, James T. 2009. Scientology in Court: A Look at some Major Cases from Various Nations. In Scientology, ed. James R.  Lewis, 283–94. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rigal-Cellard, Bernadette. 2009. Scientology Missions International (SMI): An Immutable Model of Technological Missionary Activity. In Scientology, ed. James R. Lewis, 325–34. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roy, Olivier. 2004. Globalised Islam: The Search for a New Ummah. London: Hurst & Company. First published: 2002. L’islam mondialisé. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Said, Edward W. 1995 [1978]. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. Repr. with a new Afterword. London: Penguin. ———. 1997 [1981]. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. London: Vintage. Taberner, Stuart. 2017. Transnationalism and German-Language Literature in the Twenty-First Century. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Twist, Joseph. 2017. Everyday Life and Death: Mortality and Community in Navid Kermani’s Kurzmitteilung. Germanistik in Ireland 12: 85–98. ———. 2018. Mystical Islam and Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary German Literature: Openness to Alterity. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Ulrich, Bernd. 2016. Wer ist der arabische Mann? Zeit Online, “Zeitgeschehen,” 17 January 2016. http://www.zeit.de/2016/03/sexismus-­fluechtlinge-­ islamismus-­araber-­frauen. Accessed 1 December 2017. Volpp, Leti. 2002. The Citizen and the Terrorist. UCLA Law Review 49 (2): 1575–600.

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von Stosch, Klaus. 2016. Kermani’s Writing on Islamic Religion. In Navid Kermani, ed. Helga Druxes, Karolin Machtans, and Alexandar Mihailovic, 69–85. Contemporary German Writers and Filmmakers 3. Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang. Weber, Beverly M. 2013. Violence and Gender in the “New” Europe: Islam in German Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Whitehead, Stephen M. 2002. Men and Masculinities: Key Themes and New Directions. Cambridge: Polity. Yeşilada, Karin. 2011. “God’s Warriors”: A Green Thread in the Work of Feridun Zaimoglu. Feridun Zaimoglu, ed. Tom Cheesman and Karin Yeşilada, 145–66. Contemporary German Writers and Filmmakers 1. Oxford: Peter Lang. Yildiz, Yasemin. 2009. Turkish Girls, Allah’s Daughters, and the Contemporary German Subject: Itinerary of a Figure. German Life and Letters 62 (4): 465–81.

CHAPTER 5

Masculinities Across Borders: Feridun Zaimoglu

Literary Models of Masculinity and Feridun Zaimoglu’s “Border Thinking” In contemporary Europe, borders—as both physical and mental demarcations—have gained renewed significance since the turn of the millennium. This can be read as another indicator for the desire in some circles for clear-cut identities, as I pointed out in my closing remarks in the chapter on Navid Kermani’s work. As a project with the expressed aim of literally removing borders in order to overcome mental barriers of cultural prejudice and to preserve peace after World War II (European Union website 2018), the European Union, though having rapidly expanded since the end of the Cold War, has faced popular demands to resurrect its borders: not only has the 2016 “Brexit” vote in the UK in favour of leaving the European Union put renewed emphasis on the nation-state, but the financial crisis of 2008 and its repercussions in Southern Europe in particular as well as higher numbers of migrants seeking a safe life in Europe since the mid-2010s have triggered among many Europeans renewed anxieties and fears of the other. Such emotions towards the other also manifest themselves in gender discourses, as I have already indicated with reference to Kermani’s work in the previous chapter. Sara Ahmed’s words illustrate this point well: “[t]he different value given to homes or localities […] slides into the different value given to bodies: the most privileged white © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Matthes, New Masculinities in Contemporary German Literature, Global Masculinities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10318-6_5

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masculine body is at home in the spaces which themselves are privileged (his body = his home = the world)” (2000, 53). The white male privileges Ahmed mentions here echo the well-established nexus between masculinity and nationality, which I specified in the introduction to this study. Historically, this nexus has been associated with specific norms, or models, of masculinity, usually based on ideas of ethnicity, sexuality, the male body, but also on moral values and the relationship with women. Such norms decide who belongs or does not belong to the nation, who is inside or outside of it, as George L. Mosse has explored specifically with reference to National Socialism in Germany (see particularly 1985, 1 and 133–52; 1996, 77 and elsewhere). Masculinity is here constructed in relation, or opposition, to a non-white, non-heterosexual, supposedly weak or—physically as well as morally—inferior other. I have already explored this phenomenon in the context of Jewish masculinity—perhaps its most obvious example in the German historical context—in the chapter on Maxim Biller’s work. In this chapter, however, I wish to take a closer look at borders by analysing changing models of masculinity in a German literary context, that is, at how they—literally as well as metaphorically—move and cross borders, “become” transnational in that way, and are thus open for re-­ appropriation. Thinking about models of masculinity as literary ones highlights how masculinity has reflected the relationship between “native Germans” and their perceived (cultural, ethnic, religious, but also class) others from yet another angle in recent literary production. A particularly intriguing writer in this context is Feridun Zaimoglu, who was born in Bolu, Turkey, in 1964, and immigrated to Germany with his guest worker parents as a very young child. Issues of migration and masculinity, and a challenging of the German status quo, have been at the heart of his work. Although in this chapter I focus on Zaimoglu’s construction of masculinity in prose written since the late noughties, his biography and career as a writer, including the construction of his own male authorship, cannot be entirely divorced from his subject matter and have certainly had an impact on his engagement with discourses of masculinity (compare Schmidt 2008 and Weber 2013, 188–91).1 In his early work of the 1990s, his prose texts largely focused on young German Turkish men 1

 On the construction of Zaimoglu’s authorship, see also Matthes (2015).

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and their interaction with mainstream, often xenophobic, white Germans in local places. In the semi-documentary texts ostensibly based on interviews with young German Turks and published as Kanak Sprak: 24 Mißtöne vom Rande der Gesellschaft (1995; Kanak Speak: 24 Dissonances from the Margins of Society), for instance, most of his interlocutors describe themselves as Kanaken, an originally racist term to denote “foreigners” (see Cheesman 2007, esp. 1–4 and 134–39); young, largely German Turkish authors and activists of the network “Kanak Attak” such as Zaimoglu himself, however, re-­appropriated this term in the 1990s and used it proudly to refer to themselves (see Matthes 2011, 135–36; see also Cheesman 2007, 20–32). Nevertheless, Zaimoglu’s characters come across as stereotypically aggressive, hypermasculine men, who define their masculinity in contradistinction to German men, particularly in terms of their sexual prowess (see Matthes 2008, 250; Yildiz 2012a, esp. 172, 175, and 185; Yildiz 2012b, esp. 72 and 81): men are judged according to their sexual abilities and the women to whom they have access (compare Butler 1993, 11). Accordingly, these early texts subvert the image of the traditionally feminized Oriental (see Yildiz 2012a, 184, and 191), a technique which serves as a means of reclaiming the masculinity of subordinated and marginalized German Turks (see Matthes 2011, 123–72). The new millennium, however, marked a shift in Zaimoglu’s portrayal of German Turkish as well as “native” German men. Portraying these subjects in a now distinctly transnational context, he picked up exactly those Oriental notions and perceptions of masculinity that somewhat reduced his characters to their alleged otherness, yet started to revise them with reference to German literary models, especially to Romanticism. This detour from his previous constructions of masculinity coincided with Zaimoglu’s discovery of the novel form and his growing perception, and self-construction, as a “serious” and thus more outspokenly “German” author (see Schmidt 2008, 208; Yildiz 2012b, 87–88), who is, according to Margaret Littler, increasingly “laying claim to a German literary heritage” (2012, 219), rather than a subversive, that is, somewhat other cultural figure. I would like to add a further dimension to Zaimoglu’s shift by reading it as a continuous development of his “border thinking.” I am borrowing Walter D. Mignolo’s concept here because Zaimoglu is “tell[ing] stories not only from inside the ‘modern’ world but from its borders” (2012, chapter abstract, 49). Mignolo modelled his concept on

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the Chicano/a experience (2012, 6) and it is, according to him, “unthinkable without understanding the colonial difference” (ibid.). By “border thinking” Mignolo means “the moments in which the imaginary of the modern world system cracks. ‘Border thinking’ is still within the imaginary of the modern world system, but repressed by the dominance of hermeneutics and epistemology as keywords controlling the conceptualization of knowledge” (ibid., 23). So, Mignolo’s “border thinking” does not reject modernity completely, but opens up alternative avenues of knowledge production from a subaltern, that is, beyond a Eurocentric modern perspective (see ibid., 11). I argue that aspects of Mignolo’s “border thinking” are helpful when considering Zaimoglu’s literary production, particularly with reference to his (re-)appropriation of established literary models such as Romanticism. Having started his career at the margins, or borders, of German literary production, as someone who shook up the literary establishment—the “dissonances from the margins of society” that make up the voices of his first work Kanak Sprak point us towards this—he has played a major role in shifting those borders and thereby in asking—occasionally uncomfortable—questions regarding the German literary canon and who is welcome there. Zaimoglu’s move, which may initially have looked like ingratiatory behaviour towards the literary establishment and a desperate attempt to finally belong to it, has, however, a clear political dimension to it. His now outspokenly “German” work’s sheer presence on the literary market has challenged the centre-margin dynamic that dominated the literary discourse in the years following German reunification (compare Cheesman 2004) and has enabled him to question a writer’s or a work’s marginality within the literary establishment directly. This process started with the publication of his widely acclaimed novel Leyla (2006), which recounts the life of a Turkish Gastarbeiterin before she comes to Germany and is told through the eyes of the girl, then young woman, whose name gives the novel its title (see Cheesman 2007, 186–96; Matthes 2012). Although Leyla spoke to a more mainstream audience due to its somewhat voyeuristic subject matter, the novels that followed Leyla and that form the basis for the discussion in this chapter display clear signs of subversion, of continuously scrutinizing borders, that are, on many levels, more mature than those of his first publications. Yet they still reveal an intellectual arc in his work. Around the time of Leyla’s publication, Zaimoglu started to display an outspoken interest in religion, particularly Islam, both in interviews and

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aesthetically.2 Thus, according to Joseph Twist, “Zaimoglu creates touching tales that entangle the aesthetics and thought of German and Islamic culture and demonstrate their interconnectedness (to use Adelson’s term)” (2018, 79). These “touching tales,” a term originally coined by Leslie A.  Adelson in her work on the intersections between German, Turkish, and Jewish histories and cultural experiences (2000; see also 2005), as Twist also acknowledges, critically engage with notions of national, cultural, and gender identity and question their constructions as binaries and fixed entities. Twist calls this “a movement beyond identity,” which he regards as “central to Zaimoglu’s thinking in terms of faith and spirituality” (2018, 79). Some of his work for the theatre (with Günter Senkel) is proof of this literary development, especially their play Schwarze Jungfrauen (2006; Black Virgins) (see Stewart 2021, esp. 149–83). Despite this evolution firmly placing their author within German literary traditions Zaimoglu’s challenging of identity borders is also key to several of the nine further novels that Zaimoglu has—at the time of writing this book—written since Leyla. Literary appropriation has thereby become a key literary technique for Zaimoglu, as also evidenced by two of his most recent novels: Evangelio (2017), a “Luther-novel,” is written in the German of the sixteenth century, and Die Geschichte der Frau (2019; A Woman’s History) tells the stories of ten historical female figures in their own words as imagined by Zaimoglu. In this chapter I am interested in Zaimoglu’s commitment to border-challenging in his neo-Romantic novels Liebesbrand (2008a; Love Fire)3 and Hinterland (2009a),4 as well as in Ruß (2011; Soot),5 a novel which Michael Hofmann defines as “black Romanticism” (2012, 253), but which clearly also straddles traditions of working-class literature and crime fiction. I would not go so far as to trace a Romantic tradition throughout Zaimoglu’s entire oeuvre from Kanak Sprak to Ruß or to call him “a Romantic rebel” as Hofmann has (2012, 239). However, Zaimoglu’s 2  I have explored Zaimoglu’s engagement with Islam with reference to his and Günter Senkel’s play Schwarze Jungfrauen 2006 (Matthes 2010a). For discussions of Islam in his earlier texts, see Matthes (2008 and 2011) and Yeşilada (2012). Karin Yeşilada has rightly pointed out that that Zaimoglu’s engagement with Islam goes as far back as the character of the Islamist Yücel in Kanak Sprak (2012, 180, also 181–83). See also Matthes (2011, 220–24) on Zaimoglu’s development as an author with reference to his relationship to Islam. 3  Page references to Liebesbrand will appear in the text, preceded by the abbreviation “LB.” 4  Page references to Hinterland will appear in the text, preceded by the abbreviation “HL.” 5  Page references to Ruß will appear in the text, preceded by the abbreviation “R.”

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interest in German literary models, particularly Romanticism, and its constructions of masculinity and gender roles that he appropriates and transforms for his own twenty-first-century context allow the writer—not so paradoxically as perhaps initially assumed—to continue meaningfully from earlier constructions of masculinity to those that speak to the political, social, and cultural conditions of the twenty-first century: he can now construct his male characters as transnational and outward-looking men who unashamedly embrace affect beyond the anger and defiance of the previous “generation” of his characters in a changing, challenging world. Their new German Turkish masculinity counteracts the aggressive, violent, misogynistic, and homosocial masculinity of Zaimoglu’s Kanaken and sheds new light on questions of Germanness in contemporary Europe and beyond. Thus one could read Zaimoglu’s recent approach to masculinity as the literary echo of bell hook’s The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (2004) in its emphasis on masculinities beyond patriarchy and clear-cut gender discourses, on men who embrace emotions positively and who are shown to become “emotionally aware—to feel” (hooks 2004, 70). Zaimoglu’s appropriation of Romanticism cannot be discussed without going back to Friedrich Schlegel, if we consider that in Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (1808; On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians) Schlegel confirms his declaration of 1800 that the Orient was “the purest form of Romanticism” (Said 1995, 137; see also Twist 2018, 83–84). With this assessment he contributed to an increasing interest in India and the Orient, respectively, that developed at the beginning of the nineteenth century, an interest which was shared by the Romantics and which also resonated in their work.6 Although, as Edward W.  Said has pointed out in his ground-breaking study Orientalism (1978), the Orient “was culturally, intellectually, spiritually outside Europe and European civilization,” “the Orient and Islam are [still] always represented as outsiders having a special role to play inside Europe” (1995, 71; Said’s emphasis). Beverly M. Weber refers to this relationship in a contemporary context as 6  In Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), for example, merchants report of their crusades in the Holy Land (2004, 51–60), and Zulima describes her homeland as “romantische[] Schönheiten der fruchtbaren arabischen Gegenden, […] wie Kolonien des Paradieses […], voll bunter Vögel mit melodischen Kehlen und anziehend durch mannigfaltige Überbleibsel ehemaliger denkwürdiger Zeiten” (ibid., 57–58; “romantic beauties of the fruitful regions of Arabia […], like colonies of paradise […], vocal with gay-colored birds of melodious throats, and attractive because of many vestiges of memorable bygone ages” [1964, 60]).

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“the uneven ­juxtaposition between Islam and Europe” (2013, 6). Thus despite the Romantics’ interest in the plurality of cultures, which, however, they did not experience on a day-to-day basis, the beginning of the nineteenth century also marks—perhaps not coincidentally—the beginning of German nationalism (see Niekerk 2009, 156; compare also Gellner 1998, 69). For Todd Kontje it was “the very lack of a unified nation-state and the absence of empire [which] contributed to the development of a peculiarly German Orientalism. German writers oscillated between identifying their country with the rest of Europe against the Orient and allying themselves with selected parts of the East against the West” (2004, 2–3). Kontje’s assessment of the role of the Orient in German thought highlights how national and cultural identity is largely defined in opposition to an other, an idea that also relates to my readings of the various literary manifestations of masculinity, or as Ahmed has put it with reference to Said, “[t]he Orient comes to embody that which the Occident is not” (2000, 99). It is noteworthy therefore that a little over two hundred years after the publication of Schlegel’s study, German-language authors with so-called Oriental backgrounds challenge the homogeneity of German literature that has dominated its canon over the centuries and shape the German literary market on equal terms with their “native” German colleagues. If we look at Wolfgang Beutin et al.’s definition of Romanticism as “das Wunderbare, Exotische, Abenteuerliche, Sinnliche, Schaurige, die Abwendung von der modernen Zivilisation und die Hinwendung zur inneren und äußeren Natur des Menschen und zu vergangenen Gesellschaftsformen und Zeiten ([wie dem] Mittelalter)” (1994, 173–74; the marvellous, the exotic, adventurous, sensuous, gothic, the turning away from modern civilization and towards the inner and outer nature of human beings and to bygone societies and times ([like the] Middle Ages)), then Zaimoglu’s twenty-first-century take on “the marvellous, the exotic, adventurous, sensuous, gothic” that he combines with transnational elements marks a shift in perceptions of contemporary masculinities. This shift makes us aware of the fact that ideas of masculinity travel not only across countries, but also across time, class, and literary periods; in doing so they specifically challenge the boundaries between different ideas, and ideals, of masculinity.7

7  This is an argument which Twist (2018) takes further in terms of religion, specifically Sufism, as I will come back to below.

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The question remains why Romanticism is so attractive to Zaimoglu. First, the appropriation of Romanticism in his writing is not unique: the critic Volker Weidermann has long seen in contemporary German writing a tendency towards what he calls a “new German Romanticism” (2003, 2008), which is dominated by anxious male protagonists. Maxim Biller’s narrator in his (currently banned) novel Esra (2003), discussed in an earlier chapter, or Hanns-Josef Ortheil’s protagonist in Die große Liebe (2003, The Great Love) (Weidermann 2003) exemplifies such unstable characters. Similarly, Stuart Taberner has pointed out “a resurgence in romantic motifs in German-language literature since at least the early 1990s, particularly among conservative writers” (2015, 53). However, as we shall see, Zaimoglu did not exclusively turn to Romanticism to give his male protagonists’ love and longing a meaningful label but to use its tropes as a tool with which to explore effectively contemporary transnationalism in a German as well as European context. This point brings me to the second reason: Zaimoglu’s constructions of Romantic masculinity occur at a crucial juncture in European history, that is, at a time of political and cultural upheaval and change. As in the Romantic period around 1800, the years around 2000, Zaimoglu’s time of writing, too, saw a critical engagement with the idea of Germanness as well as with that of Europe, and the meaning of Germanness within this Europe (see Cheesman 2007, 1–32; see also Schwering 2003, 551–56), a debate which has shaped the German social and political landscape of the twenty-first century so far. Thus in his neo-Romantic novels Zaimoglu offers a fresh look at the notion of Germanness as an unstable concept that is being shaped and reshaped by cultural and religious others in a transnational Europe where simple dichotomies between self and other are anything but productive. Twist reads Zaimoglu’s endeavour, in the context of cosmopolitical thought in contemporary German literature, as his counter-­ Enlightenment stance. He argues: “Just as the German Romantics opposed the marginalization of religion by the Enlightenment’s secular rationalism, so Zaimoglu allies himself with the Romantics in order to oppose the (supposedly cosmopolitan) secular elite’s equation of religion with identity conflicts and backwardness” (2018, 80). For him, “[t]his CounterEnlightenment stance comes to the fore in Liebesbrand, which demonstrates the inherent violence of universalizing, identity-driven ideologies while also undermining Orientalist prejudices” (2018, 83). While I share Twist’s assessment of Zaimoglu’s approach as “nonidentitarian” and critical “of universalism’s suppression of difference” (2018, 86; see also 2014, 399

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and 402), my interest here is in the techniques Zaimoglu uses to construct Germany’s situatedness within Europe as a transnational space and the changing notions of masculinity that serve as a point of departure from which to explore the relationship between the “native” and the transnational. As we shall see Zaimoglu disrupts established notions of nationality and masculinity via protagonists who, in a contradictory manner, challenge as well as confirm normative identities: well-off, that is, economically hegemonic German men with Turkish roots in Liebesbrand and Hinterland—the “winners” of our modern, transnational, and capitalist society—and German working-class men who, having lost the capitalist game, now find themselves at the economic and social margins of German society in Ruß. Considering the way Zaimoglu avails himself of Romantic ideas, it seems no coincidence that in 2007, shortly before the release of Liebesbrand and whilst writing Hinterland, Zaimoglu referred to himself as a “Romantic,” more specifically a “German Romantic,” who has very little in common with the “Kanaken” of the 1990s. In a lecture entitled “Liebesbrand,” which he delivered as part of his prestigious Poetik-­ Dozentur at the University of Tübingen in 2007 and in which he explores the creation of his first Romantic novel, Zaimoglu states thus: “An dieser Stelle enttarne ich mich als deutscher Romantiker, der es sich nicht nehmen lassen will, Herbheit und Herzblut in Wesenseinheit zu bringen. Nicht umsonst wird uns deutschen Romantikern von allen Seiten vorgeworfen, Luft zu stemmen, statt unsere Lungen mit Luft zu füllen [...]” (2008c, 52; at this point I expose myself as a German Romantic who insists on bringing acerbity and lifeblood into consubstantiality. It is not for nothing that everybody accuses us German Romantics of lifting air, instead of filling our lungs with air). Zaimoglu’s self-assessment goes hand in hand with his literary constructions of masculinity in relation to love, a technique which we have already encountered in previous chapters. For Zaimoglu German Romanticism is, above all, a form of love. He is inspired by Romantic concepts and ideas of love that—so he says—he adjusts to the present day (Zaimoglu 2008b; Matthes 2010b, 87). This seems to mean for his male protagonists: feeling constantly anxious (something not unusual in contemporary German literature, as mentioned above) and somehow, as human beings and men, incomplete. Zaimoglu derives his notion of incompleteness from the thirteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart (Zaimoglu 2008b), who also commented on gender roles (Heimerl 2008, 35 and 41–43) and who, according to Theresia Heimerl, emphasized “die

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grundsätzliche Unfertigkeit des Menschen [...], die in jedem Fall eines göttlichen Eingriffes bedarf” (2008, 43; the basic immaturity of human beings […], which definitely requires God’s intervention). Heimerl sees here “das Anbrechen einer neuen, noch fragilen Möglichkeit männlicher Identität, die freilich mit dem Ende der Mystik schnell und für lange Zeit in Vergessenheit gerät und erst mit der Empfindsamkeit der deutschen Romantik wieder in der Literatur auftritt” (2008, 47; Heimerl’s emphasis; the dawn of a new, still fragile possibility for male identity which, with the end of mysticism, certainly fell into oblivion quickly and was forgotten for a long time, and emerges again in literature only through the sentimentality of German Romanticism). I argue that this incompleteness of the male protagonists, their emotional instability, particularly in the context of today’s modern, late capitalist conception of love and relationships between men and women (compare Illouz 2012), allows in Zaimoglu’s novels for a thinking across and beyond borders, that is, a fundamental questioning of allegedly stable forms of masculinity tied to ideas of nationality and culture but also to class and (modern) time. Thus Liebesbrand’s and Hinterland’s central themes—male desire and a quest first and foremost for a woman,8 against the backdrop of the new, expanded Europe— and Ruß’s supposed return to fixed notions of masculinity in a local place open up new avenues for re-thinking masculinity in the twenty-first century.

Romantic Transnationals: Liebesbrand Despite my reading of Zaimoglu’s novels in the context of Romanticism, I would not identify Zaimoglu’s conscious nod to Romanticism as a “Romantic turn,” as Twist has done (2018, 79 and 80–86; also Littler 2012, 220). Instead, I see this “phase” as both enabling him to show his critique of universalist ideas of “identity” (Twist 2018) and to develop forms of masculinity that give his readers insight into the conditions of a twenty-first century marked by transnational movements and global events such as 9/11 or the financial crisis of 2008 and its impact on capitalist society. It would therefore be somewhat counterproductive for my analysis here to read Liebesbrand in conjunction with the Romantic texts that Zaimoglu may allude to in order to find similarities with his novel and to draw parallels to Sufism that tease out the religious aspect of Liebesbrand 8

 On male longing in Liebesbrand, see Matthes (2010b).

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as Twist has done in his careful study (2018, 78–107).9 My reading of Liebesbrand is, by contrast, concerned with its construction of contemporary masculinity in a transnational context of which religious aspects may be part but are not of primary import. Zaimoglu appears to expect his readers to be somewhat familiar with literary traditions and with the religious underpinnings that tie in with his take on German Romanticism, as these elements are needed to grasp the full complexity of his work, including his construction of a contemporary version of Romantic masculinity. Liebesbrand starts off with a real fire: the main protagonist, German Turkish David who is based in Kiel, is travelling through Turkey, a place widely considered to be at the “edge” of Europe or at the border between Europe and Asia but with long-standing ambitions to join the European Union. The bus he is travelling on has an accident and goes up in flames. David experiences this fire as follows: “Wenn man stirbt—kurz bevor der Faden reißt—, leiten die Nerven Millionen von Impulsen weiter, und vielleicht ist diese Impulsexplosion das Fegefeuer, die kleine Hölle vor dem Eintritt in das große Paradies. Ich war nicht darauf vorbereitet, ich hatte Angst” (LB, 5; when you die—when the thread is about to snap—your nerves are transmitting millions of impulses, and perhaps this explosion of impulses is purgatory, the small hell before entering paradise. I wasn’t prepared for that, I was scared). In this instance Zaimoglu conveys David’s emotional reaction to his potential death in the fire: as a new beginning burning can lead to salvation and hence to becoming a new human being. Later, having escaped the burning bus, he is given water by an unknown woman, an angel-like figure who—tellingly—wears a ring with a light blue enamel locket. She appears to him as his saviour from “purgatory.” As the woman is driving away David can just about make out the number plate of her car, which begins with the letters “NI” (which stands for the Northern 9  Saniye Uysal Ünalan has, in addition, identified references to Divan literature in Liebesbrand. She relates the resulting “intermediäres Liebeskonzept” (intermediary concept of love) closely to the concept of the “Third Space” (2013, 160). In her reading, Liebesbrand crosses borders between German and Turkish literature (ibid., 162 and 163) and productively engages with their differences, both of which result in the creation of a “Third Space” (ibid., 169–70). While Divan literature is certainly a somewhat neglected element in interpretations of Liebesbrand, I am not, as my comment on Twist’s analysis of Romantic references has made clear, concerned with tracing potential literary references. In addition, I do not regard the concept of the “Third Space” as a particularly fruitful one in my focus on notions of transnationalism as it tends to stress the idea of interculturalism that treats cultures as separate entities (compare Matthes 2011, 31–32).

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German town Nienburg an der Weser). After his stay in a Turkish hospital, where he seems to be disengaged from time and space and where he encounters strange fellow patients, David begins to experience his “Liebesbrand,” a fiery longing as characterized by the early Romantics,10 and decides to search for the woman with the blue ring, whose name we later discover is Tyra. He thus hopes to fulfil his longing and become—if only for a short time—“ein erlöster Mann” (LB, 106; a redeemed man). It turns out that David, the former presumably rather rational stockbroker, an example of what, in a sociological context, Raewyn Connell refers to as “a fairly convincing corporate display of masculinity,” whose “successful claim to authority […] is the mark of hegemony” (2005, 77; Connell’s emphasis), is an incurable Romantic led by emotion and, at least superficially, irrational behaviour.11 Thus Tyra’s ring may quickly lead readers who are familiar with Romanticism to draw parallels between David’s search and Heinrich von Ofterdingen’s quest for the Blue Flower, the “Dingsymbol für die romantische Suche nach einer heilen Welt” (Schlosser 2006, 183; symbol for the Romantic quest for an ideal world). David’s quest takes him to the German provinces, to Nienburg; later he travels to the European capitals Prague and Vienna. Despite the religious connotations of David’s experience of fire and rebirth in the form of a new love, the question of the arbitrariness of his “choice” of woman as “the one and only” (Schmitz 2017, 5) diminishes the divine element of the encounter between David and Tyra of David’s ensuing love. In many ways David and Tyra are part of a “heteronormative system of gender relations” (Schmitz 2017, 7) in which Tyra, the object of his longing or, what could also be called, his courtly love is supposed to play the role of an “ideal” in this, as we find out later, one-sided love relationship. The fact that Tyra gave the injured David water at their first encounter seems to predict the course of their relationship: symbolically, water can dampen or dilute, as well as quench, and can therefore be understood as the counter-element to David’s fire. Tyra does not want to accept this love and rejects David, who is “burning,” as Tyra comments upon 10  See, for example, Schlegel’s Lucinde (1799), where Julius describes his love for Lucinde as follows: “das Feuer der Liebe ist durchaus unverlöschlich, und noch unter der tiefsten Asche glühen Funken” (1999, 34; “The fire of love is absolutely inextinguishable, and even under the deepest heap of ashes there are still some sparks aglow” [1971, 61]). 11  Twist reads David’s “journey in pursuit of Tyra” as “both Sufi and Romantic” and points out that “this quest also involves the renunciation of capitalism” (2012, 91). Indeed Twist refers to David’s stance as “anticapitalism” (2018, 93).

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touching his warm hands when they are together later (LB, 230). So, she wants to convince David rationally that his longing cannot be fulfilled. Her reluctance, however, simply adds fuel to his fire. David’s longing for an “ideal” in Tyra is clearly a Romantic quest, which Ricarda Schmidt characterizes as “[a] merging of the sacred and the profane, of the sublime and trivial. But this is often expressed in irony, the awareness of the contrast between ideal and reality, which emerges through self-reflection and seeks distance from the self” (Schmidt 2009, 22–23).12 Here Schmidt’s observations tie in with sociologist Eva Illouz’s study on contemporary love: she explores convincingly in her study Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation (2012) how introspection has shaped the way we approach our choice of partner and the way we lead our relationships. Similarly, David’s hyperreflection on his relationship with Tyra and his role within it can be read as a sign of his own increasing uncertainty as a man and lover, proof of which is his self-description as a “geschlechtslose[r] Minnesänger” in what he perceives as “ein offenes unbebautes Land” (LB, 104; genderless minstrel in an open untilled land) of contemporary gender relations “wenn die Grenzen verschwimmen” (LB, 104; as boundaries become blurred). As David gradually realizes that what he wants from Tyra is his idealized version of her as well as their “love,” his own sense of masculine self is under threat. Ahmed makes clear that “the idealisation of the loved object can allow the subject to be itself in or through what it has. […] [T]he lover and the object approximate an ideal, an approximation which binds them together” (Ahmed 2004, 128; Ahmed’s emphasis). Yet Tyra who has “Eissplitter in ihrem Herzen” (LB, 274; shards of ice in her heart),13 that is, who does not share this ideal of love, prevents David from truly finding her (see Steinert 2008). David’s “failure” as a “successful” lover brings to the fore the uncertainty of his own position as a man and a Romantic, a position which stands in contrast to his professional identity as a (now former) stockbroker and which he needs to renegotiate on his journey through the “new” Europe, where a new post-Cold War capitalism has completely altered people’s lives. In this light, David’s position may come across as a 12  Schmidt refers here  to Paul Kluckhohn. 1953 [1941]. Das Ideengut der deutschen Romantik (Ideas of German Romanticism), 8–9. 3rd edn. Tübingen: Niemeyer. 13  Compare with Romantic titles such as E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Das steinerne Herz” (1817; “The Stone Heart”) or Wilhelm Hauff’s “Das kalte Herz” (1827; “The Heart of Stone”) which emphasize the place where love is, or is not, located. See also below on the significance of the heart in Liebesbrand.

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challenge to Connell’s prototype of the hegemonic man with “the successful claim to authority” (Connell 2005, 77). Yet success is for David no longer tied to the realm of work traditionally associated with hegemonic masculine behaviour and economic power,14 but to love, or perhaps rather to access to a specific woman. Here ideas and ideals of hegemonic masculinity shift in Liebesbrand, drawing attention away from clear-cut meanings of masculinity and towards their ambiguity. We can find similar ambiguities in David’s troubled self-perception in the context of what Zaimoglu calls “die Hitze und Kälte der deutschen Romantik” (Zaimoglu 2008b; the heat and cold of German Romanticism). This is the point where David’s German Turkish background comes in, even if the narrative does not linger on it. The word “Liebesbrand” (love fire) is also a Turkish term: sevda yanığı. (The word is also the title of a song by the popular Turkish singer Funda Arar, for example.) Saniye Uysal Ünalan connects the title to metaphors of love and burning as they can be found in Divan literature to capture love as an experience of suffering (2013, 166). Right at the beginning of the novel, David thinks about his way of loving, of longing, and how this might be linked to his background and upbringing. He says: “[I]ch kannte Feuerzeugfunken, aber keinen Liebesbrand im Herzen, ich war im Westen verdorben, ich war ein durch und durch degenerierter Mann des Abendlandes, und von der Tradition der orientalischen Frauenanbetung hatte ich keine Ahnung” (LB, 31; I knew sparks coming from a lighter but no love fire in my heart, I was corrupted in the West, I was a degenerated man of the occident, through and through, and I didn’t have a clue about the oriental way of worshipping women). David’s pondering on his desire, to which he can no longer respond by stepping into the gender roles of the country of origin of his parents, is one of the few moments when Zaimoglu directly alludes to David’s Turkish background. Although, by contrast to a number of texts of so-called literature of migration of the 1980s and 1990s, Zaimoglu’s novel does not generally expose his protagonist to feelings of self-­conscious “in-betweenness” as experienced by the migrants who have lost the traditions of their culture of origin, but have not “arrived” in Germany 14  From an economic point of view we can see parallels between David and Dariusch, the protagonist in Navid Kermani’s Kurzmitteilung: as children of migrants that have “made” it and can now take advantage of the capitalist system in which they found professional success. David can afford not to work and instead to travel around Europe to follow the woman he loves; Dariusch also has a peripatetic lifestyle, if for different reasons, and finds some sort of stability in Scientology, which highly values success (as I discussed in the previous chapter).

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properly either,15 when it comes to love he lets his protagonist willingly tap into the “cultural fable” of the “in-betweenness” of children of migrants.16 Yet Zaimoglu’s devotion to themes of German Romanticism brings, I argue, David’s Germanness to the fore: he is far too concerned with himself as a man and as a Romantic “degenerated” (“degenerierter”)—as he says—lover (LB, 31). His cultural background turns out to be somewhat convenient insofar as it highlights his own insecurities and anxiousness as a lover, that is, as an individual rather than as a representative of a community. Although Zaimoglu attributes to David a certain level of regret that he does not have rules with which he can love “successfully” and is thus set up for “failure,” a literary move which appears to confirm his complicity to the discourse of the “in-between” (compare Adelson 2003), I read David’s statement as an ironic “cop-out” of explaining his inability to be a “good” lover. Ultimately, David, whose name is rather unusual for a German Turkish man, stands by Germany, if not uncritically (compare Steinert 2008). Illouz’s differentiation between pre-modern and modern love is useful to delve a little further into this complex aspect of the novel that seemingly confirms traditional discourses revolving around post-migrants’ positions in Germany. Pre-modern love is, according to Illouz, “the ritualized version of love, emotion confirms commitment as much as commitment confirms emotion.” This is an “incremental process,” the lovers involved use “appropriate signs and signals” shared, and rehearsed, by both of them. Modern love, on the other hand, is characterized by a “regime of emotional authenticity,” one that “makes people scrutinize their own and another’s emotions in order to decide on the importance, intensity, and future significance of the relationship” (2012, 30–31). David’s idea of “orientalische Frauenanbetung” (oriental way of worshipping women), an idea that echoes patriarchal gender relations and often marries “worship” of women with their suppression, not just in the Orient but also in other cultural and historical contexts, is reminiscent of Illouz’s pre-modern love. David’s regret at not having access to a ritualized way of loving Tyra appears to contradict David’s position as a “modern” man with his emphasis on his self, on his emotions and perceptions. For him “commitment 15  Leslie A.  Adelson has argued “for the obsolescence of the cultural fable suspending migrants ‘between two worlds’” (2005, 21; also 2003). 16  David’s attitude is not dissimilar from Dariusch’s ambivalent attitude towards, and use of, his Oriental background in Kurzmitteilung as I discussed in the previous chapter.

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does not precede but rather follows emotions,” to borrow Illouz’s words again (2012, 31). Zaimoglu negotiates his protagonist’s complex sense of self via love. Tyra is intrigued by David’s non-German background perhaps due to the perceived clash in different approaches to “love” between the two lovers; indeed she seems to be keen to “recognize the stranger” (Ahmed 2000) in David. In the following exchange they properly introduce themselves to one other: [I]ch heiße Tyra, der Name ist von Thor abgeleitet. Ich heiße David, sagte ich. Du bist doch kein Deutscher, sagte sie. Doch, ich bin eben etwas später dazugekommen. (LB, 94) My name is Tyra, the name is derived from Thor. My name is David, I said. But you’re not German, she said. Yes, I am, I just joined a little later.

This brief, maybe even unremarkable, scene that revolves around the names of the two protagonists is a key point in David’s and Tyra’s relationship which is based on difference, in terms of perceptions of gender, nationality, and emotions. It reflects stuck notions of citizenship and nationality linked to ethnicity (see Taberner 2017, 31–32). Yet I would go a step further here. Difference, a phenomenon that appears to be pivotal in self-other relations as my analyses of Maxim Biller’s Esra and particularly of Navid Kermani’s Kurzmitteilung and Große Liebe have highlighted, is clearly central to Tyra’s view of David as well as of his love for her: she can only recognize him by looking for “visible signs” of his “concrete difference” (Ahmed 2004, 132).17 Tyra’s insistence on David’s apparent non-Germanness and her inability to think “beyond identity” (Littler 2012, 220; Littler’s emphasis), to see that “people who seem different can be Germans too” (Taberner 2017, 32), make her a far from ideal lover for him. Yet her character allows Zaimoglu to draw attention to David as he destabilizes not only the idea of a man in love who loves “successfully,” but also that of the nation, and thus to reveal his “resistance to all national narratives” (Littler 2012, 236). 17  Again, we can find parallels here with my readings of Biller’s Esra and Kermani’s Kurzmitteilung in the previous two chapters.

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Zaimoglu takes the destabilization of the notion of the “nation” via David and Tyra even further when he intersects it with the disruption of normative gender identities. Their exchange of names also points to their respective levels of devotion. Above all, Tyra’s name hints at the state of her heart and thus her lack of devotion to David and his ideal of love: in Old Norse anthropology the male heart is “der Sitz des Mutes” (where bravery is located); it is “das Zentrum der Lebenskraft” (the centre of vitality). These are characteristics that are cherished in a culture of war (Høystad 2006, 111–12). But Thor, whose female form is Tyra, embodies among the Norse gods “emotionale Primitivität” (Høystad 2006, 113; emotional primitivity), which does not allow complex forms of emotion and affective behaviour. Thus Liebesbrand suggests a reversal of heteronormative gender relations in terms of what Illouz calls “emotional inequality” between men and women: according to Illouz, men have the advantage of “withholding their emotions” in the context of serial sexuality which does not need to lead to commitment “because they have a larger sample to choose from” (2012, 103–104). In Liebesbrand, the rejected lover David, however, perceives himself as “entmannter Romantiker” (LB, 54; emasculated Romantic), whose heart is broken (compare LB, 238). In his longing his masculinity disappears or, in the words of Roland Barthes, “[a] man is not feminized because he is inverted but because he is in love” (2001, 14). David’s self-perception contrasts with the notion of the masculine Oriental who has “hot blood,”18 something which was mystified during Romanticism (Weber 2002, 163), but, strangely, other characters around him still perceive him as an “Orientale” (LB, 74; Oriental). As Zaimoglu reveals David’s affect, his burning love, as at the core of his perceived “effeminization,” readers may be left with Jack Halberstam’s opening questions to his seminal Female Masculinity: “What is ‘masculinity’ [then]? […] If masculinity is not the social and cultural and indeed political expression of maleness, then what is it?” (1998, 1). In its disruption of established notions of masculinity, and femininity, via David’s perceived “malelessness” and Tyra’s “emotional dominance” traditionally associated with men, the novel highlights the fruitlessness of the dichotomy of femininity versus masculinity as stable concepts attached to a specific sex, especially when it comes to love. Yet Zaimoglu also highlights the literal fluidity between bodies with “a further 18  I already pointed out this trope, or rather the stereotype, of the hypermasculine, sexually forward, and passionate “foreigner” with reference to Kermani’s Dariusch in Kurzmitteilung.

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transgression of body boundaries” (Littler 2012, 227), when David donates blood plasma together with Jarmila, an actress, his city guide in Prague and temporary lover, then confidante (LB, 261–66). In her “openness toward others” and dismissal of identity labels (for instance, she does not reveal whether she is German or Czech [LB, 179–80]), she stands as a counter-image to Tyra (Twist 2018, 102). David’s conscious emphasis on affect reveals him to be not only a Romantic rooted in Germany, but also a man who is characterized by Islamic concepts of love, despite his seeming detachment from his cultural background as mentioned above. The figure of David (Arabic Daoud) is, as name giver in Islam, a warrior (he killed the giant Goliath), king, wise man, poet, prophet, and writer of Psalms.19 “David” is “used as a paradigm in the twentieth century for colonized Muslim nations, since his story shows that faith, determination, and God’s blessing are more important than size and strength” (Esposito 2004, 64). So, in this combination of courage and wisdom David represents the counterpart to Tyra on two further levels that tie in with Tyra’s insistence on difference as explored above: first, Tyra is a settled (married) German woman—she even has a distinctly Nordic name;20 David, by contrast, is of a so-called migration background, something which does not seem to bother him if we follow Littler’s interpretation of his name as a change from Turkish Davud (meaning bass or baritone voice) to Hebrew for “beloved” (2012, 226). Read differently, however, with his change to a name whose cultural difference is widely accepted or, to lean on Ahmed, “nativized” in Germany, he wiped out the last sign of his difference (Ahmed 2004, 134) to match his professional success, something which may still be unexpected of a man of his cultural and religious background. This name change thus signals what would be widely read as his full integration as he has given something back to society, or here rather to the private market, through his career as a stockbroker, that is, in a profession geared toward economic profit (compare Ahmed 2004, 134). It therefore seems that, having become a fully accepted member of German society, he can now afford to open his heart and, through that, to  Ünalan connects the religious aspect of David’s name to Divan literature (2013, 168).  If Tyra is, however, derived from “Tyr, the Norse god of battle,” as Littler argues (2012, 229), then the novel allows for intertextual references to Kleist’s Penthesilea, the “war machine” that can only engage with love violently, as a “response to Romanticism” (ibid., 229–35). 19 20

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reconnect with his religious roots that would mark him as “different” and potentially threatening, to express his love. In Islam the heart is “nicht bloß eine Metapher, sondern ein objektives Organ der sinnlichen Wahrnehmung, der Intuition und Erkenntnis [...], der Inspiration, Offenbarung und der göttlichen Einsicht” (Høystad 2006, 85–86; not simply a metaphor, but an objective organ of sensual perception, of intuition and knowledge, of inspiration, revelation, and of divine reason). Thus the novel gradually uncovers love as faith, but faith in turn expresses David’s love (Zaimoglu 2008b): faith carries David’s love that he cannot explain rationally. Yet in Liebesbrand Zaimoglu is also interested in (occidental) Christianity as well as in popular piety which he complements with his perception of Islam, or, as Twist has analysed, more specifically Sufism. For Twist “this touching tale between Romanticism and Sufism undermines the Islam-West binary, establishing an ambiguous connection between Islamic and German culture while simultaneously destabilizing the binaries between heaven and earth, and Self and Other” (2018, 89). The blurring of boundaries between such supposed binaries comes particularly to the fore when David follows Tyra, who is conducting doctoral research on Marketenderinnen (camp followers) in the Middle Ages, in themselves “transnational” figures who circulated goods as well as stories and myths, to Prague, “der Hauptstadt der schwermütigen Vollbluteuropäer” (LB, 246; the capital of the melancholic thoroughbred Europeans), and to Vienna. It might therefore not come as a surprise that it is in Vienna, a city which was twice besieged unsuccessfully by the Ottomans (in 1529 and 1683), and not already in Nienburg or even in Prague, that David is reminded of his Muslim background. [I]ch erzählte dir von meinem heiligen Buch, in dem es heißt, daß das Feuer ihre Angesichter verbrennen wird, jener, die Gott, den Herrn, zum Verschwinden bringen wollen, und du nanntest mich das erste Mal bei meinem Namen, wie ein Hauch kam es über deine Lippen, der Herr hat mich erweckt, sagtest du, und ich kannte diese Zeile aus dem Gotteslob meines Glaubens, wo ist der Abstand, wo ist die Stille, wo ist das Geschrei, unsere Körper unser Atem unser Gotteslob, mehr würde kein Erzengel wollen, meine Frau meine Frau, sagte ich, mehr ist nur der kranke Wunsch, auf der Stelle zu sterben, um nicht aufräumen zu müssen hinter sich. (LB, 343) I talked to you about my holy book, where it is said that the fire will burn their faces, of those who want God, the Lord, to disappear, and for the first time you called me by my name, it passed your lips like a breeze, the Lord

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has awoken me, you said, and I knew this line from the praise of God of my faith, where is the distance, where is the silence, where is the screaming, our bodies our breath our worship, an archangel wouldn’t want more, my woman my woman, I said, what is left is only the sick wish to die instantly so not to have to tidy up after yourself.

Towards the end of the novel Tyra too discovers religion, Catholicism, via legends that she brings back from Naples (where she goes for a brief spell). This could be read as a symbol of her “resignation in the face of the complexity of the world” (Karnatz 2008). It is certainly no coincidence that she, who lives in the predominantly Protestant north of Germany, turns to Catholicism, just as some Romantics like Friedrich Schlegel did. This step ties her more closely to David, the Muslim, and with the help of religion he can hope for Tyra’s understanding and affection (she calls him by his name for the first time). Both of them need to recognize that the divine experience can never be reached and—similarly to love—so means endless pursuit. Despite his non-Christian faith David remains an incurable Romantic: his religious belief blends seamlessly into his love for “[s]eine Frau” (his woman), any boundaries have been overcome and any arbitrariness removed. What is left for him now is only the wish to die (see LB, 343). Tyra, David’s “schöne Katholikin” (LB, 342, beautiful Catholic woman), as he calls her, is, by contrast the one who experiences major changes now. She is now the one who strives for David. Jetzt bin ich dir hinterhergelaufen, sagte sie. Nicht das erste Mal, sagte ich, in Prag ist es auch passiert. Das war davor. Wovor? Bevor ich anfing, Kirchen zu besuchen. Vor Neapel, sagte ich. Neapel hat es ausgelöst, sagte sie, die alten Frauen im Gebet haben es ausgelöst. Und jetzt bist du ein anderer Mensch. Ich bin eine andere Frau. Gleich, aber anders. (LB, 363) Now I followed you, she said. Not for the first time, I said, it also happened in Prague. That was before. Before what? Before I started visiting churches. Before Naples. Naples triggered it, she said, the praying old women triggered it. And now you’re a different human being. I’m a different woman. The same, but different.

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In this situation the power relations obtaining hitherto between David and Tyra are inverted and the question is now whether Tyra, due to her faith, is in the process of turning into a Christian-European Romantic (see Schulz 2004, 33). Significantly, her Catholic faith was triggered by “alte[] Frauen im Gebet” (old women praying), whereby Tyra’s new Christian identity gains a clearly feminine component (she is a “different woman” now, not a “different human being”). She also tells of a “Heilige” (holy woman) who seemingly randomly approaches people and has a mysterious impact on them; experiencing this woman had an enormous influence on her conversion (LB, 366–68). It is now Tyra— like David before her—who is effeminated through faith, yet not faith in love, but faith in a Christian God, the ultimate male authority figure. Despite his Muslim background David shows a certain lack of understanding for Tyra’s newly discovered faith; he calls her “meine abergläubische gläubige Tyra” (LB, 368; my superstitious religious Tyra). The symbiosis that David has been striving for seems to be anything but a smooth process: they believe in things that are simply too different; the ideal is too far out of reach. Although David seems to be able to connect with Tyra to a limited extent now, he remains “der Idiot an der Peripherie ihres neuen Glaubens” (LB, 371; the idiot at the periphery of her new faith), because “[sie ist] nach [ihrer] Erweckung unantastbar geworden” (LB, 342; she became sacrosanct following her epiphany). Yet as their desires shift and gender power dominance switches back and forth between the two lovers, the boundaries between who desires whom, who follows whom, and who determines the course of their love for whom are increasingly blurred. As David summarizes: “Meine Frau meine Frau meine Frau, dein Glaube bleibt dein Geheimnis, aber auch ich kenne es, auch ich weiß, was geschieht, wenn der Grassamen, der auf Stein fällt, aufgeht, sage es nicht weiter, flüstere das Gebet im Schlaf wie in deinen wachen Stunden” (LB, 344; my woman my woman my woman, your faith remains your secret, but I, too, know it, I, too, know what happens when the grass seed that drops on stone is sprouting, don’t tell anyone, whisper the prayer in your sleep like in your waking hours). Eventually, Tyra ends her relationship with David in Vienna with the significant words: “keine Liebe” (LB, 373; no love). After a dream revolving around blood (LB, 373–74) David thinks that the circle of action, which started with blood, is coming to a close; he says to Jarmila that

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he has “mit allem abgeschlossen” (LB, 375; finished with it all) and is now “ausgeglüht” (LB, 342; he has ceased glowing). Yet Zaimoglu refuses to bring the novel to a satisfying end, because David’s love remains unfulfilled; his male longing continues. The novel gains therefore a fragmentary nature: Liebesbrand hints, not without irony, to the preliminarity of love and gender constructions and, in addition, to the preliminarity of the human capability to influence this love. From that perspective David never reaches the final destination of his journey, of his longing, yet this makes his love—the worshipping of a woman who remains beyond reach (compare Ahmed 2004, 130)—a Romantic love. Liebesbrand portrays David as a new Romantic hero of the twenty-first century who shares a major characteristic with his Romantic equivalents: he creates a temporary space of desire. Even though he might come across to readers as a dreamer, someone whose masculinity appears fragile, he is aware of the discrepancy between reality and his ideal of love and does not stop striving for the latter. Ole Martin Høystad points out that “[g]enau diese schöpferischen Quellen im Herzen suchten die Romantiker, wenn sie die Gefühle vor die Vernunft stellten und uns mit ihren Beiträgen endgültig zu Europäern machten” (2006, 15; the Romantics were looking for precisely those creative/fertile origins in the heart when they were putting feelings before reason and, with their work, ultimately turned us into Europeans). David seems to exemplify a type of contemporary European (Romantic) who connects the Orient with the West, Islam with Christianity, but he is simultaneously aware of incompleteness, constant desire, and striving for something that cannot be reached. In that sense, David, as a man with a German Turkish background, is confident in his masculinity after all; unlike Zaimoglu’s earlier characters he does not need to reclaim his masculinity, but can embody a self-assured, constantly renegotiated form of masculinity—despite temporarily “losing” it on his quest. Thus Zaimoglu has indeed created on many levels—in his words—“ein Buch der Wandlungen und Verwandlungen” (Zaimoglu 2008b; a book of changes and transformations).

Coda: Romantic Masculinity in Hinterland The novel that followed Liebesbrand, Hinterland, can be read as an extension of Zaimoglu’s ideas concerning Romanticism, masculinity, and transnationalism. A brief excursion into this text will complete my analysis of

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Romantic masculinity in Zaimoglu’s work. As Hinterland was written with the support of the tellingly named “Grenzgänger” (border crosser) programme of the Robert Bosch Foundation (see website),21 the question is, though, in how far the novel represents Zaimoglu’s own ideas or the Foundation’s requirements for the programme.22 Regardless of the possible creative restrictions caused by financial support of this kind, my focus is Hinterland’s main protagonist Ferda, “a modern-day Novalis,” as Taberner calls him (2017, 298), and his positioning as a German Turk in contemporary Europe rather than the novel’s rich variety of material, fragmentary character, and the deliberate inclusion of fairy tales and myths.23 These very characteristics have led Hofmann to conclude that “the sheer profusion of material drowns the core narrative thrust” of the novel (2012, 253). While I am sensitive to Hofmann’s point, I would argue that Zaimoglu engages with core notions of transnationalism, of crossing borders, on a critical as well as ironic level, as Ferda’s journeys through Europe acquire an even more significant role in his construction of his hero’s masculinity than in Liebesbrand. Zaimoglu described Hinterland as “ein durch und durch sehnsüchtiges, stilles Buch […], und ein sehr deutsches, und ein europäisches Buch” (Cheesman and Yeşilada 2012, 68; a yearning, quiet book, through and through, and a very German, and European book). It is noticeable that, when discussing this novel, Zaimoglu puts more emphasis on the European, rather than exclusively German, dimension of his neo-­Romantic novel than he did in his lecture on Liebesbrand, to which I referred above. Taberner’s take on the relationship between Germany and Europe via Romanticism in Hinterland is revealing in this context. He writes: “German Romanticism is the inspiration for Ferda’s discovery of the affinities and affections that shape a shared European sensibility, notwithstanding—more likely because of—the continent’s cultural diversity” (Taberner 2017, 84). For him the novel can thus “confront[] the anxiety of German provinciality” (ibid., 193–94), an issue that Taberner regards to be of concern in many recent German-language texts (ibid., 87–88). I am less convinced by Taberner’s identification in contemporary German-language writing of an “anxiety” of being (perceived as) “peripheral within the  The same foundation that sponsored the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize.  See also Taberner (2017, 210) on this aspect of the novel’s generation. 23  See also Twist’s discussion of Hinterland as a “cosmopolitan Kunstmärchen” (2014, 408–16). 21 22

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global circulation of narratives about (or from) nations as typologies that facilitate access to ‘worldness’ or—more banally—as brands to be consumed” (2017, 88), especially considering a recent upsurge of consciously regional narratives, some of which may well be considered “world literature.”24 In Hinterland Zaimoglu does directly engage with notions of centre and periphery as well as those of transnationality in contemporary Europe. And he does so via the “empfindsamer” (sentimental) man Ferda, who is also longing for a woman, his Czech girlfriend Aneschka, as well as via the novel’s transnational setting in Prague, Berlin, Istanbul, the North Sea island of Föhr, Budapest, and Krakow. Any sense of anxiety is displayed via Ferda and his own masculinity that he is confronted with in the novel’s diverse locations. Some places such as Prague already played key roles in Liebesbrand. Most of the locations in Hinterland are, again, places at what for some are the “edges of Europe” or can be regarded as “Hinterland” (compare Taberner 2017, 189)—especially if seen from a German centre (compare Taberner 2017, 211)—such as Prague. Having been considered politically and economically central in the past, these places have largely lost their metropolitan character in the more recent Western imagination, yet Prague in particular now challenges ideas of national fixity by reminding us that it once was part of the Holy Roman Empire (Twist 2018, 100).25 Prague also brings to the fore the fluidity of borders as in very recent times the city has become more central again due to “Brexit” and the changing shape of the geo-political relations facing eastwards. The diversity of the novel’s locations also presents the reader with a varied image of Europe, as well as with an invitation to take a fresh view on Germany. This is not least the case due to the object of Ferda’s longing: while the scenario in Hinterland may be similar to that of Liebesbrand, Ferda is, by contrast to David, not longing for a German but for a Czech woman and his longing is less extreme while he is travelling through Europe. As may be expected from a neo-Romantic novel that borrows some of the literary tropes of its predecessor period, Zaimoglu approaches questions of nationality and belonging in an ironic way, thereby carefully scrutinizing conventional perceptions of Germanness in a transnational context. Ferda’s difference, his deviation from what a German is supposed 24  Compare my article on Saša Stanišić’s 2014 novel Vor dem Fest (Before the Feast, 2015) set in the Uckermark (2020). 25  Twist discusses the role of Prague in Liebesbrand here.

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to look and act like,26 is a running theme throughout the novel, an idea which was primarily voiced by Tyra with reference to her “lover” David in Liebesbrand: Ferda is the eternal “braunäugige[r] Gast aus Deutschland” (H, 30; brown-eyed guest from Germany), who has a “Touristenstatus” (H, 33; tourist status) and is “expected to return home” (Taberner 2017, 216), when he is in Prague, that is, not in his homeland. But he is distinctly German, because he projects a Romantic image of himself. Ferda comes across as “ein Empfindsamer in der Blüte [seiner] Verzweiflung” (a sentimental man at the height of his despair), as an Ethiopian Turk in Istanbul notices (H, 162). Yet in Istanbul Ferda refuses to reveal himself as a sentimental, an Empfindsamer (H, 164): he does not seem to have anything in common with the “empfindsamen jungen Männer” (H, 139; sentimental young men) who give in to their “schwarze Sehnsucht” (H, 144; black desire) and throw themselves off the Galata Tower. Sentimentality (Empfindsamkeit), which is no longer something exclusively German-Romantic, is here related to Oriental “hot-bloodedness,” a psychological feature which was also supposed to characterize David in Liebesbrand27—and this in turn deviates from a traditional German view on Romanticism. By distancing himself from sentimentality, Ferda in Hinterland seemingly paradoxically “becomes” more German and less Turkish. Taberner reads Ferda’s “nationalization” as such: “In becoming knowable to others, Ferda ceases to be queer. Transnational solidarity— even of the discrepant kind—involves a renationalization of the border-­ crossing stranger. In order for him to inspire the historical consciousness needed to resist the homogenizing drive of neoliberalism, Ferda must first be identifiable as German” (Taberner 2017, 215). While I do not disagree with Taberner—after all transnationalism contains the very nations/ nationalities that it aims to traverse—I tie Ferda’s “(re)nationalization” to his relationship with Romanticism, where I insist on the potential for ironic subversion. Ferda may be recognized as German, but the novel plays throughout with the construction of Ferda first and foremost as a Romantic, whose nationality is often subject to ridicule, especially in Prague. Most noticeably Aneschka comments on his desire with the 26  Taberner points out that Ferda is also descendent of Chechens deported from the Caucasus by Stalin in 1944 (2017, 212; see H, 162). 27  As already briefly mentioned earlier, we could also find similar character traces in Dariusch in Kurzmitteilung, who distinguishes himself from “bland” German men by exploiting his “Oriental passion,” thus ensuring his success with German women.

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following words: “Er idealisiert uns. Der Deutsche hatte seine große Liebe in dieser Stadt entdeckt—kein Kommentar” (H, 98; he is idealizing us. The German has found his great love in this city—no comment). I read this ironization of his nationality as a Romantic twist to the novel’s engagement with, and often subversion of, national stereotypes in a transnational, seemingly borderless world. It also brings to the fore the often absurd mechanisms such as the attribution of allegedly national characteristics through which national identity is created, through which one becomes who one is supposed to be. The novel’s ending encapsulates its critical view on one-dimensional ideas of gender/masculinity and nationality as Ferda never reaches the final destination of his quest and his literal journey: at the novel’s close he and his girlfriend are about to continue on to Berlin, but it is far from clear what the two lovers can expect there. This may suggest that such a non-­ arrival, or the constant circulation of people, which Twist describes as “transnational relationships […] that form an interconnecting and disorderly cosmopolitan web across Europe” (2014, 410) is at the heart of Zaimoglu’s contemporary perception of Romanticism as something no longer strongly tied to Germanness as in Liebesbrand but as something more transnational. In that way Berlin is a significant choice of location: as a world city, it provides a space of radical mixture where origins and identities become relatively less important. So, Ferda does find his way, because he is aware of his incompleteness. He can never fully become “truly” German in traditionalist, blood-and-soil terms—he remains on the “identarian margins” to some extent—but that does not matter: the world is a globalized, transnational place, and Ferda, as a rather privileged post-­ migrant, is happy to circulate between different identities in different situations, an idea with which Zaimoglu deliberately plays and which reveals different models of transnationality as enacted by his characters. This freedom in terms of identity enables Ferda to find his Germanness at a time when it seems to get lost in the “new” Europe with its frequently shifting borders28: Germanness has become a suitcase rather than a home

28  Taberner notes similarly that “hinterland […] seems to suggest that German culture can create, or recreate, a kind of regional preeminence in its European locality” (2017, 88). He also reads Ferda’s relationship to Germany as “rooted” which he links to the late Romantics’ nationalism (ibid., 218).

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(compare Steinert 2008).29 Or, as Twist has put it more straight-forwardly in his conclusion regarding Liebesbrand: “Zaimoglu’s Romantic argument indicates that German culture is and was diverse” (2018, 107). And Ferda’s “migrating into the German tradition” is, according to Taberner, an indicator for “how Germany might become not only of the world— incorporating the world’s diversity into its particularity—but also acceptable to the world” (2017, 219; Taberner’s emphasis). What the reader is left with after their reading of Hinterland is the impression that Ferda’s journey is certainly not that of a migrant who does not fit in, but that of an outward-looking, transnational European-German Romantic, or, in Taberner’s words, “a (hope for a) ‘new Germany’” (2017, 290) who reflects Germany’s worldliness. This hope echoes Zaimoglu’s self-description as a “Humanistenkopf, der sich die schöne Idee von Europa nicht wegnehmen lassen will” (2009c; Humanist mind who does not want to let the beautiful idea of Europe be taken from him): Zaimoglu, via his protagonist, adds his thoughts on twenty-first-century Europe and thus continues an intellectual tradition that has been shaped by German thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel (compare Peter 2007, 89), G.W.F. Hegel, and Wilhelm von Humboldt (compare Davis 2008, 11). The journeys of his male characters in both Hinterland and Liebesbrand not only transcend different countries and engage with different histories, traditions, cultures, and religions, but also overcome boundaries of an identitarian nature via diverse approaches to love, affect, and reason, that is, via thinking “across borders.” And this makes Zaimoglu’s novels European “stories of today” (see Zaimoglu 2008b).

Working-Class Locals: Ruß With the novel that followed Zaimoglu’s neo-Romantic novels, Ruß (2011), the author took yet another, perhaps surprising, turn as he then focused his attention on a less individual, reflexive, and culturally outwardlooking, “European” form of masculinity than the one I analysed in Liebesbrand and Hinterland. With this, what we might call domesticated form of masculinity Zaimoglu seems to have gone backwards again, to more clear-cut meanings of gender, masculinity, and nationality that 29  Zaimoglu explores similar questions of “Heimat” in an age of transnationality and of an expanding European Union in his intriguing article “Volkes Gesänge” (2009b; The People’s Song).

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shaped the discourses in his early work such as Kanak Sprak. However, by constructing masculinity via an association with a local place, a geographical centre, as in Ruß, Zaimoglu shifts the attention from transnational male characters to the transnational position of his novel and thereby raises further significant questions concerning literary appropriation that he started with Liebesbrand: Ruß is, arguably, transnational due to its position as an imaginative-empathic (re-)construction of working-class subjectivity from the presumed author’s exterior, or at least borderline, perspective. This allows Zaimoglu to rethink another model of masculinity, namely, that of the “native” German working-class man here. In that way Ruß also comments on how the transnational movements of capital, rather than people as in Liebesbrand and Hinterland, impact the lives of his male characters whose surroundings have undergone rapid changes in the late twentieth century. Ruß’s main protagonist is the former doctor Renz (short for Lorenz) whose wife Stella was murdered and who embarks on a relationship with the man-controlling Marja. Together with his father-in-law Eckhart (whose name may be a hidden reference to Meister Eckhart and thus Zaimoglu’s Romanticism),30 he runs a kiosk at the Neumarkt in the Ruhrort district in Duisburg, a focal point for male homosocial relations. His customers are the former coal miners Kallu, Hansgerd, and Norbert mit der Plastikhand (Norbert with the plastic hand) who, having lost the pride and stable sense of masculinity once rooted in their work in the collieries, are now unemployed alcoholics. After a strange encounter with a man called Karl, Renz goes on a journey to Warsaw to find Josef, the mentally ill brother of Karl’s mysterious employer Heinrich. This journey again seems to expose Zaimoglu’s fascination with the Eastern edges of Europe, exploring the question where Europe begins and ends. Yet this journey also enables Zaimoglu to dig deeper into the conditions of human relationships and to explore various aspects of maginalization and the loss, or severe reduction, of agency in the neoliberal world of the twenty-first century. Josef’s wife and child are, as we find out later, also dead, this being the cause for his illness. In the meantime Renz’s wife’s alleged murderer is released from prison in Bochum and hides in Austria. Karl persuades Renz to go to Austria to avenge his wife’s murder by killing him. This ends in Karl and Josef’s deaths and the alleged murderer reveals that 30  This reading would, at least in part, support Hofmann’s view that Romanticism can be traced throughout Zaimoglu’s oevre (2012), as mentioned above.

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Josef killed Renz’s wife in order to avenge the death of his own wife which he thinks was caused by Renz’s failure as doctor. This brief summary of the novel’s plot makes clear that Zaimoglu’s Ruß approaches notions of transnationality and masculinity from a different angle than in his neo-Romantic novels: here, he exposes a different kind of “border thinking” as his protagonists, “old Europeans,” that is, ethnic Germans who are, as the novel makes clear, very much tied to, or frequently reminded of, their history, traditions, and social values and do not have literal access to the global world, “to the world’s metropolitan centres,” to borrow Graham Huggan’s words (2001, 9–10), in the same way as did the travelling Romantics of Zaimoglu’s previous novels. These characters feel the negative effects of globalization, of twentyfirst-century modernity, or of what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have termed “Empire,” a concept which “does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is,” they continue, “a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers” (2001, xii; Hardt and Negri’s emphasis). In that way, borderless globalization, or Hardt and Negri’s “Empire,” and with it “a transformation of the dominant productive processes themselves, with the result that the role of industrial factory labor has been reduced and priority given instead to communicative, cooperative, and affective labor” (ibid., xiii), has already come home in Ruß—after all, “Empire” “operates on all registers of the social order” (ibid., xv). Globalization is nothing that happens elsewhere anymore and this has dire consequences for those who suddenly find themselves at the social margins of society.31 Hofmann, who, as briefly mentioned before, labels Ruß with the term “black Romanticism” (2012, 253), also sees in the novel’s characters’ inaccessibility to the global world a return to Zaimoglu’s roots as a writer, though in terms of his engagement with social marginalization rather than seemingly fixed ideas of gender as I pointed out above. He states: “In sum, Ruß offers a sarcastic, grotesque, yet affectionate portrait of the ‘defeated’ of the Ruhr, marking a return to Zaimoglu’s earlier tendency to posit socially marginalized figures as champions of Romantic rebellion against conventional cultural values” (2012, 257). Zaimoglu himself has 31  Here we may also be reminded of Clemens Meyer’s East German male characters and their socio-economically marginalized position shortly after the Wende as discussed in Chap. 2.

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commented in a similar vein on his own preference for characters: “Wenn ich sage, ich habe etwas gegen die Moderne, dann meine ich: Ich habe große Sympathie für all jene, die nicht gelernt haben, zu siegen. Als Schreiber, aber auch als Almosensozialist habe ich eine große Sympathie für die Besiegten. Das ist ein sehr naives Gefühl” (Cheesman and Yeşilada 2012, 46; when I say I’m not keen on Modernity, then this is what I mean: I have great sympathy for all those who haven’t learnt how to win. As a writer, but also as an alms socialist I have great sympathy for the defeated. This is a very naïve feeling). If, following Hardt and Negri, “European modernity is inseparable from capitalism” (2001, 86), then the “anti-­ modernity” of Zaimoglu’s characters in Ruß can be read as a political statement or a critical engagement with the transnationality of people, ideas, and not least capital, which anchored the narratives of Liebesbrand and Hinterland. So, in Ruß Zaimoglu asks what happens with people who cannot, or can no longer, seemingly effortlessly take part in those movements of people and capital that have shaped today’s transnational world. In Ruß, the main characters’ “failure” to succeed, that is, to be part of the global arena of capitalism and its circulating goods as well as people, can only be compensated for with a return to essentialized perceptions of gender and, linked to that, with an association with a particular place, an association which appears to be more accessible than with Germany as a whole or even a bigger entity such as Europe. This ties in with what used to be the experience of migrants and/or their children. As Bart Moore-­ Gilbert makes clear with reference to the British postcolonial novel The Black Album (1995) by Hanif Kureishi: “the modern inner city is an easier ‘England’ to identify with for diasporic populations than rural, industrial and suburban ‘Englands’” (2001, 10). Big cities such as London, or even smaller places such as the Duisburg of Zaimoglu’s novel, seem to welcome everybody, including those at the margins of society, the “defeated,” to refer back to Zaimoglu’s choice of word. However, ethnically German rather than migrant characters are marginal now; and the ethnically non-­ Germans characters of his Romantic novels appear to be truly part of a transnational Europe in which physical as well as identity borders are challenged and, ideally, overcome. The transnational experience of the characters in Ruß, which is not rooted in the protagonists’ affluence as in Liebesbrand and Hinterland, thus opens up another layer which is beyond the local, that is more precisely, beyond their control. This is reminiscent of Judith Butler’s concept of “precarity,” which she explores in her collection of essays Precarious Life (2004) and her essay “Precarious Life,

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Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation” (2012). In the concluding remarks to her essay she highlights the “unequal distribution of precarity” (some lives are more grievable—a term Butler uses—and thus worth protecting than others); precarity is “dependent upon the organization of economic and social relationships, the presence or absence of sustaining infrastructures and social and political institutions” (Butler 2012, 148), aspects of our social life which we cannot influence directly. Thus “[p]recarity exposes our sociality, the fragile and necessary dimensions of our interdependency” (ibid.).32 In Zaimoglu’s Duisburg the “interdependency” reveals the loss of autonomy less associated with transnationalism if one cannot choose to be part of the, supposedly, mind-­broadening encounter with other cultures and religions celebrated, often uncritically, under the label of “diversity.” In order to understand the social and economic “interdependency” in Ruß more fully, I would like to draw on Timothy Morton’s ecological thought. For him “[e]verything is interconnected” (2010, 1 and elsewhere). So, his notion of the “mesh of interconnected things” (ibid., 15), which has “no absolute center or edge” (ibid., 29), sheds light on the experiences of Zaimoglu’s characters from another angle. According to Morton, ecology has to do, amongst other things, “with capitalism and with what might exist after capitalism. […] It has to do with ideas of self and the weird paradoxes of subjectivity. It has to do with society. It has to do with coexistence” (ibid., 2). Furthermore, “[i]nterconnection implies separateness and difference. There would be no mesh if there were no strange strangers. The mesh isn’t a background against which the strange stranger appears. It is the entanglement of all strangers” (ibid., 47). Thus where in Liebesbrand and Hinterland highly educated and professionally successful protagonists who can choose not to work and, instead, follow a woman around Europe, in Ruß a domesticated form of masculinity caused by the men’s unemployment resulting in social estrangement from their sense of self, their workplace (the former focal point of their lives, of their economic as well as personal interconnections), and their locality takes centre stage. In short: they have become socially and economically marginalized in the late capitalist “mesh.” Their roles have shifted from active worker, if with a limited amount of control in the network of production of which they were once part, to passive consumer of alcohol who are in 32  In her 2017 essay, Silke Horstkotte reads Zaimoglu’s later novel Isabel (2014) from the viewpoint of economic precarity and love.

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danger of becoming disconnected from the society around them. If Renz and his companions do travel, that is, become active, in Ruß, then it is to carry out unpleasant tasks (such as bringing Josef back from Warsaw and, later, finding Renz’s wife’s alleged murderer and taking revenge). Their role in the game of transnational movement is not the one of leisure but the one of precarity. In fact, Renz, who perceives himself as a “Tourist unter Touristen” (R, 231; tourist among tourists), that is, as a stranger when not in Duisburg, is wary of moving too far from Duisburg, perceiving it as a threat to his existence: “Hatte er sich zu weit von seiner Heimatstadt entfernt und drohte ihm deshalb Unheil?” (R, 48; had he ventured too far from his hometown and was this the reason why disaster was impending?). Again Morton’s words may help us understand Renz’s dilemma. He writes: “The strange stranger affects ideas of place and space. The essence of the local isn’t familiarity but the uncanny, the strangely familiar and familiarly strange. The experience of the local is the profound experience of strangeness” (2010, 50). We can also put this differently in terms of gender: where in Liebesbrand and Hinterland transnational masculinity determined the male characters’ sense of self in a largely positive, if not uncritical or unchallenging, way, in Ruß transnationality only brings out what is lacking for those men who are—literally—stuck. They are “Männer, die nach Moos und billiger Zitronenseife rochen” (R, 23; men who smelled of moss and cheap lemon soap), that is, men who are not as light-footed and flexible as contemporary transnationality implies and who also cannot afford to bring the sweet-smelling world into their homes in the form of expensive products. Being “stuck,” that is, being in an economically and socially precarious situation with no hope of amelioration, is therefore linked in Ruß to class which is particularly significant if the setting is a supposedly affluent Germany. Zaimoglu’s Duisburg is, however, anything but an affluent place (such as the “rival” of nearby “posh” Düsseldorf [see R, 87]) offering its inhabitants opportunities for economic and social success, and the characters’ financial shortfall needs to be made up by other means. Thus in Ruß a kiosk, or “Trinkhalle” as it is called in the Ruhr area, becomes the space for homosocial relations marked by “passive, often depressive melancholy” (Hofmann 2012, 254), not comparable with the sentimentality of Zaimoglu’s earlier Romantics that launches them into pursuing their love interests. This form of homosociality also differs from that of Meyer’s characters, which is more active and physical, if not entirely without nostalgia for previous times, as discussed in Chap. 2. Zaimoglu’s characters’

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frequent low mood, often captured in seemingly carefully chosen archaic language, is also mirrored in their surroundings: “Sie [Renz and Kallu] sprachen über den langen kalten Winter, der auch den Männern alter Schule zusetzte” (R, 160; they [Renz and Kallu] were talking about the long cold winter that also tormented those old-school men). Elsewhere Renz refers to Josef as “gemütskrankt” (R, 40; depressed), while he himself “hatte die wüsten Tage überstanden” (R, 143; had survived his desolate days). The novel’s homosocial relations revolve around difficult male friendships, which take shape for the reader in dialogue-heavy passages about seemingly unrelated, random topics but also in Renz’s reflections about his past and current situation among those “old-school men,” displaying a certain level of aimlessness in their daily lives. What is worth mentioning in addition is that women, who are also physically excluded from many of the places these men frequent (see, e.g., R, 65),33 have no proper place in the men’s relationships and conversations other than as the means of confirming what Pierre Bourdieu terms the “male habitus” (2001) and the men’s understanding of social norms. Their views on women as mere objects may partly have been caused by their former jobs: they were coal miners, which may be, or was, one of the last professions where women are, or were, not present. Most of the women who are present in the novel are either hired (like the sex workers in the bar in Warsaw), hard to get (like Marja who is content with “getting along” with Renz [R, 172]), or are murdered or dead (above all Renz’s wife Stella who “haunts” him). This inaccessibility of women plays into their emasculation, which may explain why most of the characters are overcompensating for these voids by other means. Although readers are confronted with nostalgic and melancholic men who long for the old days (their emotional “Heimat,” or home) and who are now broken after the loss of their jobs—and as Bourdieu has made clear “[t]he precedence universally accorded to men is affirmed in […] the productive and reproductive activities, based on a sexual division of labour of biological and social production and reproduction which gives the better part to men” (2001, 33)—these men are still competing for power, for a place higher up on the gender hierarchy. Renz is highly aware of the “Dominanzspiel” (R, 101; game of/for dominance) among most men, of which he would rather not be part. Their male competition for power allows them to address, or even 33  Compare with my reading of the exclusion, but also use of women in the homosocial worlds of Meyer’s novels.

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counteract, their longing, which clearly is of a different nature than in Liebesbrand: they try to replace their now-marginalized masculinity as unor underemployed men by other supposedly masculine actions, which I shall discuss below, and thereby confirm gender “as a way in which social practice is ordered” (Connell 2005, 71). Although the characters are lost amid the ideals and myths of proud working-class manhood, which are, as the novel makes unmistakably clear, at risk here, they still cling to and confirm them via their homosocial relations. They want to come across “wie Kerle” (R, 174; like lads). I would like to dwell a little longer on the characters’ enforced shift from a form of hegemonic masculinity (at least in terms of their professional identity) to an economically and socially marginalized sense of gendered self, which has taken place before the novel’s plot sets in, and to their attempts to return to a form of hegemony by proving their masculinity through other means. There are two sides to this shift that need to be considered in Ruß: firstly, the specific emotional brokenness of the individual male characters and, secondly, the collective questioning of the authenticity of working-class masculinity. The main protagonist Renz is an interesting example for the individual experience of emotional brokenness or melancholia, or indeed longing, and for the questioning of working-­ class ideals. In many ways he also comes across as a mediator between Duisburg’s past and present: he is emotionally close to the old Duisburg dominated by mining, an industry which, incidentally, attracted workers from the Prussian part of today’s Poland after 1871, thus lending the novel’s setting an historically transnational character (see R, 59), and does not like change such as the redevelopment of Duisburg’s inner harbour. Renz used to work as a doctor, but after his wife’s murder he became addicted to alcohol and was no longer able to work. Though a former working-class child whose education could not “make him middle-class” (R, 64; “Bildung hat ihn nicht zum Bürger gemacht”) and he remained “der Sohn seines Vaters” (R, 62; his father’s son), now a “Büdchenmann” (kiosk owner),34 he is very much an outsider among outsiders, more ­marginalized than the marginalized men: he is no longer part of the hegemonic group of successful, intellectual men (even though he is still perceived as an “intellectual” [R, 243]), nor is he a real companion to the former coal miners who drink at his kiosk—he is simply “der Apotheker 34  Renz is also jokingly called “Pullerbudenwärter” (R, 11; outhouse attendant) as the kiosk was once a public toilet.

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der Kaputten” (R, 93; the pharmacist of broken men). Renz comes across as a misanthrope; he curses the men around him as “Pack” (R, 181; pack) and says that “[d]ie meisten Männer will ich tot sehen” (R, 171; I want to see most men dead), but Karl and his gang force their company upon him. Karl ironically promises to “cure” (“heilen,” R, 191) him. Renz, the “Amateur” (R, 231), now feels “peer”-pressure to conform to the masculine ideal of “having” as many women as possible and of taking revenge— he is asked to “be a man” (“Sei ein Mann, Renz,” as Heinrich puts it (R, 181)—but it turns out that his non-actions (he refuses to “buy” women and does not kill anyone after all) and his, in that respect, somewhat “non-­ masculine” behaviour seem to release him from the demons of his past and to shed some of what marginalizes him in terms of masculinity. The tension between the old and the new Duisburg mentioned above is worth returning to briefly when thinking further about the class element that guides many of the characters’ actions. Renz’s attachment to the miners who stand for a long-gone era and are given a voice in brief narratives—Renz’s dreams—told in the collective first-person plural “wir” (we) is particularly significant in this context. These nine interspersed episodes, which are particularly frequent in the novel’s first chapter set in Duisburg, are set off in a different font from the rest of the text and give the reader a flavour of the miners’ pride in their work (R, 21), their position as working-­class men with, quite literally, soot on their faces (R, 24), and their lives as postindustrial subjects today (R, 32). In the second to last interspersal, the “wir” makes a clear connection between their perceived national(ist) masculinity and the Second World War, something which, as I will explore further below, the novel thematizes when the characters leave Germany and are confronted with narratives of Germanness outside its national borders. What these passages make ultimately clear, however, is the novel’s scrutiny of the conditions of working-class life across time, its giving voice to those long gone and no longer heard via a highly educated Renz with a working-class background who is still emotionally strongly connected with his roots. Through Renz, Zaimoglu reveals how meanings of class can shift and this enables him to scrutinize the supposed authenticity that underlines many of the characters’ self-perceptions as working-class men. I will now take a closer look at how many of the characters oscillate between mourning their lost power and their difficult coming-to-terms with their social marginalization and their attempts to regain some form of power by aiming to reinforce their masculinity by other actions. The

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second part of the novel centres therefore on the planned vengeance of Renz’s wife’s murder, which is initiated by Karl and his gang. These intruders trigger a strong, if not unproblematic, collectivity and solidarity among the frequenters of the kiosk—something which they used to experience down in the mines—and they “display loyalty and bravery in confrontation with ‘outsiders’” (Segal 2007, 222). So, Renz’s kiosk customers on the one hand and Karl and the other avengers on the other find different ways of finally “manning up” by confronting a superior opponent: the drinkers fight with Karl and his gang to chase them away from their territory and from their quiet little lives, and Karl and his gang prepare Renz for killing his wife’s alleged murderer. By embracing a different kind of social marginalization, namely, various forms of affray, to different extents, the men who were forced to “go soft” by losing their old lives as workers seem to regain what they perceive to be their masculinity now, and thereby to transform the meaning of working-class masculinity. The “Arbeiterkeule” (R, 93; worker’s club/bat) that Renz mentions in a conversation with Karl and Josef is very much present when it comes to showing trouble-­ makers from outside “wo es langgeht” (R, 93; how things are done around here). Thus what I would like to call “empowering marginalization” ironically helps them overcome their marginalization originally caused by their sudden confrontation with “disempowering marginalization,” namely, unemployment. But this could only be achieved by “Männerbünde” of sorts,35 often somewhat pejoratively referred to as “Männermeute” (R, 68; a mob of men), who, according to Renz, may consist of “moralisch verrottete[] Männer” (R, 119; morally rotten men), but who also take pride in their sense of honour: “Mann gegen Mann war in Ordnung, aber nicht Meute gegen Mann” (R, 192; man against man was fair, but not mob against man). Ultimately, in Ruß, traditional concepts of manhood are in place, if frequently questioned by an uncomfortably participating Renz. It is not surprising then that Zaimoglu lends some of his characters the language of war as they set out to avenge Renz’s wife’s murder, a language that shifts from the novel’s consideration of working-class masculinity to a reflection on the nexus between nationality and masculinity which has been central to this book and with which I also opened this chapter. A reluctant Renz is therefore “carried to the hunt” (“Wir tragen dich zur Jagd,” as Josef says [R, 209]), and Josef quotes “[e]in altdeutsches  On Männerbünde, if in the context of warfare, see Mosse (1985, 154 and 161).

35

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Marschlied,” “wir ziehen in die Schlacht” (R, 246; an old German marching song, we are going into battle). It is perhaps also not a coincidence that they are looking for Stella’s murderer in Austria just across the border from Germany, the “Grenzgebiet” (border area) between the two countries, not far from Adolf Hitler’s mountain retreat, the Kehlsteinhaus (Eagle’s Nest) on the Obersalzberg near the Bavarian town of Berchtesgaden, which they visit (R, 247–49). On their journeys they are confronted with their Germanness, one often associated with the Third Reich, especially abroad: for example, a Bulgarian man in Warsaw calls them in English “[l]ittle Hitler and his friends” to which Karl replies “We are no Hitlers, we are Germans” (R, 50). In many ways the characters’ transnational experience echoes common narratives of German nationhood which have travelled across borders and across time; they also “make” Renz and his fellow travellers German abroad, an experience comparable to that of Hinterland’s Ferda in Prague mentioned above. So, although Josef and some of the male gang accompanying Renz on his journey of planned revenge choose militarized language to engage with their endeavour, that same militarism associated with National Socialism in particular gives them a German identity they did not necessarily choose. Despite their movements around a borderless Europe, the nation gains significance as a main identifier again and pushes identifications via a local place, class, or former profession to the background. In many respects, despite building up tension like in a crime novel as the revenge narrative increasingly gains dominance in the second half of the novel, Ruß nods to the tradition of “Arbeiterliteratur” (working-class literature) or to “social realism” (compare Hofmann 2012, 257). This is a technique which once again puts emphasis on the significance of literary appropriation in Zaimoglu’s work from around 2010 onwards. Perhaps as a way to confront the presumed outsiderdom to this kind of subject matter as some reviews problematically have pointed out (for instance, Spiegel 2011), Zaimoglu—again—finds a way to identify himself with his central characters by calling upon his “son-of-a-Gastarbeiter” background (Bartels 2012) and thus ensuring a certain level of authenticity to his readers. However, by contrast to some attempts in the GDR such as the “Bitterfelder Weg” (Bitterfelder way, Bitterfeld being an industrial town in the former GDR, thus emphasizing the working-class background of this movement’s representatives), or the “Dortmunder Gruppe 61” (Dortmund group 61, with “Dortmund” hinting at the working-class element of this kind of writing) in West Germany represented by writer such as Wolfgang Hilbig

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or Günter Wallraff, the workers themselves do not have a say and are only represented by the author. Ruß is also reminiscent of a Milieustudie of a Realist/Naturalist nature, or early as well as late twentieth-century texts that focus on everyday life, the lives of the so-called “kleine Leute” (little people), such as Hans Fallada’s Kleiner Mann, was nun? (1932; Little Man, What Now?, 2019) or, later, Erich Loest’s Es geht seinen Gang oder Mühen in unserer Ebene (1978; Business as Usual or Our Hard Slog). Zaimoglu thus marks a shift in those literary genres by bringing his characters to a twenty-first-century reality and capturing their lives as postindustrial subjects. Zaimoglu himself has pointed out the everyday-ness of his protagonist. As he puts it: “In uns allen steckt ein Renz” (Durmus 2011; there is a Renz in all of us). Morton’s notion of the mesh is again helpful here to understand Renz’s experience. He writes: “Capitalism has brought all life forms together, if only in the negative. The ground under your feet is being changed forever, along with the water and air” (Morton 2010, 104). Yet the dereliction of the area and the frustrations and tiredness of the men are aestheticized to such an extent that Zaimoglu stays true to himself and to the neo-Romantic novels that precede Ruß—in fact he tends to romanticize this disappearing world of working-class Duisburg which Renz “is longing for” (“Er sehnte sich nach Duisburg,” R, 258) yet cannot find again—by portraying it in an aesthetically “efficient,” that is, largely unmetaphorical, syntactically uncomplicated, and often colloquial, yet engaging way which is not dissimilar to the characters who speak that language, and the term “wortgewaltig” (powerfully eloquent) that used to characterize his work of the 1990s (see Yildiz 2012b, 80) was employed in reviews yet again.

Writing Masculinities Across Literary Borders In Ruß Zaimoglu appears to move away from the transnational considerations of his neo-Romantic novels Liebesbrand and Hinterland, narrowing his focus to social outsiders stuck in local places and in their conceptions of masculinity. Incidentally Ruß was publicized by the publisher Kiepenheuer & Witsch as “eine deutsche Saga” (back cover; a German saga). This does not come as a surprise when considering that Ruß is Zaimoglu’s first novel without a character with a migrant background. Zaimoglu’s choice of characters seems to play into Maxim Biller’s judgement of recent German writing by authors of a non-German background who are increasingly less concerned with their own background of

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migration in their work. This shift in subject matter makes them, according to Biller, complicit to a “boring” mainstream German literature, something which he laments (Biller 2014). Yet by contrast to Biller’s assessment, I would argue that Ruß can be read as a timely comment on particular transnational concerns—the economic crisis and its impact on perceptions of masculinity, on this masculinity’s shift to the margins and back again, and on the emotions linked with such transformations—from a German perspective. Zaimoglu thus shows his readers that the world as produced but also connected by today’s late capitalism is still present in Ruß, despite the novel’s apparent focus on what might come across as specifically German concerns. His appropriation of working-class literature and his focus on the localism that is at its core in the light of those postindustrial transnational connections, or Morton’s mesh, lend themselves particularly well for offering a thought-provoking look into contemporary Europe under the pressures of recent national movements and the economic and social challenges in the European Union. By writing masculinities across national, social and class, but also literary borders, Zaimoglu makes his readers experience a form of “border thinking,” which has also shaped his literary career and production as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, and thus reassesses well-known models of masculinity (Romantic, working-­class) for the twenty-first century. And so he remains true to the literary agenda that has dominated much of his work so far: with Liebesbrand and Hinterland, but also with Ruß Zaimoglu continues to challenge perceived dichotomies such as German vs. different other, femininity vs. masculinity, hegemonic vs. marginalized masculinity, and, not least, “native” vs. transnational.

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Schwering, Markus. 2003. Romantische Geschichtsauffassung—Mittelalterbild und Europagedanke. In Romantik-Handbuch, ed. Helmut Schanze, 543–57. 2nd edn. Stuttgart: Kröner. Segal, Lynne. 2007 [1990]. Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men. 3rd, rev. edn. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Spiegel, Hubert. 2011. Feridun Zaimoglu, Ruß: Und hinterm Wasserhäuschen eine Welt. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung / faz.net, 5 October 2011. https:// www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/rezensionen/belletristik/feridun-­ zaimoglu-­r uss-­und-­hinterm-­wasserhaeuschen-­eine-­welt-­11483764.html?print PagedArticle=true#pageIndex_2. Accessed 31 March 2020. Steinert, Hajo. 2008. Zaimoglus “Liebesbrand” ist pure Leidenschaft.” Welt online, 23 February 2008. https://www.welt.de/kultur/article1709134/ Zaimoglus_Liebesbrand_ist_pure_Leidenschaft.html. Accessed 19 June 2018. Stewart, Lizzie. 2021. Performing New German Realities: Turkish-German Scripts of Postmigration. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Taberner, Stuart. 2015. Transnationalism and Cosmopolitanism: Literary World-­ Building in the Twenty-First Century. In Transnationalism in Contemporary German-Language Literature, ed. Elisabeth Herrmann, Carrie Smith-Prei, and Stuart Taberner, 43–64. Rochester, NY: Camden House. ———. 2017. Transnationalism and German-Language Literature in the Twenty-­ First Century. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Twist, Joseph. 2014. “The Crossing of Love”: The Inoperative Community and Romantic Love in Feridun Zaimoglu’s “Fünf klopfende Herzen, wenn die Liebe springt” and Hinterland. German Life and Letters 67 (3): 399–417. ———. 2018. Mystical Islam and Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary German Literature: Openness to Alterity. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Uysal Ünalan, Saniya. 2013. Liebe als “Dritter Raum”: Feridun Zaimoğlus Liebesbrand als interkultureller Roman. Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik 4 (1): 157–72. Weber, Annette. 2002. “Blood Is a Most Particular Fluid”: Blood as the Object of Scientific Discovery and Romantic Mystification. In Blood: Art, Power, Politics and Pathology, ed. James M. Bradburne, 157–73. Munich: Prestel; Museum für Angewandte Kunst und die Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt am Main. Weber, Beverly M. 2013. Violence and Gender in the “New” Europe: Islam in German Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Weidermann, Volker. 2003. Die neue deutsche Romantik. Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 14 September 2003. FAZ.Net [Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Online-edition]. http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/ literatur-­die-­neue-­deutsche-­romantik-­1115620.html. Accessed 19 June 2018.

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———. 2008. Ich weiß, was wir in diesem Frühling gelesen haben werden. Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung 9, 2 March 2008. FAZ.Net [Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Online-edition]. http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/rezensionen/belletristik/ich-weiss-was-wir-in-diesemfruehling-gelesen-haben-werden-1516771.html. Accessed 19 June 2010. Yeşilada, Karin. 2012. Gotteskrieger und Jungfrauen: Islam im Werk Feridun Zaimoğlus. In Islam in der deutschen und türkischen Literatur, ed. Michael Hofmann and Klaus von Storch, 175–192. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh. Yildiz, Yasemin. 2012a. Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. New York: Fordham University Press. ———. 2012b. Wordforce: Ethnicized Masculinity and Literary Style in Kanak Sprak and Koppstoff. In Feridun Zaimoglu, ed. Tom Cheesman and Karin Yeşilada, 71–91. Contemporary German Writers and Filmmakers 1. Oxford: Peter Lang. Zaimoglu, Feridun. 2004 [1995]. Kanak Sprak: 24 Mißtöne vom Rande der Gesellschaft. 6th edn. Hamburg: Rotbuch. ———. 2006. Leyla: Roman. 2nd edn. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. ———. 2008a. Liebesbrand: Roman. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. ———. 2008b. Reading at Swansea University, 25 June 2008. mms://mrcstr1. swan.ac.uk/german/fz.wmv. Accessed 19 June 2018; URL no longer available. ———. 2008c. Liebesbrand: Dritte Vorlesung. In Feridun Zaimoglu and Ilija Trojanow. Ferne Nähe: Tübinger Poetik-Dozentur 2007, ed. Dorotee Kimmich and Plilipp Ostrowicz, with Maik Bozza, 47–66. Künzelsau: Swiridoff Verlag. ———. 2009a. Hinterland: Roman. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. ———. 2009b. Volkes Gesänge. Sprache im technischen Zeitalter 47 (190): 219–26. ———. 2009c. Interview mit Johanna Kutsche. Ich bin ein Humanistenkopf. ZEIT-online, 17 March 2009. https://www.zeit.de/online/2009/12/ interview-­zaimoglu. Accessed 20 June 2018. ———. 2011. Ruß: Roman. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. ———. 2017. Evangelio: Ein Luther-Roman. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. ———. 2019. Die Geschichte der Frau: Roman. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch.

CHAPTER 6

Man in Crisis: Ilija Trojanow

The Explorer’s Crisis: From “Native” to Transnational So far, I have largely avoided the term “crisis” in this book to name the challenges and changes which masculinities have been facing—only to include it in the title of the final chapter. However, as I explained in the introductory chapter, it would be a noticeable omission in a study on new masculinities not to ask specifically in one of the chapters whether certain men are perceived to be “in crisis.” Crises are associated with times of political and social upheaval or change such as the ones prominent in the primary texts considered here: the two major junctures of 1989/1990 and 2000, which have framed this book, have triggered many challenges to and redefinitions of established forms of masculinity in a German context as I have explored. They have dominated much of the public, but also academic discourses on masculinity in recent years, and the notion of the “crisis” is often part of these discourses. I opened the literary analysis part of my book with what has perhaps been regarded as the most significant gender crisis of recent years in Germany: that of East German masculinities in the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Clemens Meyer’s sharp look into younger and older men in Als wir träumten (When We Were Dreaming) and Im Stein (Bricks and Mortar), respectively, has revealed forms of masculinity which may be © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Matthes, New Masculinities in Contemporary German Literature, Global Masculinities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10318-6_6

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tied to a local context yet are inextricably enmeshed in the transnational. These masculinities reflect wider social conflicts on a local level. The central text in this final chapter of close readings, Ilija Trojanow’s twenty-first century take on what I read as an explorer novel, EisTau (2011b; literally: Melting Ice; translated, interestingly, as The Lamentations of Zeno, 2016),1 by contrast, revolves around a personal crisis of masculinity that is not directly linked to social, political, and cultural changes within Germany, but is connected with, and reflected in, an obviously transnational crisis: that of the environment, more specifically of the melting glaciers in Antarctica, caused by global warming. This ecological crisis, to use a term Val Plumwood employs to call for “a new kind of culture” beyond the persistent “human/nature dualism” (Plumwood 2001, 4), is of particular transnational concern as, according to article 4 of the Antarctic Treaty, Antarctica maintains “territorial sovereignty”: it does not belong to any one nation (British Antarctic Survey website). Its melting glaciers therefore reveal a transnational, indeed planetary, crisis of nature that affects the globe as a whole and highlights “the sensible international relations in this contested spot of future neocolonial exploitation” (Dürbeck 2014, 117). Trojanow’s twenty-first-­ century traveller thus appears as a figure who assembles various crises within him, something which, as we will see, leads to his self-annihilation. In Trojanow’s novel the intertwining of this transnational, planetary environmental crisis with the protagonist’s personal crisis of masculinity becomes particularly prevalent if we consider what underlies the notion of the “crisis of masculinity”: the breakdown, or at least radical questioning, of long-established patterns of masculinity and male role models. The nineteenth-century explorer who raced to conquer “virgin” land to fill the last “white spots” on the map and came back a hero to his homeland represents such a traditional form of hegemonic masculinity that, as we shall see, is no longer exemplary and compatible with the demands of the twenty-first century, a time that has felt particularly harshly the impact of shifting gender roles as well as the consequences of climate change and the wreckage of colonialism, both of which are of concern here. This chapter will ask what happens to this traditional form of masculinity under these circumstances: how does a “crisis of masculinity” manifest itself in relation 1  Page references to EisTau and its translation, The Lamentations of Zeno, will appear in the text, preceded by the abbreviation “ET” and “TLoZ,” respectively. See the translator’s note for an explanation of the translated title (TLoZ, vii–viii).

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to a “crisis of nature”? I argue that we can understand such “crises” through the figure of the contemporary explorer as represented in Trojanow’s EisTau in a nuanced way. Thus we can trace the adaptability of now redundant models of masculinity in a transnational context particularly well and see clearly how masculinities have shifted from “native” to transnational.

From Weltensammler to “Eco-Warrior,” or Crisis of Masculinity Meets Crisis of Nature: EisTau Ilija Trojanow seems to suggest himself as the final author to be discussed in this study as travel and transnationality are such defining factors of his identity as a writer and traveller and therefore his work. Trojanow’s transnational perception of the world has its roots in his biography: he was born in Bulgaria in 1965, fled with his parents to Germany in 1971 via what was then Yugoslavia, grew up in Kenya and spent some time in Paris before returning to Germany for university, and has since lived in India, South Africa, Germany, and Austria.2 The encounter with the other, especially on long-haul journeys, has led to the association of his work with what Christof Hamann and Alexander Honold have termed “Welthaltigkeit” (2009, 9; literally: the containing of world). This comes through particularly well in his travel writing, which covers a wide range of countries and cultures: for example, An den inneren Ufern Indiens: Eine Reise entlang des Ganges (2003; Along the Ganges, 2005), Zu den Heiligen Quellen des Islam: Als Pilger nach Mekka und Medina (2004; Mumbai to Mecca, 2007a), Der entfesselte Globus: Reportagen (2008a; The Unleashed Globe: Reports), and Die Versuchungen der Fremde: Unterwegs in Arabien, Indien und Afrika (2011a; The Temptations of Foreign Lands: On Route 2  See Trojanow’s biography on his personal website (http://trojanow.de). In the following I can only mention some of his texts as Trojanow has had a very productive writing career during which he has also addressed themes such as public surveillance (Angriff auf die Freiheit: Sicherheitswahn, Überwachungsstaat und der Abbau bürgerlicher Rechte, with Juli Zeh, 2009; Attack on Freedom: Security Mania, Surveillance State, and the Reduction of Civil Rights); Bulgaria during or shortly after socialism (as, e.g., in his novel Macht und Widerstand, 2015a; Power and Resistance); or, most recently at the time of writing, fact and fiction in a political context in his novel Doppelte Spur (2020; Two Tracks). However, as I am primarily interested in otherness in Trojanow’s work in the context of this chapter, I focus on works engaging with this theme in my brief overview of his oeuvre. For a full list of his works, see his personal website.

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in Arabia, India, and Africa).3 However, it would be too easy to read Trojanow’s work as an exclusively positive, or even naïve, engagement between self and other in a contemporary global context. Trojanow also consciously raises questions of ethical responsibility between self and other in a world shaped by global political, cultural, and environmental crises. As the title of one of Trojanow’s essays on travelling—“Richtig reisen?” (2015b; Travelling Properly?)—indicates, the question of how to travel “properly,” that is, adequately and responsibly from an ethical point of view in this age of transnational connections and opportunities, is therefore of great concern to Trojanow. His 2018-publication Gebrauchsanweisung fürs Reisen (Manual for Travelling) confirms his concern. Trojanow’s critique of travel is particularly significant considering that travel has become a pursuit of the masses in the twentieth century. Where travel to somewhere like the Arctic once would have been restricted to a small elite, a tourist visit is now within the means of vast swathes of the Western world’s population. This marks an epochal shift in the history of mankind. With constantly accelerating technological advances geographical distances can be overcome more easily than ever before. This ease of passage in space does not, however, guarantee an open or conscientious relationship between self and other or a fundamental challenge to the traveller’s preconceptions and attitudes towards different cultures and religions, as Trojanow continues to point out.4 In “Richtig reisen?,” as in many of his publications that revolve around his own travels (such as the ones mentioned above) but also around travel in general, Trojanow presents himself as a committed writer-cum-traveller (Preece 2013, 112), who does not tire of calling for a true sense of responsibility in our interaction with others. A key example for his literary engagement on an ethical level is Kampfabsage: Kulturen bekämpfen sich nicht—sie fließen zusammen (Rejection of War: Cultures Don’t Fight Each Other—They Are Joining Each Other) with the Indian poet, cultural theorist, and curator Ranjit Hoskoté (2007). In this manifesto-like collection of essays the authors

3  On Trojanow’s travel writing, particularly Zu den Heiligen Quellen des Islam, see Matthes (2011, 79–120). 4  See, for example, the essays collected on Trojanow’s personal website (http://trojanow. de). Scholars have also commented on Trojanow’s critical approach to today’s self-other relations, for example, Christina Kraenzle who points out that “Trojanow challenges the myths and prejudices that continue to shape our understandings of self and other, even in a world increasingly connected through mass travel and technology” (2015, 126).

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argue against the so-called clash of cultures and for the positive encounter, or intermingling, of civilizations. The ethical concerns that result from engagement with other cultures and religions are also central to Trojanow’s editorial and translation work as well as his fiction and poetics. He has edited a wide range of works by diverse authors such as Arnon Grünberg’s travel reports in Couchsurfen und andere Schlachten (2013; Couchsurfing and Other Battles), early poems by José F.A. Oliver in the collection Heimatt (2015; Home), or the only novel by G.V. Desani, Alles über Herrn H. Hatterr (2020; All About H. Hatterr, 1948), published in Trojanow’s series “Weltlese” (literally: world read; this is likely to be a play on the word “Auslese” (selection), thus stressing the “worldliness” of Trojanow’s selection of titles for this series) at the Büchergilde Gutenberg. In his debut novel Die Welt ist groß und Rettung lauert überall (1996; The World is Vast and Rescue is Lurking Everywhere), Trojanow already deals with otherness as a result of exile, something which he explored further in his autobiographical essay Nach der Flucht (2017; After the Flight). Yet the most famous of Trojanow’s works that addresses fundamental questions of otherness is his 2006 novel Der Weltensammler (The Collector of Worlds, 2008b), on whose writing process he partly reflected in his lecture “Voran ins Gondwanaland” (Off to Gondwanaland) delivered as part of his Tübinger Poetik-Dozentur in 2007.5 This novel enjoyed a wide reception—it was also shortlisted for the German Book Prize in 2006—and was an enormous market success, both in Germany and abroad. Reviews have tended, however, to focus on the intercultural aspects of the text and in so doing neglect the actual subject of travel and self-other encounters: the figure of the Western male traveller-explorer—such as Richard Burton in the novel just mentioned—a figure with whose twentieth-century incarnation Trojanow identifies and who embodies his modelling of the issues involved in an ethical relationship with otherness (compare Preese 2011, 121–22). Der Weltensammler describes the journeys of the nineteenth-century British imperial explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890). The novel examines how Burton furiously “collects” worlds: in true colonial

5  Trojanow held this lectureship jointly with Feridun Zaimoglu. It is only one of many guest lectureships and professorships he has held over the years (see Trojanow’s personal website, http://trojanow.de).

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fashion, he “conquers” them and makes them his own.6 One means he employs is to write about those worlds, translating them, both literally and metaphorically, for his readers back home. This writing makes them comprehensible and graspable, yet a certain level of exoticism is preserved in order to keep those other worlds at a safe distance and thus defuse any threat they might pose to the stable categories of home. My interpretation of Burton’s “world collecting” leans heavily on Edward W. Said’s concept of Orientalism, on which I have already drawn when analysing Navid Kermani’s and Feridun Zaimoglu’s constructions of contemporary other masculinities that appear to remain to the present day subject to such Orientalist techniques of perception. Said describes exactly these processes of encountering and attempting to understand the other as a means of exercising rhetorical and political control, objectifying non-European spaces and peoples in the furtherance of European hegemony. Indeed the worldhistorical Burton is a frequent point of reference in Said’s Orientalism.7 While the issues involved in the encounter between a white, male, Western explorer and the other are well known, the specific representation of masculinity in liminal situations, as tested under difficult circumstances abroad (Vickery 2012) in texts such as Der Weltensammler, sheds a stark light on the unequal relationship between self and other this interaction supposes and pursues. By choosing Burton as the hero of Der Weltensammler, Trojanow could, however, be accused of perpetuating long-established colonial patterns of the self-other encounter as an interaction of unequal partners shaped by predetermined, clear-cut power relations. Trojanow’s construction of Burton could hence be regarded as contradicting his outspoken defence of a genuinely equal relationship between “us” and those perceived as foreign or other  (compare Preece 2011, 119–23). However, contemporary constructions of manhood must be viewed as challenges to, or redefinitions of, established models of masculinity and as one specific literary approach to present-day negotiations of self-other relations. The notion of a “crisis of masculinity” or “men in  However, Ernest Schonfield views Burton’s activities more positively: “Trojanow’s Burton does not just collect worlds; he participates in them and moves between them restlessly” (2013, 95). And Julian Preece explains: “He [Burton] not only ‘collects worlds,’ he incorporates them—in the literal meaning of the world—by making them part of himself” (2010, 222).  7  See, for example, Said (1995 [1978], 195–96). Preece points out that “Edward Said insisted on the imperialist character of Burton’s writings and the asymmetrical relationship between him and the countries he visited and wrote about, which was not a meeting of equals” (2010, 213). 6

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crisis” will thereby help us tackle the question whether this role model of sorts can survive in this day and age of transnational movement. In the introductory chapter I have already elaborated on the notion of the crisis in considerations of masculinity. Here I would like to return to Stephen Whitehead’s suggestion that the notion of the crisis implies “evidence of some men’s attempts to reinforce or construct a particular sense of masculine identity that provides them with a feeling of potency in an increasingly insecure world” (2002, 61). This is of particular relevance when engaging with the figure of the traveller-explorer, a figure who is traditionally associated with potency, with strength, willpower, and dominance, especially in the colonial patterns of conqueror and conquered, “man” and nature. Yet the question is what happens to those traits when they are challenged in a world shaken by climate change, when it no longer makes sense (if it ever made sense at all) to see the dominant white male as the default against which all other gender categories are marked. As an example of such a dominant white man, the twenty-first-century explorer can no longer be unmarked in the gender order; he, too, becomes a category characterized by changeability and instability, or in Raewyn Connell’s terms, “disruption” and “transformation” (2005, 84). Wishing to capture such disruptions and transformations in an accessible manner may be the reason why some critics have pointed out the usefulness of the notion of the crisis. Sally Robinson, for example, “remain[s] convinced that crisis is, in fact, the best way to understand the contemporary condition of white masculinity. […] However, a cyclical, as opposed to linear, understanding of crisis is perfectly suited to a history that appears to move through waves of crisis and resolution” (2006, 250; Robinson’s emphasis). Robinson’s words echo Jürgen Martschukat and Olaf Stieglitz’s point that the concept of the crisis could enable us “das wechselhafte Spiel der Stabilisierung und Destabilisierung von performativen Männlichkeiten und ihre Stellungen in dem Spektrum marginal-hegemonial schärfer zu fassen” (2008, 69–70; to grasp more precisely the alternation between stabilization and destabilization in performative masculinities, and their positions on the spectrum from marginal to hegemonic). The performative element of masculinity is another crucial element in a “crisis discourse” as it contributes to the undermining of the perceived ahistoricity and stableness of gender and gender relations. This brings us back to Connell’s suggestion to reserve the term crisis for “the crisis of a gender order as a whole, and of its tendencies towards crisis” (2005, 84). So, what I am interested in this chapter is how the notion of the crisis relates to the figure

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of the traveller-explorer as perhaps the most prominent example of “white masculinity” as Robinson has it. This manifestation of a hegemonic, dominant form of masculinity has undergone particularly noticeable transformations in the gender order in the context of both transnationalism and environmental crisis. The latter two aspects are increasingly prominent in contemporary negotiations of the relationship to the other, including nature. In Trojanow’s novel, such intertwining of transformations or “crises” causes a form of conflict in the male protagonist, which is not dissimilar to the conflicts experienced by the protagonists in the texts examined in previous chapters. All in all, the figure of the explorer serves as a particularly fruitful example of a form of masculinity that perhaps complies most with the cliché of a hegemonic man: strong, “out there,” fighting the elements, conquering nature and those living in and with it in faraway lands, and thus proving his masculinity. The validation of manhood through travel abroad goes back to the belief that journeying to remote areas, especially prevalent in the nineteenth century,8 was a masculine pursuit that allowed men to prove their courage and their “ability to endure hardship” far removed from the sphere of women (Vickery 2012). Travel also sharpened what Amanda Vickery has termed “an austere version of masculine heroism”: this heroism is fashioned through the struggle of “men against the elements,” an idea which has survived to this day as men are still often encouraged, or even required, to “test[] themselves in extreme environments” (Vickery 2012). In a backlash against feminist achievements,9 some writers and activists, above all those involved in the mythopoetic men’s movement that began in the early 1980s “to recuperate their own innate, masculine power” (Adams and Savran 2002, 5), have even argued that these environments free of female interference are the only spaces left for men to reconnect with their “true” masculinity in the contemporary world. However, here I am not primarily interested in such notions of hypermasculinity that the figure of the explorer traditionally embodies, but rather in the conditions of the twenty-first century that have put that figure to the test. The following questions help us approach and examine the  Christina Kraenzle sees parallels between that and Trojanow’s work here: “Nomade auf vier Kontinenten does little to address the historical gender coding of mobility and adventure as inherently masculine” (2013, 151). 9  See also my comments on this phenomenon in the introductory chapter. 8

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transformations of this figure of masculinity: how can a traveller-explorer’s masculinity be constructed and perceived as the world has become significantly smaller and reachable, and manhood can no longer be tested in environments that seem to require “strong men” as in the eras prior to mass tourism; and how does an ethical conscience, or an increasing awareness of the human contribution to the destruction of the exact same environment whose “conquering” is so strongly linked to hegemonic masculinity, come into play here? These are particularly noteworthy points if we bear in mind that the traveller, that is, not the tourist, of the twenty-­ first century tends to be an “individual” traveller, at least they often aspire to be so, only to be met by plenty of fellow travellers even in the most remote areas of the planet. How do such encounters shape male self-­ perceptions as well as the relationship with nature then? All these considerations make it necessary to examine the figure of the male explorer in the context of contemporary literary engagements with one of the most prevalent ethical questions today: how to encounter the other with moral adequacy. A brief summary of the plot of EisTau will already make clear how the notion of the “crisis of masculinity” and the complexity of the self-other encounter are intertwined in Trojanow’s novel. EisTau, like Der Weltensammler introduced earlier, also centres on a male traveller-explorer, but its protagonist, the middle-aged glaciologist-turned-tour guide Zeno Hintermeier,10 is anything but a twenty-first-century version of Richard Burton. His journey to Antarctica highlights his concern with a more responsible relationship with the other, that is, nature, in the face of the disastrous consequences of global warming, an environmental process, or crisis, which lies at the root of his mental suffering, his own crisis. The novel’s subject matter has determined the text’s perception as a climate change novel and its critique within the contexts of ecocriticism (e.g. Goodbody 2013, esp. 94–95), ecopsychology (Wilke 2014, esp. 265),11 and “Anthropocene literature” (Dürbeck 2014). Yet similar to the dominant interpretation of Der Weltensammler as a novel of interculturalism, these ecocritical approaches to EisTau underestimate, I argue, the central position of Zeno as a contemporary explorer-figure who has to negotiate his precarious position within the transnational patterns of which climate change as a planetary phenomenon is part. It does not come as a surprise  On the name Zeno, see Preece (2013, 121).  Here Wilke praises the depiction of suffering in EisTau.

10 11

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perhaps that Zeno is Bavarian with a strong connection with “his” local glacier. Yet his love for ice “transnationalizes” as he approaches the glaciers in Antarctica—in itself a transnational place as it does not belong to any nation—with a similar kind of tenderness and responsibility. Although Julian Preece has drawn parallels between Trojanow’s Burton and Zeno Hintermeier as characters who both pursue their distinct ideals but ultimately fail,12 an examination of Zeno as a more responsibly minded, crisis-­ ridden traveller-explorer needs to be pushed further. Such an assessment of Zeno will allow me to trace a contemporary masculinity that has been influenced particularly by the transnational tendencies of the past decades, including the easier access to the other, at the same time as the allegedly “heroic” masculinity of male explorers has undergone some radical transformations (compare Connell 2005, 84). This figure, traditionally associated not with ethical encounters with the other but instead with recklessness and the wish to conquer unknown lands, encourages a reassessment of self-other encounters in literature as ethically more responsible encounters. EisTau is a key text in these literary re-evaluations. This approach, which takes into account the significance of affect in the novel’s ethical encounters between self and other, Zeno and nature, will reveal a responsibly minded explorer who both negotiates and struggles with his relationship with the other in his notebooks and language. Centring on the emotional reactions of its protagonist Zeno Hintermeier, EisTau can therefore be seen as a unique contribution to a growing corpus of engaged literature13 that Carrie Smith-Prei regards as “the definite marker of the contemporary or present moment in literature” (2015, 81). Her comment that “[a]ffect is key to grasping the immediacy of the present […]” (ibid.) allows us to view critically Zeno’s negotiation of his relationship with nature. Initially, however, Trojanow’s protagonist appears to follow the footsteps of earlier, less ethically inclined explorers as he journeys to perhaps the most extreme environment on Earth that “man” can face: Antarctica. 12  Preece (2013, 117): “both leading characters [of Der Weltensammler and EisTau] behave in ultimately self-defeating ways as they fail to rise to the challenges that they set themselves.” For a further brief discussion of the connection between the Burton of Der Weltensammler and Zeno of EisTau, see ibid., 122. 13  See Mayer (2015, 242). For Mayer, who references Goodbody (2013, 100), the novel’s proximity to engaged literature is due to “d[er] Kontrastierung von alarmistisch-moralischem Erzähen mit schneidender Satire” (the contrast between alarmist-moral narration and poignant satire).

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Yet instead of providing a pristine space in which Zeno can discover and conquer nature, as Burton-like explorers and adventurers would conceivably have done in other eras, the disappearance of these expanses of purity under the pressures of late industrial capitalism that have triggered the global environmental disaster of melting glaciers mirrors his personal crisis and diminishment (see also Dürbeck 2014, 116). The futility of Zeno’s efforts is confirmed by the mode of contact between “man” and nature now prevalent, which has an impact not only on the contemporary traveller’s perception of nature, but also on his sense of self. Zeno has taken a position as an expert tour guide on a cruise liner, a role that removes him from the potential dangers of direct contact with nature on his own, the need to actually make landfall in the harsh arctic environment, and thus to confront his personal crisis of masculinity face-on. Instead he hopes to introduce tourists to the beauty of Antarctica and thus raise their environmental consciousness. We learn, in an ironic twist on the figure of the “adventurer,” that he has accepted this job primarily in order to escape his old life—Zeno’s glaciologist’s love for “his” melting glacier in the Alps that, he believes, can only lead to pain and suffering, and he is moved to give up his job at a research institute, along with his failed marriage, rather than to explore new territories. This discrepancy between Burton as a nineteenth- and Zeno as a twenty-first-century traveller is due to a general understanding that, at the beginning of our century, there is no “new world” left to be discovered. All that remains is to document as a helpless witness the disappearance of whole worlds of nature.14 We can name this phenomenon, after Christina Kraenzle’s thoughts on today’s travel in her analysis of Trojanow’s travelogue Nomade auf vier Kontinenten (2007b, Nomad on Four Continents), a traveller’s “sense of belatedness” (Kraenzle 2013, 134; see also Menke 2000, 568), yet Zeno’s time lag is of a different kind: he comes too late to save the glaciers from melting. At this point his crisis of masculinity meets the crisis of nature. Zeno’s “sense of belatedness,” which may explain his lack of ambition to counteract actively the consequences of global warming, comes through particularly on the meta-level of EisTau. The novel consists of his 14  Zeno’s despair is one of the topics Der Standard discussed with Trojanow in an interview: the anonymous author/interviewer highlights Zeno’s “Verzweiflung, weil sich alles dokumentieren, aber nicht ändern lässt” (desperation because everything can be documented but nothing can be changed) while Trojanow states: “Zeno fühlt sich als Wissenschaftler auf die Rolle eines Protokollisten der Vernichtungen reduziert” (as scientist Zeno feels being reduced to the role of secretary of destructions) (2011).

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notebook, which serves as a space for recording events that determine his day-­to-­day life as well as the impact of global warming on the glaciers, but also for his own reflections, anger management, and self-construction as an “eco-warrior” who perceives himself to be better—that is, more environmentally responsible and conscientious—than the tourists on the ship. This kind of behaviour appears as a way to combat his conflicting emotions. His notebook mediates what Zeno can only perceive as people’s growing ignorance of the otherness they encounter when travelling abroad, because his initial educational enthusiasm is met by indifference on the part of the tourists. They are shown as lacking even a basic awareness of climate change, which merely creates greater frustration in Zeno, whose emotional reactions to their ignorance are seen to intensify as the novel wears on. The text is punctuated with radio messages, half-­passionate, half-angry tirades, and sensationalist news reports that narrate Zeno’s story from the point of view of an unknown “I” and “we.” Within the chronology of the novel, these inserts can be dated to the point at which the narrative, Zeno’s journal, and Zeno as a human being come to an end: Zeno seizes the ship, leaving the tourists stranded on the ice while they are taking part in an art installation (they will be rescued as one of those radio messages reports), and sailing off without any apparent aim in mind (compare Goodbody 2013, 99). On the one hand, EisTau documents how with Zeno the “classic” explorer as encountered in history books and constructed in fiction finally disappears and gives way to the disillusioned, aimless traveller; on the other, the novel also reflects on when, and how, the limits of reason are reached as words fail when trying to describe the disappearance of “pure” wild nature. As we will see in the final part of this chapter, this linguistic crisis prepares the reader for the end of nature as well as Zeno’s end. Given the complexity of the encounter between “man” and nature in today’s transnational contexts, it might not come as a surprise that EisTau ties in with a wider literary interest in male travellers roaming far from their comfort zones. In response to some personal crisis, these characters travel to extreme environments, particularly those dominated by ice and glaciers; through their physical experiences in such unforgiving yet also breathtakingly beautiful nature, they confront their own sense of self and its physical and emotional boundaries. Raoul Schrott’s Tristan da Cunha oder Die Hälfte der Erde (2003, Tristan da Cunha oder Half of the Earth), Christoph Ransmayr’s Der fliegende Berg (2006; The Flying Mountain, 2018), and more recently Thomas Glavinic’s Das größere Wunder (2013,

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The Greater Miracle) are but three examples of literary portrayals of such, at times, self-indulgent male journeys to parts of the world that offer the protagonists a temporary escape from their troubling past back home, but that have also become part of the transnational machinery of tourism. These novels engage with rather complex notions of masculinity, with transnationalism as well as with nationalism, the environment and its endangered state in the twenty-first century, and—given the wealth of texts about “men en route”—they confirm the urgency of such questions in contemporary literature as they are negotiated via the transforming role of the explorer represented by those male characters. EisTau, perhaps not coincidentally, was published in time for the centenary of the South Pole expeditions led by Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott in 1911/12, which itself entailed a number of publications, especially biographies, thus suggesting an ongoing fascination with such “heroes.”15 Today, just over a hundred years after the explorers who revealed a part of the world previously untouched by Western man, as pioneers rather than part of a crowd of sightseers, the male traveller now finds himself in the position of no longer being able to be “first” anywhere. This inability to go and find new lands is a particularly noteworthy point: if for previous generations the possibility of space travel only theoretically opened a new territory beyond the limits of the known world, today despite our age of economic recession and shrinking government, the idea of pushing back the known limits of outer space through manned space travel appears more achievable than ever before. In the second and third decades of the twenty-first century, space travel has undergone an exceptional commercialization and reinvigoration. In the context of this chapter entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and Jeff Bezos represent the most interesting examples of this contemporary development. These men have been pushing the boundaries of (literally) manned space travel with their respective companies SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, and Blue Origin. Branson and Bezos flew into space themselves in 2021, which may only be the start of more widely accessible space travel. The mission of Musk’s company SpaceX is to “mak[e] humanity multiplanetary” by establishing human life on Mars (SpaceX website). In many ways these men’s ventures echo what Alexander C.T. Geppert has described as follows: “Numerous ventures to ‘explore,’ ‘conquer’ and 15  For example, see Christian Jostmann’s Das Eis und der Tod: Scott, Amundsen und das Drama am Südpol (2011, Ice and Death: Scott, Amundsen and the Drama at the South Pole).

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‘colonize’ the depths of the universe in both fact and fiction must be read as attempts to counter the prevailing horror vacui, the fear of empty spaces and voids of infinity felt and explicitly formulated since the sixteenth century” (2018, 3). The universe now appears as the only space that is left for contemporary male explorers (as represented by Branson, Bezos, and Musk) to “conquer” and thereby to prove their masculinity. On earth the horror vacui has long given way to the “horror” of no longer finding empty space, because the only arena left to explore now on our planet has already been discovered and fully mapped out. Any attempt to revisit it on old terms of derring-do is like a poor pastiche. It may not come as a surprise therefore that many of the literary incarnations of the contemporary traveller-explorer fail in their attempt to reach their adventurous goals, which may explain why so many of them disappear in nature.16 Yet as my examples show exploring the idea of “pure” wild nature as the “true other” (compare Goodbody 2013, 98) that challenges the urban man of our cosmopolitan, artificial cities and brings him to the limit of his physical and mental abilities remains an intriguing subject in contemporary literature in order to explore how “man” can break free from social conventions and restrictions and embark on adventures abroad that now focus primarily on the pushing of the frontiers of the male self rather than those of geographical spaces. The explorers’ masculinity is shown in these texts as a flexible category which adapts to the transnational circumstances that determine the protagonists’ often precarious and challenging relationships with cultural, religious, and—as is the case in EisTau—natural others. Concern with, and love for, nature is certainly not a new phenomenon in the German (literary) context; in fact, nature has often been used as a tool for the construction of German (national) identities, as Sabine Wilke has pointed out (2015b, 638). In her study German Culture and the Modern Environmental Imagination: Narrating and Depicting Nature Wilke takes the reader through various phases of the relationship between German culture and nature, starting with Immanuel Kant, moving on to writers such as Georg Forster and Alexander von Humboldt, and arriving at the present day with the films of Werner Herzog (2015a). Others have 16  On the disappearance of Ransmayr’s protagonist Josef Mazzini in Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis (1984; The Terrors of Ice and Darkness, 1991), see Menke (2000, 596). Menke also discusses extensively the question of succession in this article, esp. 573, 578–79, and 593. See also Menke (2012, 66).

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traced the conceptions of nature in the work of, for example, Goethe, Nietzsche, Heidegger, as well as Adorno and Marcuse as key moments of the presence of nature in German thought (Goodbody 2017a). Twentieth-­ century writers such as Wolfgang Hilbig or W.G. Sebald have also shaped “nature writing” in German; and environmental disasters such as the nuclear accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant have triggered influential texts such as Christa Wolf’s Störfall (1987; Accident: A Day’s News, 1989). Yet in German literary history it seems that the Romantics above all show how nature, or rather idealized nature, can serve as an object of projection for “man’s” negotiations with himself and even for wider nationalist projects (compare, e.g., Schulz 2008, 47–48). I have mentioned the Romantics last in my brief introduction to the significance of nature in German literature and thought as Trojanow’s protagonist seems to continue in a “neo-Romantic” fashion when it comes to employing nature for the construction of his own identity as man, scientist, and “eco-warrior.” Thus my preliminary thoughts on EisTau suggest the fruitfulness of an ecocritical approach to analysing contemporary takes on the male explorer in literature. Ecocriticism helps open up ethical questions in an age shaped by climate change—a process with a direct, even if not necessarily adequately recognized or seriously considered, impact on people’s lives, including those of male traveller-explorers such as Trojanow’s protagonist, whose agendas change in the light of increasingly frequent environmental disasters. What EisTau highlights particularly in its engagement with nature is that today the environmental changes that endanger nature and affect “man” are now largely understood to be as man-made. It is widely accepted that we are living in the age of the “Anthropocene,” or, as Gabriele Dürbeck et al. define it, “the epoch of accelerated and global human impact through Earth’s biosphere since the Industrial Revolution” (2015, 118), whose influences have now “reached a planetary level” (ibid., 119) and have made the long-­rendered “nature/ culture divide” irrelevant (ibid., 121). With EisTau Trojanow is rethinking the “nature/culture divide,” that is, more specifically, the self-other relationship between “man” and nature. By looking more thoroughly into the figure of the explorer in its twenty-­ first-­century incarnation—perhaps “transnational” masculinity per se— and his relationship with nature at a local as well as global, or more precisely planetary, level in the age of the Anthropocene and by giving it this specifically ethical dimension, the discussion in this chapter aims to “move closer to the vital problem of the ethical relation obtaining in new

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models of transnationality, internationality, or multinationality” (Elias and Moraru 2015, xvii; Elias and Moraru’s emphasis). Thus we can find particularly revealing responses in this final chapter of close readings to the complex relationships between self and other, the local and the global, the “native” and the transnational that have directed my discussions of new masculinities in this book.

Encountering Nature and the Male Self: Responsibility, Otherness, and Affect As people’s ignorance of otherness is, in Zeno’s eyes, growing, his sense of responsibility for that other, nature, is intensifying. I would therefore like to read Zeno’s encounter with nature and his documentation of that encounter as a practical way of recording his emotions and ultimately as an attempted “ethical act.” Seen in this light, EisTau can be analysed in the context of “the ongoing ‘ethical turn’ across the arts and humanities” (Jeremiah and Matthes 2013, 3). This “ethical turn” is associated with, among others, Emmanuel Levinas, one of the key thinkers on self-other relations: being faced with the other is inherently ethical as it “challenges illusions of separateness, intactness, and invulnerability, making the other’s mortality one’s own affair. It obliges the looker, binding him or her into a relationship of responsibility” (ibid.).17 Part of the ethical turn has been the extension of Levinas’s ideas, so that our responsibility is seen to go beyond that which has a face to more abstract entities with which we enter relationships and upon which our continuing existence depends. In part, a responsibility to the environment, to nature, is also a responsibility to all the others that have a share in it, not merely a singular other. In EisTau feeling a sense of obligation and responsibility is only the first step in Zeno’s encounter with the other that is nature. Yet the particularity of a place like the Antarctic is its austere inhospitability, its lack of anything that could be reduced anthropomorphically to a Levinasian “face.” In addressing these questions in the context of EisTau, I shall draw on another key critic on ethical encounters, Sara Ahmed, whose ideas have already helped me read self-other relations in several of the novels discussed in the previous chapters. Although in her study Strange Encounters (2000) she is concerned with the figure of “the stranger,” their embodiment and recognition, and the impact thereof on community, something  Jeremiah and Matthes refer to Levinas (1989, 83) in this context.

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which I first explored in this study in Maxim Biller’s Esra and, to an extent, also in Navid Kermani’s Kurzmitteilung and Feridun Zaimoglu’s Liebesbrand, her notion of “stranger fetishism,” which I adapt to mean “fetishism of the other” in Zeno’s encounter with nature, will be particularly crucial here. Ahmed’s work, especially her subsequent study The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), ties in with the “affective turn” in ethics and offers a stronger emphasis on emotionality and embodiment, thus counteracting the abstract rendering of the subject of which Levinas and other thinkers have been accused (Jeremiah and Matthes 2013, 3–4). In EisTau emotionality and embodiment determine Zeno’s relationship with nature, both when coming into actual physical contact with the glaciers in the Alps as a glaciologist and in the Antarctic as a tour guide, and when capturing these encounters in words. It should not be forgotten that Zeno’s engagement with nature in the transnational and capitalist context of the Anthropocene also has a political dimension. According to Smith-Prei, affect is “politically charged,” especially in transnational contexts (2015, 66). Thus my reading of EisTau specifically ties in with ecocritical considerations if we follow Greg Garrard’s definition of ecocriticism as “an avowedly political mode of analysis […]. Ecocritics generally tie their cultural analyses explicitly to a ‘green’ moral and political agenda” (2004, 3). Although Zeno’s encounter with nature, his writing about it, may primarily shape his male sense of self, rather than be “about” nature, his documenting and lamenting of its disappearance can be regarded as part of the “‘green’ moral and political agenda” that Garrard ascribes to ecocritics and thus as a counteract of sorts to the ignorance and failure to act of most Westerners in the face of climate change. Simultaneously, however, there is an inherent problem in Zeno’s agenda as individual male self-realization and ecological thinking, which is necessarily collective, contradict each other. Thus, with EisTau, Trojanow both offers a comment on the possibilities of developing a sense of responsibility for the other, nature, in this day and age and critically engages with the limits of such a responsibility if the traveller’s crisis-ridden self rather than nature, which is close to complete disappearance, takes centre stage. Furthermore, Zeno’s self-realization via his supposed attempts to counteract brings his own impotence home to him. He can only state soberly: “bei uns gibt es keine Natur mehr” (ET, 149; “there isn’t any nature left in my country,” TLoZ, 140). Zeno’s statement can be read as a resigned reply to Plumwood’s analysis of the Western dichotomy between “human”

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and “not-human,” seen in the context of EisTau more specifically the “uncivilized,” that she regards as a form of imperialism (Plumwood 2001; see also Huggan and Tiffin 2010, 5–6). The contemporary exploitation of nature is a form of imperialism, and it has clearly gone too far as it only leaves melting ice behind. Zeno’s comment therefore begs the question: how can he encounter nature that is—literally—melting away, but that is part of his identity as scientist and traveller? And what impact does this encounter have on him? First, Zeno’s sense of self is not based on heroism, a fact which some might regard as unusual, given that he is travelling to Antarctica. He shows no identification with the mythical South Pole explorers such as Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott. Even if he did want to identify with them, these men—unlike Zeno—have already left a questionable legacy rooted in colonial conquest and exploitation behind. For Zeno there is, therefore, nothing left, other than his devaluation of the “old” explorers’ achievements in order to differentiate himself from them. Instead Zeno, who as a glaciologist has informed knowledge about the ice, comes across as a responsible traveller without any desire to discover anything. In fact when he reads to his Filipina lover, the waitress Paulina, from their travel accounts, the “Berichte[] der sogenannten Entdecker” (ET, 67; “reports of the so-called Explorers,” TLoZ, 60), he clearly disapproves of what he regards as their “greedy” way of taking nature “als wäre sie eine Jungfrau” (ET, 67; “as if she were a virgin,” TLoZ, 60). Zeno’s assessment of those who came before him is not surprising if we accept that the age of the Anthropocene has triggered a more ethically aware perception of nature, people’s living space. Zeno’s male self can therefore no longer be based on such self-sufficient “heroic” deeds that submit nature to “man” and thus clearly separate nature from culture. Instead, what is required is a redefinition of the meaning of the male explorer in the twenty-first century, a time that not only has seen particularly noticeable challenges to traditional, “hegemonic” forms of masculinity (see, e.g., Bielby and Matthes 2015, 256–58) as this study has demonstrated throughout, but also a radical redefinition of the relationship between human and non-human natures. However, Zeno also indulges in his crisis, his suffering, as well as in his feeling of superiority towards both his “predecessors” and the tourists. In EisTau the complexity of the self-other relation and Zeno’s scientific, collectively oriented perception of nature thus lead us to question any celebration of the tough, ruthless male explorer.

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Consequently, instead of displaying the hypermasculine traits of stolid Victorian explorers, Zeno is passionate about his glaciers “to the point of obsession” (Preece 2013, 112) or even, to borrow Ahmed’s term, fetishization. This fetishization could be read as an expression of what Trojanow has called Zeno’s “verzweifelte Unsicherheit” (Trojanow 2010; desperate insecurity) as Zeno finds himself in a moral dilemma (Preece 2013, 117). Despite his desire to teach tourists about the effects of global warming, by working in the tourist industry, Zeno becomes part of the transnational machinery that facilitates easy and privileged travel, as well as the capitalist marketing of nature, including the marketing of its disappearance.18 The novel therefore also engages critically with the “consumption” of nature by tourists, which could be described as the conquering of nature in an updated, twenty-first-century form (compare Huggan and Tiffin 2010, 67). This consumption also accelerates nature’s disappearance because, “[f]rom the perspective of the Anthropocene, the consumer industry leaves manifold footprints on the geological strata” (Dürbeck 2014, 118). If EisTau conceives of glaciers as “pure,” or “pure as the driven snow,” as the saying goes, then the melting of the glaciers becomes a potent metaphor for a fallen world and a dirty, corrupted life epitomized by the capitalist practices which Zeno so frequently criticizes, but from which he, like anybody, cannot escape and in which he is of necessity complicit. In short: Zeno’s moral dilemma or, put more pessimistically in Axel Goodbody’s words, his “guilty conscience” (Goodbody 2013, 98) comes down to a contradiction: on the one hand, he makes a living from, even consumes, the other, his fetish nature; on the other hand—in line with Levinasian ethics19—Zeno feels responsible for the other and aims for a respectful relationship with it. However, Zeno’s relationship with nature becomes more complicated than the binary perception of nature vs. culture that allows for its exploitation in the first place (Mayer 2006, 114), if we consider Zeno as a man 18  As Preece points out: “He [Zeno] profits from the modern form of imperialism known as tourism, which he quietly despises on account of the tourists’ ignorance and their contribution to the destruction of the habitat that they have come to admire. […] Trojanow’s hint that Zeno may be delusional is surely an invitation to see through him and to subject his stance to a critique. If this reading is right, then EisTau depicts a character grappling with the dilemma of wanting to halt humanity’s destruction of its own living space but who does not know how to go about achieving this goal, even though he is ready to die trying” (2013, 117). 19  See Ahmed (2000, 146): “in Levinasian ethics, the responsibility for the other is infinite and before being.”

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whose personal crisis as well as sense of responsibility is mirrored in his emotions. For Ahmed “emotions are what move us” in order to act, to do something (Ahmed 2004, 171). Yet Zeno appears to react rather than to act as a consequence of his emotions. His passion finds its expression in his anger towards tourists, but also in his grief for the melting glaciers and his shame, at both his helplessness and collusive position on the ship, all of which result in melancholia, feeling “paralyzed” (ET, 10; TLoZ, 10), and thus his inability to act on his emotions in a morally responsible way (compare Preece 2013, 116). During a conversation with the journalist Mary, Zeno reflects: “auf einmal hörte ich mich zugeben, daß ich manchmal Scham empfinde, auf diesem Schiff zu arbeiten, zumal ich auf dieser Fahrt als Expeditionsleiter mehr Verantwortung trage, die Touristen sollte man umleiten, in einen Themenpark” (ET, 101; my emphasis; “all of a sudden I hear myself confessing how I sometimes feel ashamed to be working on this ship, especially on this trip when I’m even more responsible because I’m Expedition Leader, the tourists should be sent elsewhere, to a theme park”; TLoZ, 93–94; my emphasis). Even in a position of power and prestige, as knowledgeable expedition guide, Zeno cannot act on but only react to his emotions, which for him are an unhelpful mix of passive aggression and shame. Neither his professional sense of responsibility nor the moments of affect that could move him to display his responsibility outwardly (by, for example, actively raising awareness for climate change among the tourists) make him a moral role model.20 Instead his lack of response to the human beings around him only intensifies his misanthropic side and moves him emotionally even closer to the ice. However, his passivity can perhaps be understood better if we consider Zeno’s emotional link to and quasi-religious worship of nature. The following scene, which describes Zeno’s visit to “his” glacier in the Alps when he is still a researcher, captures his passion and love for nature particularly well: Jeden Mai und jeden September reiste ich einige Tage vor den Studenten an, um mich ungestört meinen Sinneseindrücken zu überlassen, um den Gletscher ungestört zu erfühlen, ehe wir ihn erfaßten, diesen Gletscher, den mir mein Doktorvater in Obhut gab, eine arrangierte Ehe, die sich über die Jahre in Leidenschaft verwandelte, als sei jede Messung eine Bestätigung 20  See also Goodbody (2013). Goodbody reads Zeno “as a provocative challenge to readers and writers alike” (ibid., 100) rather than as a role model (ibid., 98–99).

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seiner Einzigartigkeit. […] [Ich] brach auf, um meinen Gletscher zu umfußen […]. Ich tastete ihn jedesmal aufs neue ab, mit meinen Augen, mit meinen Füßen. Bei jedem Innehalten berührte ich ihn, legte meine Hände an seine Flanken und strich mir dann mit den Händen über das Gesicht. […] Wir waren wie ein altes Liebespaar. […] Es gab nur unzulängliche Begriffe für unsere Beziehung […]. Dieses Kreditieren und Debitieren ließ mich zunehmend verzweifeln. Über die Jahre hinweg verwandelte ich mich in einen Arzt, […] ich erkannte den Verfall meines Gletschers […]. Es war nicht mehr möglich, die Verluste zu kompensieren. Wir alterten gemeinsam, doch der Gletscher ging mir im Sterben voraus. (ET, 50–52) Every May and September I would go a few days ahead of my students, so I could abandon myself to my senses, undisturbed, and feel the glacier’s full emotional force before we captured its data. It was my doctoral advisor who placed this particular glacier in my care, an arranged marriage that in time became a union of love, as if every measurement were an acknowledgement of its singularity. […] I trekked around the glacier […]. Each time I visited I would first scan the glacier with my eyes, then test it with my feet. Whenever I stopped to catch my breath I would touch it, laying my hands on its flanks and then stroking my face […]. […] We were like an elderly couple […]. […] All terms used to describe our relationship […] were woefully inadequate […]. […] These credits and debits caused me greater and greater despair, and over the years I changed into a kind of doctor […]. I recognized that my glacier was doomed […]. It was no longer possible to offset the loss. We were aging together, the glacier and I, but the glacier was well ahead of me when it came to dying. (TLoZ, 44–45)

Many critics have concentrated on the gendered aspect of Zeno’s encounter with “his” glacier—nature personified—which resembles a relationship between lover and beloved that is not dissimilar, in fact, to that between him and his human lover Paulina.21 Described in terms reminiscent of those applied to Indigenous people  in colonial travel accounts, she, for example, also “naturally” seduces him with her call and song (ET, 66; TLoZ, 56–60).22 Thus Zeno gives nature, the glacier, some agency (compare Dürbeck et al. 2015, 126–27). Here we can go back to Dürbeck et al. 21  For a reading of this scene from the point of view of ecopsychology, see Wilke (2014, 266). Wilke pays particular attention to the desire that marks the relationship between Zeno and “his” glacier. 22  See, for example, Preece (2013, 114–15). Goodbody reads this aspect of Zeno’s relationship to the glacier as “ridicule” (2013, 98).

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who discuss the notion of agency and suggest that “even the seemingly static and massive structures like mountains and ice are active, changing forces in their own right” (2015, 119). Furthermore, in an article specifically on EisTau, Dürbeck points out that “natural objects that once appeared stable and permanent, such as glaciers, become changeable and even vulnerable in the face of globalized technological civilization” (2014, 117). The authors’ approach to perceiving nature as agent in its own right is indeed reminiscent of Zeno’s view of nature. By granting his glacier— the object of his desire—agency, he can, namely, directly influence his own behaviour as an empathetic glaciologist, empathy being a character trait to which he seems to aspire but he does so in a way that also highlights his eurocentrism and sexism. In fact, nature’s agency depends on its gendered manifestation. To put it more bluntly: nature’s worth relies on its ability to attract a man, to be desirable while remaining “pure” and silent and, at least on the surface, untouched for the conquering traveller. At the same time, nature is vulnerable in Zeno’s eyes—the glaciers are melting after all—and it needs saving from men, ignorant tourists and consumers, by a man, namely, Zeno himself. Thus nature may have agency, but does not speak; there is no reciprocity in Zeno’s relationship with it. In this way nature with a Levinasian “face” is reduced to the function of confirming Zeno’s masculinity. The trope of nature’s “purity” reveals, furthermore, much about the necessity of Zeno’s desire in the development of his moral responsibility for nature and thus his own male self. Ahmed’s critical assessment of the function of a desire similar to that of Zeno’s is helpful in unpacking Zeno’s relationship to “his” glacier further. When considering the “distinction between identification and desire,” Ahmed comes to the conclusion that “[t]he idealisation of the object is not ‘about’ the object, or even directed to the object, but is an effect of the ego” (2004, 127).23 As much as Zeno may desire his glacier, the tactile encounter with it (something which Ahmed also discusses with reference to encountering “strangers” [2000, 49]) in fact serves to confirm Zeno’s sense of self. The physical encounters between Zeno and his glacier have the same pattern—Zeno follows the same Islamic prayer-like “Begrüßungsritual” (ET, 86; “ritual greeting,” 23  Compare this with my reading of David’s male desire and its connection to his sense of self in Zaimoglu’s Liebesbrand discussed in Chap. 5. For David Tyra, who he idealizes, remains similarly unreachable, and the unreachability of his lover essentially makes him the Romantic he is.

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TLoZ, 78) every time he visits his glacier on what resembles a pilgrimage (compare also Preece 2013, 118). In this way Zeno is able to keep (re-) producing a masculinity that is no longer based on capturing the other (nature), but on what he regards as caring for it, nature, caressing it even, and feeling responsible for it by merely lamenting in his notebook instead of actively trying to prevent its complete disappearance. Zeno’s feelings towards his “lover,” the glacier, may therefore be genuine but his behaviour is contradictory or ambivalent (see Dürbeck 2014, 117 and 2017, 335; Goodbody 2017b, 306): Evi Zemanek rightly accuses Zeno of “Selbstgerechtigkeit” (2012, 192; self-righteousness), as he, like previous travellers or some of the tourists on the ship bound for Antarctica, treats the glacier as an object for his own purposes. Zeno takes in nature with his conquering male gaze (“ich tastete ihn […] ab,  mit meinen Augen”; “I would scan that glacier with my eyes”), makes it his own, and uses it to paint a favourable picture of himself as a responsible man, traveller, and scientist.24 Trojanow’s construction of a contemporary explorer’s masculinity therefore still depends on a gendered perception of nature as being disconnected from the male self, but simultaneously as something that is endangered due to climate change. As hinted at earlier with regard to nature’s agency, it becomes the woman the male hero must save. The paradox here is that the catastrophic climate change caused by “man” now needs to be prevented by this selfsame “man,” yet he is incapable of doing so. Zeno’s increasing awareness of the consequences of the human impact during the age of the Anthropocene actually prompts him to develop and realize his moral feelings for the glacier in the first place, that is, to give it a Levinasian “face,” even if, as we have seen, “nature with a face” may not disturb the established gender order or threaten Zeno’s self-construction as a male. If “man” had not played such a fundamental role in actuating climate change Zeno would not have to lament ­repeatedly the disappearance of “his,” and a lot of other, glaciers and would perhaps not have felt as impotent in the situation in which he now finds himself and which ultimately does not allow him to “prove” his masculinity.

24  See Evi Zemanek’s comment: “Empört vergleicht Zeno die Inbesitznahme der Antarktis mit der einer Jungfrau—während er selbst mit männlichem Blick verzückt die ‘Vulven’ des Eisbergs betrachtet” (Zemanek 2012, 191–92; Zeno compares indignantly the conquering of Antarctica with that of a virgin—while he himself looks ecstatically at the “vulva“ of the glacier with a male gaze).

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Yet there is a further dimension to Zeno’s relationship with nature that is crucial for the construction of his male self: he needs to lament the unpreventable loss of that which he idolizes in order to preserve the spirituality of the encounter. Thus Zeno’s experience can be read as Trojanow’s comment on what critics have termed a “post-secular age,”25 in which the seemingly endless opportunities offered by transcultural movements provoke the need for some form of human stability, especially, as my analysis in this book has shown so far,26 in men for whom established models of masculinity no longer work and who thus experience conflict and crisis. This becomes perhaps more prevalent in the age of the Anthropocene when the divine dimension of nature, which has dominated its perception for centuries, is fundamentally shattered. In that respect Zeno’s longing for his glacier, or rather for the comfort and stability that he hopes will heal his pained self, is not far removed from the German Romantics’ search for a “neue Mythologie” (new mythology), which was at the same time supposed to fulfil the hope of “die Rückkehr ins verlorene Paradies” (Schulz 2008, 97; the return to the lost paradise).27 This seeming paradox promises Zeno salvation: by journeying to what causes him pain and suffering, to something which is already lost, he can confront his crisis and seemingly overcome it. Thus Zeno’s longing, like that of a true Romantic’s, can ultimately not be fulfilled28 as the melting of the glaciers is far too advanced to be stopped. He can never win the twofold twenty-first-­ century version of the “race to the pole,” a race against an abstract, faceless opponent, that is, global warming, which in turn is at least partly caused by human beings whom—had he only the will to do so—Zeno could confront face to face in order to save the ice from complete disappearance. 25  Compare Habermas (2008). I am indebted to Judith Ryan (Harvard University) who mentioned the “post-secular” in her commentary on the panel “Trends in 21st-Century Literature (2): Nature Writing—Writing Nature” at the Thirty-Ninth Annual Conference of the German Studies Association (1–4 October 2015; Washington, DC), at which I presented a first, much shorter version of this chapter. I would not only like to thank Judith Ryan for her thought-provoking comments more generally but also the moderator of the panel Leonhard Herrmann (University of Leipzig). 26  See here in particular my reading of Dariusch’s turn to Scientology in Kurzmitteilung discussed in Chap. 4. 27  For the Victorian Romantic notion of nature and its influence by theories of the sublime, see Dürbeck et al. (2015, 126–27). 28  Compare with my reading of David’s and Ferda’s “Romantic longing” in Liebesbrand and Hinterland, respectively, discussed in Chap. 5.

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My reading of the relationship between traveller and nature in EisTau extends Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer’s assessment of the culture/ nature dyad as a “natural” given that has been challenged by much of Anglophone ecocriticism. They write: On every hike into the world of nature […] we carry minds full of cultural values, norms, and attitudes that inform the ways in which we see, know, represent, inhabit, and, ultimately, reconstruct nature. At the beginning of the 21st century it no longer makes sense to think of nature and culture in oppositional terms. Rather, we should start to conceive of the pair as hybridized entities […]. (Gersdorf and Mayer 2006, 14)

As Trojanow’s novel implies, the effects of the age of the Anthropocene in a transnational context on both “man” and nature are to break down the culture/nature dichotomy, even as this hybridity cannot go emotionally unrecognized by a protagonist to whom the scientific evidence is all too clear. Nonetheless, the opposition of “man” and nature does dwindle somewhat as the novel does not centre on a man against the elements: Zeno is shown as a “participant” rather than an “overseer,”29 and the boundaries between self and other, nature and culture become blurred in those moments of somewhat ridiculous intimacy between the glaciologist and “his” ice.30 It is therefore not surprising that Zeno’s spiritual and sensual experience of nature, which subverts a traditional traveller-explorer’s masculinity and highlights, through his relations with the other, a responsible, if not selfless, dimension of his male self, is quickly hit by reality as the tactile encounter is also a means to measure scientifically the disappearance of the glaciers. “Erfühlen” (to feel) gives way to “erfassen” (to capture data), and the glacier is no longer an object of his desire and quasi-worship, but of science. This shift in Zeno’s way of looking at his glacier emphasizes Zeno’s ambivalent, and paradoxical, position as a glaciologist with an  These descriptive terms are taken from Dürbeck et al. (2015, 122).  Trojanow’s inadvertently humorous description of Zeno’s relationship with “his” glacier (compare again Goodbody 2013, 98) stands in contrast to an “ecosexual” understanding of this bond. Collaborative artists Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens launched their “ecosex movement” in 2011 (see their Ecosex Manifestos on their website). Their concept of “ecosexuality” deliberately uses absurdist humour to perform “an environmentalism that is feminist, queer, sensual, sexual, post-human, materialist, and steeped in humor,” as they say in the advertising blurb of their book Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover (2021; website). 29 30

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intimate tie to nature: on the one hand, he comes across as the helpless Romantic who wishes to save the glaciers through science, despite never being able to do so, but on the other he is also the knowledgeable, therefore powerful, white explorer who travels to the global South and at least partially confirms old colonial patterns between conqueror and conquered, “man” and nature. The way Zeno captures his journey and encounter with nature in his writing as a form of crisis management will provide more insight into this paradox.

Post-Nature—Post-Masculinity31 Earlier in my analysis I highlighted Zeno’s “sense of belatedness” as he comes too late to save the glaciers: nature is literally melting away. This is where we may think of Zeno’s experience in terms of “post-nature.” This concept relates to the impact of environmental despoliation on human beings as some critics have analysed: for example, Ursula K. Heise “unfolds the relationship between species loss and modern culture” and thus explores how “mankind as a species is trying to rethink itself” in her study Nach der Natur (After Nature) (Wilke 2015b, 646). In EisTau, Antarctica, as a space outwith the nation, becomes a particularly intriguing space for the rethinking of “man” in relation to nature. It is here where for Zeno the divide between nature and culture becomes increasingly blurred, where it becomes obvious that the human separation from nature can no longer be upheld, and where Zeno can finally confront his own crisis of masculinity, which leads to his death. Zeno’s death signals the end of the old “explorer” or hegemonic masculinity par excellence; this dissolves as the glaciers are melting, leaving us asking what is left behind. “Postnature” gives way to Zeno’s state of “post-masculinity.” It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Zeno intensively reflects on the notion of “post” in his notes, taken before and during his trip to Antarctica, which form the main sections of EisTau. It is no coincidence that Trojanow places so much emphasis on his protagonist’s notebook, one of the most personal, and perhaps self-indulgent, forms of narration. The notebook or journal is the ultimate traveller’s companion: in it, travellers record what they see and experience,

31  I am  again indebted to  Judith Ryan who suggested the  notion of  “post-masculinity” based on “post-nature” in her commentary mentioned in note 25.

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preserve and archive,32 but they also try to understand, “(be)greifen” (see Trojanow et al. 2010), what they have encountered. Bettine Menke has discussed the “modi des Aufschreibens” (2000, 572; modes of recording) as the traveller’s way of leaving a trace behind for those who will follow their steps in the future (ibid., 572–93).33 Zeno’s notebook, his act of writing, does some of that and yet serves an entirely different purpose. Zeno records his knowledge about the glaciers that is clearly more informed than that of the passengers on the ship (compare ET, 32; TLoZ, 25–26). By using his journal in that way, it could be argued that in colonial fashion Zeno confirms his authority and power as an academic who “fixes” and thus “owns” nature. However, Zeno also uses his knowledge ethically, or at least he tries to do so: his notes are also a recorded lament about the disappearance of nature and a lesson in engaging with nature responsibly. As Goodbody puts it: “Trojanow’s book exemplifies the tensions in contemporary climate fiction between confessional and didactic impulses on the one hand, and recognition of the need for an aesthetic form avoiding the shortcomings of the elegiac mode and apocalyptic imagery on the other” (2017b, 305). However, nature and climate change for that matter are only seen and conveyed through Zeno’s eyes. His notebook is, ultimately, only about him and his emotions and will not serve future travellers as a guide, that is, it will not contribute to an archive of travel literature (compare Menke 2000, 574). As a concern climate change contributes to Zeno's self-construction as well as self-destruction. His “apocalyptic worldview” (Goodbody 2013, 99), on which he at least initially does not act, is part of his identity process and it prepares the reader for his end. The novel’s author Trojanow seems to sympathize with Zeno’s worldview when he compares Zeno’s ship with that in Sebastian Brant’s late-­ medieval text Das Narrenschiff (1494; Ship of Fools) (Trojanow et al. 2010; see also Preece 2013, 120). Zeno is shown to feel clearly that he is surrounded by fools, which comes through especially in his reaction to the artist Dan Quentin, who comes on board “to do something for the environment” (ET, 123; TLoZ, 116) with his art installation and faux emergency: all passengers are supposed to form the letters “SOS” in the ice. This human formation representing environmental despair is then  On archiving, see Kraenzle (2013, 135–39).  Menke primarily refers to Ransmayr’s Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis in this context. 32 33

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photographed from a helicopter. Quentin’s art installation may be seen as a fictional example of what Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin have termed “the Northern environmentalism of the rich (always potentially vainglorious and hypocritical)” (2010, 2). Yet this art project gives Zeno the opportunity to act finally, that is, to seize the ship, to leave all passengers behind, and to sail off, into death. The only way Zeno can show agency, that is, prove his “adventurous masculinity” which is dwindling the more he interacts with the guided tourists, in his paradoxical situation between his felt moral responsibility towards nature and his undeniable part in the human impact on climate change is self-erasure: his “soul” is not “saved.” He is lost like many of the species that Heise regards as an indication of “post-nature” (see Heise 2010). Yet before Zeno’s emotions move him to act into disappearance, he needs to stop writing and “confessing” (ET, 88; TLoZ, 80). Throughout the novel Zeno is looking for the right language to mediate his emotionally laden encounter with nature. It seems that only by attempting to capture his sensual, quasi-religious experience of nature (e.g. ET, 90; TLoZ, 82) in words he can give his “fight” for his glaciers meaning and provide confession-like testimony (ET, 88; TLoZ, 80) for the travellers that will come after him. Zeno, who showed only disrespect for his “predecessors,” is thus also seeking to leave his own legacy behind, even if his desire springs from a different source. Trojanow has spoken about Zeno’s “Sehnsucht nach der ‘kristallreinen Sprache’” (2011; longing for “crystal clear language”),34 a comment which suggests that readers are to see Zeno primarily as a helpless Romantic, who wishes to be united with nature, rather than as a scientist, who feels the need to separate himself from nature in order to measure it. Consequently, Zeno’s longing cannot be fulfilled: nature cannot be fully captured in writing. It is as tour guide then, and not as scientist, that Zeno describes in his journal his approach to Antarctica 34  Trojanow (2011c) full comment is as follows: “[EisTau ist ein Buch ü]ber die Rigorosität von Leidenschaft, über die Sehnsucht nach einem reinen Leben, ausgedrückt auch als Sehnsucht nach der ‘kristallreinen Sprache’” (EisTau [Melting Ice] is a book about the rigourousness of passion, about the longing for a pure life, which is also articulated as longing for a “crystal clear language”). He then describes Zeno’s language further: “Zenos Sprache ist radikal subjektiv und worteigen, das Geschwätz der Welt hingegen verbraucht und entwertet die Sprache, folgerichtig sind das Passagen voller Spreu aus Konfetti und altem zerkautem Kaugummi” (Zeno’s language is radically subjective and linguistically peculiar; the waffle of the world is, by contrast, worn out and devalues language. Consequently, these passages are full of chaff of confetti and old chewed up chewing gum).

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with the following words: “Es gibt auf Erden nur noch eine Terra Nullius, und wir laufen sie an, und ‘alle Nacht durch Nebel lacht’, die Sprache zieht sich zurück vor dem Wunder, das Schweigen erwartet uns hinter dem Dunst ‘wie [sic] des Mondes weißer Schein’” (ET, 77–78; “There is only one Terra Nullius left on Earth, and that’s where we are headed, ‘whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white’ the language shrinks back from the miracle, the silence awaits us beyond the mist, where ‘glimmered the white Moon-shine’,” TLoZ, 70–71). Drawing on Samuel Coleridge’s Romantic poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), Trojanow not only shows his readers how Zeno’s perception of nature is increasingly shifting towards the sublime but also how he approaches the end of language the closer he gets to Antarctica and the more real and overwhelming, yet unstoppable, the environmental disaster of melting glaciers becomes. Thus while entering those contested spaces beyond national borders—terra nullius—spaces that are, nonetheless, still subject to neocolonial interests played out on the back of nature, as Zeno is highly aware (ET, 112; TLoZ, 104–105), he reaches the root of nature’s as well as his own crisis. So, as nature, pure ice, is gradually disappearing in the Anthropocene, Zeno’s words, his longing for a language that is just as pure, as Trojanow was describing, are coming to an end. This is also the end of Zeno as a responsibly minded explorer and a human being. What began as an attempt to preserve and to archive nature, or what is left thereof, and to “rescue” the glaciers from complete disappearance—namely, writing about it—turns out to be an unsuccessful way of fighting against his fellow human beings’ ignorance of the environmental crisis that they have, at least in part, created and that they are now witnessing. Yet Zeno’s ambiguous final act, though perhaps intended as an ethical gesture, can only be described as morally irresponsible, selfish, and even terrorist-like.35 He acts on his emotions alone. His is therefore an act of revenge more than anything else. In the end Zeno has failed as a successful “eco-warrior”; and even through acting finally, that is, through choosing to disappear in Antarctica, in what Zeno called earlier “unser aller Archiv” (ET, 36; “a repository for all of us,” TLoZ, 30), he has not acted ecologically but only addressed his own moral dilemma, that is, his “tired[ness] of being human” in the “parasitic system” formed by “a few billion human beings” 35  See also Goodbody with reference to critical reviews of EisTau in the German-language press (2013, 97).

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(ET, 167; TLoZ, 157), by joining “his” nature where he will probably be forgotten, his only remaining trace being—somewhat ironically—his notebook. In a reverse turn, Zeno plans to “be flying” “bis mein Blut zu Eis geronnen ist” (ET, 167; “until my blood has run to ice,” TLoZ, 157); so while nature’s ice is turning into water, Zeno’s blood will take on the material form that the glaciers’ once had: Zeno will finally be united with nature, with ice. Thus while Zeno would perhaps like to be seen to have taken on personally the burden of the disastrous consequences of climate change, his act can also be read as a cop-out: it changes nothing in the end as both the melting ice and Zeno, the supposedly responsible male traveller, will disappear into nothingness. Preece has called EisTau “a moral novel” (2013, 120; see also Dürbeck 2014, 118), and in many ways it is. Gabriele Dürbeck has a particular take on the novel’s moral approach when she refers to it as “an ironic version of a comic apocalypse, where the deficiencies of the prophet discredit the moral reckoning” (2017, 337). I have read the novel primarily as a novel of crisis (compare also Goodbody 2017b, 304): of nature and of masculinity and, conveyed through that, of contemporary moral values in a transnational world. It is a novel whose diary form along with the interspersed messages allows Trojanow to address his own ethical concerns and considerations. Choosing the narrative voice of a failing and ultimately vanished explorer may in itself be a comment on the author’s difficulties in engaging with climate change as a responsible human being. Indeed, the author reflects on the process and challenges of writing a novel about climate change in his essay “Requiem auf die Zukunft” (Requiem to the Future; see Goodbody 2017b, 305). In it, Trojanow makes revelations about his struggle to find the right language to describe climate change which ties in with the public marketing strategies that have enhanced the widely held perception of Zeno “as a mouthpiece of the author.”36 While this may suggest that Trojanow uses the medium of the fictional novel to verbalize his own emotions—the distinction between fact and fiction is often not clearcut in Trojanow’s work, as the examples of Der Weltensammler and the subsequent Nomade auf vier Kontinenten show—the unstoppable melting of the glaciers becomes “real” or believable for the reader through its protagonist’s emotions and his attempt to verbalize them. Zemanek has referred to EisTau in an interview with Trojanow as “[einen] ernsthaften 36  Goodbody draws attention to this fact with reference to a performance of EisTau and reviews (2013, 97).

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Roman über die Reaktion eines leidenschaftlichen Menschen” (2012, 191; a serious novel about the response of a passionate human being). Trojanow certainly portrays Zeno as a contemporary traveller-explorer, perhaps not unlike himself, who, despite failing to raise people’s awareness of the environmental disasters that impact their own lives and habitat,37 tries to “make the world a better place” (Preece 2013, 125). In doing so, Zeno perhaps is also shown to try to travel “properly”—to return to Trojanow’s article on the same topic—in order to hold on to his moral values, which can, in true Romantic fashion, only lead to the novel’s hero’s journey into death. He cannot find a viable solution to his crisis. However, some readers may not be able to ignore the bitter aftertaste left both by Zeno’s gendered perception of nature and by his self-­ righteousness when it comes to his complicit relationship with the capitalist world of which he, like everyone else, is part. Goodbody, for instance, referred to the novel as “flawed” “because of the unresolved contradictions in the figure of Zeno” (2017b, 306). Since these binary oppositions and perceptions seem to persist, are needed even, in Zeno’s construction as a responsible traveller, the question remains whether or not Zeno in fact represents an explorer figure capable of meeting the ethical demands of the contemporary world. This question can only be considered by referring back to the protagonist’s own words. Differentiating himself from the old guard of explorers, who left behind far more than a notebook, he says passionately to Paulina, foreshadowing his complete dissolution: “Ja, [...], ich will keine Menschen und kein Treiböl in der Antarktis, aber ich will sie nicht besitzen, das ist der Unterschied, kein Teil von ihr soll nach mir benannt sein, ich will, daß sie in Ruhe gelassen wird, nichts weiter” (ET, 68; “If you mean I don’t want any people or fuel oil in the Antarctic, then you’re right, I do want to determine what happens here. But I don’t want to possess the place, that’s the difference, I don’t want to have any part of it named after me, I just want it to be left in peace,” TLoZ, 61). The defiant, or even self-righteous, undertone in Zeno’s statement aside, which only seems to emphasize his inability to act, EisTau portrays a male traveller-explorer who deliberately rejects the traditional image of the tough pioneer in the wild who seeks fame and a lasting legacy—since this has proven to be irrelevant in the context of twenty-first-century transnational movements—and who reconfigures himself as a lone, 37  See also the interview between Trojanow and Preece, in which Preece asks: “Hintermeyer [sic] is a failure too, is he not at the end of his life?” (Trojanow and Preece 2013, 12).

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misanthropic traveller outwith the homosocial world of previous male explorers but, instead, with ethical concerns. Through its self-reflexive mode of writing, that is, through Zeno’s struggle with language that can only reveal his helplessness, disengagement from the world around him, and failure to resolve his moral dilemma (that is, to act ethically and ecologically at times of crisis) (see also Goodbody 2013, 100), EisTau allows its readers to experience the encounter with, and writing about, disappearing nature—both within the novel and on its meta-level—from the vantage point of affect and its ethical implications. It lets its readers take part in the aesthetics that try to convey an environmental disaster that is far removed from most readers’ experience. And it does so by following a male traveller-­explorer who attempts unsuccessfully via his notebook to straddle a critical position that is somewhere between his individually felt responsibility for the damaging influences of the Anthropocene on a global scale and his, a human being’s, place both in ecology and in transnational contexts.

Crisis, Ambiguities, and New Masculinities Heise’s concept of “eco-cosmopolitanism” might be a fitting term with which to end my discussion of Trojanow’s protagonist’s ambivalent position and the author’s own ethical literary agenda. Heise calls for “an increased emphasis on a sense of planet, a cognitive understanding and affective attachment to the global,” which she summarizes as “an environmentally oriented cosmopolitanism” (2008, 59). Her concept of “eco-­ cosmopolitanism” attempts “to envision individuals and groups as part of planetary ‘imagined communities’ of both human and nonhuman kinds” (Heise 2008, 61). As a scientist as well as traveller-tour guide Zeno is certainly shown in the novel to be part of such “imagined communities” that transcend national boundaries in their engagement with nature. They are doing this either by measuring its gradual destruction in different places on the planet or by lamenting the effects of climate change, which Zeno first notices in his local environment of the Alps, on a global scale. Thus in EisTau the local meets the global; Zeno’s environmental concern moves from a “native” to a transnational context, revealing him as a truly transnational “explorer” figure. And the fact that Zeno’s journey takes him to Antarctica of all places—terra nullius, to repeat an expression used earlier—highlights the disintegration of stable concepts of nature, masculinity, and the nation even more.

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However, as a misanthrope, albeit one who is aware of the ecological consequences of climate change caused by humans and who therefore also includes himself in his misanthropy (ET, 167; TLoZ, 157), Zeno’s “imagined communities” only seem to exist in his notebook, where he can hide his impotence and hurt male ego from the people around him, while leaving any genuinely ecologically responsible actions to others. He does not share a homosocial world similar to that of previous explorers but experiences the crisis of nature and his crisis of masculinity on a purely personal level. In many ways the explorer figure in EisTau shifts from the position of hegemony, of power and influence, to one of marginality, of powerlessness and triviality, indeed even one of nothingness. My verdict on Trojanow’s protagonist may not leave readers of EisTau with a positive outlook on human agency in the age of the Anthropocene. In fact, Zeno’s actions appear to reinforce the anxieties revolving around and difficulties in redefining established patterns of masculinity in the encounter with the other. However, the author’s aspiration to consider via his lone protagonist an idea of ethical responsibility towards the environment that goes beyond our local concerns and requires an awareness for the transnational connections at play is nonetheless fulfilled here. At the same time, the ambiguities left by its anti-hero, whose journey does not end with triumph and celebration, but instead in death, combined with the denial of a reliable and objective narrative of global warming and its continuous after-effects through the novel’s aesthetic form, productively deconstruct myths revolving around “nature” and “culture,” otherness, and masculinity. Thus Zeno’s crisis can ultimately be read as a positive momentum towards redefining new masculinities.

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Grünberg, Arnon. 2013. Couchsurfen und andere Schlachten, ed. Ilija Trojanow and trans. Rainer Kersten. Zurich: Diogenes. Habermas, Jürgen. 2008. Ein Bewußtsein von dem, was fehlt. In Ein Bewußtsein von dem, was fehlt: Eine Diskussion mit Jürgen Habermas, ed. Michael Reder and Josef Schmidt, 26–36. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Hamann, Christof, and Alexander Honold. 2009. Ins Fremde schreiben: Zur Literarisierung von Entdeckungsreisen in deutschsprachigen Erzähltexten der Gegenwart. In Ins Fremde schreiben: Gegenwartsliteratur auf den Spuren historischer und fantastischer Entdeckungsreisen, ed. Christof Hamann and Alexander Honold, 9–20. Poiesis: Standpunkte der Gegenwartsliteratur 5. Göttingen: Wallstein. Heise, Ursula K. 2008. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2010. Nach der Natur: Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. 2010. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. London: Routledge. Jeremiah, Emily, and Frauke Matthes. 2013. Introduction: Ethical Approaches in Contemporary German-Language Literature and Culture. In Ethical Approaches in Contemporary German-Language Literature and Culture, ed. Emily Jeremiah and Frauke Matthes, 1–11. Edinburgh German Yearbook 7. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Jostmann, Christian. 2011. Das Eis und der Tod: Scott, Amundsen und das Drama am Südpol. Munich: C.H. Beck. Kraenzle, Christina. 2013. Rewriting Colonial Travelogues: Cosmopolitan Visions and Colonial Legacies in Nomade auf vier Kontinenten / Nomad on Four Continents. In Ilija Trojanow, ed. Julian Preece, 127–52. Contemporary German Writers and Filmmakers 2. Oxford: Peter Lang. ———. 2015. Writing Travel in the Global Age: Transnationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Reworking of Generic Conventions of Travel Literature in Ilija Trojanow’s An den inneren Ufern Indiens and Nomade auf vier Kontinenten. In Transnationalism in Contemporary German-Language Literature, ed. Elisabeth Herrmann, Carrie Smith-Prei, and Stuart Taberner, 125–43. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1989. Ethics as First Philosophy. Trans. Seán Hand and Michael Temple. The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand, 75–87. Oxford: Blackwell. Martschukat, Jürgen, and Olaf Stieglitz. 2008. Geschichte der Männlichkeiten. Historische Einführungen. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Matthes, Frauke. 2011. Writing and Muslim Identity: Representations of Islam in German and English Transcultural Literature, 1990-2006. igrs books 6. London: Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies.

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Mayer, Sylvia. 2006. Literary Studies, Ecofeminism and Environmentalist Knowledge Production in the Humanities. In Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations in Ecocriticism, ed. Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer, 111–28. Nature, Culture and Literature 3. Amsterdam: Rodopi. ———. 2015. Klimawandelroman. In Ecocriticism: Eine Einführung, ed. Gabriele Dürbeck and Urte Stobbe, 233–44. Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau. Menke, Bettine. 2000. Die Polargebiete der Bibliothek: Über eine metapoetische Metapher. Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 74 (4): 545–99. ———. 2012. Grenzüberschreitungen (in) der Schrift, Exterritorialität der Pole. In Literarische Entdeckungsreisen: Vorfahren—Nachfahren—Revisionen, ed. Hansjörg Bay and Wolfgang Struck, 53–78. Cologne: Böhlau. Oliver, José F.A. 2015. Heimatt, ed. Ilija Trojanow. Berlin: Verlag Hans Schiler. Plumwood, Val. 2001. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London: Routledge. Preece, Julian. 2010. Faking the Hadj? Richard Burton Slips between the Lines in Ilija Trojanow’s Der Weltensammler. In Religion and Identity in Germany Today: Doubters, Believers, Seekers in Literature and Film, ed. Julian Preece, Frank Finlay, and Sinéad Crowe, 211–25. Leeds-Swansea Colloquia on Contemporary German Literature 2. Oxford: Peter Lang. ———. 2011. Ilija Trojanow, Der Weltensammler: Separate Bodies, or: An Account of Intercultural Failure. In Emerging German-Language Novelists of the Twenty-­ First Century, ed. Lyn Marven and Stuart Taberner, 119–32. Rochester, NY: Camden House. ———. 2013. Mr Iceberger Runs Amok: The Aporias of Commitment in EisTau/ Melting Ice. Ilija Trojanow, ed. Julian Preece, 111–25. Contemporary German Writers and Filmmakers 2. Oxford: Peter Lang. Ransmayr, Christoph. 1991. The Terrors of Ice and Darkness. Trans. John E. Woods. New York: Grove Press. ———. 2003 [1984]. Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis: Roman. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer. ———. 2006. Der fliegende Berg: Roman. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer. ———. 2018. The Flying Mountain. Trans. Simon Pare. London, New York, and Calcutta: Seagull Books. Robinson, Sally. 2006. Visibility, Crisis, and the Wounded White Male Body. In Men and Masculinities: Critical Concepts in Sociology, ed. Stephen M. Whitehead, 242–70. London and New York: Routledge. Said, Edward W. 1995 [1978]. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. Repr. with a new Afterword. London: Penguin. Schonfield, Ernest. 2013. On the Road to Mecca with Trojanow and Burton. In Ilija Trojanow, ed. Julian Preece, 81–97. Contemporary German Writers and Filmmakers 2. Oxford: Peter Lang.

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Schrott, Raoul. 2010 [2003]. Tristan da Cunha oder Die Hälfte der Erde: Roman. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. Schulz, Gerhard. 2008 [1996]. Romantik: Geschichte und Begriff. 3rd edn. Munich: C. H. Beck. Smith-Prei, Carrie. 2015. Affect, Aesthetics, Biopower, and Technology: Political Interventions into Transnationalism. In Transnationalism in Contemporary German-Language Literature, ed. Elisabeth Herrmann, Carrie Smith-Prei, and Stuart Taberner, 65–85. Rochester, NY: Camden House. SpaceX. Mars & Beyond: The Road to Making Humanity Multiplanetary. https:// www.spacex.com/human-­spaceflight/mars/. Accessed 2 March 2022. Sprinkle, Annie, and Beth Stephens. 2021. Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. ———. Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephen’s website. https://sprinklestephens. ucsc.edu/. Accessed 2 March 2022. ———. Ecosex Manifestos. https://sprinklestephens.ucsc.edu/manifestos/. Accessed 2 March 2022. Trojanow, Ilija. 1996. Die Welt ist groß und Rettung lauert überall: Roman. Munich: Hanser. ———. 2003. An den inneren Ufern Indiens: Eine Reise entlang des Ganges. Munich: Malik. ———. 2004. Zu den Heiligen Quellen des Islam: Als Pilger nach Mekka und Medina. Munich: Malik. ———. 2005. Along the Ganges. Trans. Ilija Trojanow with Ranjit Hoskoté. London: Armchair Traveller at Haus Publishing. ———. 2006. Der Weltensammler: Roman. Munich: Hanser. ———. 2007a. Mumbai to Mecca. Trans. Rebecca Morrison. London: Armchair Traveller at Haus Publishing. ———. 2007b. Nomade auf vier Kontinenten: Auf den Spuren von Sir Richard Francis Burton. Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn. ———. 2008a. Der entfesselte Globus: Reportagen. Munich: Hanser. ———. [Iliya Troyanov]. 2008b. The Collector of Worlds. Trans. William Hobson. London: Faber & Faber. ———. 2008c. Voran ins Gondwanaland: Eine poetische Zeile in drei Doppelhälften und einem offenen Dach. In Feridun Zaimoglu and Ilija Trojanow. Ferne Nähe: Tübinger Poetik-Dozentur 2007, ed. Dorothee Kimmich and Philipp Ostrowicz, with Maik Bozza, 67–94. Künzelsau: Swiridoff Verlag. ———. 2010. Requiem auf die Zukunft. Der Standard, online: 26 November 2010 / print: 27/28 November 2010. http://derstandard.at/1289608878287/ Requiem-­auf-­die-­Zukunft. Accessed 11 August 2015. ———. 2011a. Die Versuchungen der Fremde: Unterwegs in Arabien, Indien und Afrika. Munich: Malik ———. 2011b. EisTau: Roman. Munich: Hanser.

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———. 2011c. Vor der Katastrophe. (Interview). Der Standard, 26 August 2011. http://derstandard.at/1313025257040/Neuer-­R oman-­E isTau-­I lija-­ Trojanow-­Vor-­der-­Katastrophe. Accessed 7 August 2015. ———. 2015a. Macht und Widerstand: Roman. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer. ———. 2015b. “Richtig reisen?” http://trojanow.de/richtig-­reisen/. Accessed 5 July 2021. ———. 2016. The Lamentations of Zeno: A Novel. Trans. Philip Boehm. Brooklyn, NY: Verso. ———. 2017. Nach der Flucht. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer. ———. 2018. Gebrauchsanweisung fürs Reisen. Munich: Piper. ———. 2020. Doppelte Spur: Roman. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer. ———. Ilija Trojanow’s personal website. http://trojanow.de. Accessed 25 August 2021. Trojanow, Ilija, and Ranjit Hoskoté. 2007. Kampfabsage: Kulturen bekämpfen sich nicht—sie fließen zusammen. Trans. Heike Schlatterer. Munich: Blessing. Trojanow, Ilija, and Julian Preece. 2013. Interview. In Ilija Trojanow, ed. Julian Preece, 3–13. Contemporary German Writers and Filmmakers 2. Oxford: Peter Lang. Trojanow, Ilija, and Juli Zeh. 2009. Angriff auf die Freiheit: Sicherheitswahn, Überwachungsstaat und der Abbau bürgerlicher Rechte. Munich: Hanser. Vickery, Amanda. 2012. Amanda Vickery on… Men: The Explorer, BBC Radio 4, 3 September 2012. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mbztm [programme no longer available]. Accessed 27 January 2018. Whitehead, Stephen M. 2002. Men and Masculinities: Key Themes and New Directions. Cambridge: Polity. Wilke, Sabine. 2014. Figurationen von Klimawandel: Ilija Trojanow’s EisTau als Elegie des Anthropozäns. In Gegenwartsliteratur: Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch / A German Studies Yearbook 13, ed. Paul Michael Lützeler, Erin McGlothlin, and Jennifer Kapczynski, 255–74. Tübingen: Stauffenburg. ———. 2015a. German Culture and the Modern Environmental Imagination: Narrating and Depicting Nature. Nature, Culture and Literature 11. Amsterdam: Brill. ———. 2015b. German Ecocriticism and the Environmental Humanities. German Studies Review 38 (3): 635–52. Wolf, Christa. 2001 [1989]. Accident: A Day’s News. Trans. Heike Schwarzbauer and Rick Takvorian. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2009 [1987]. Störfall: Nachrichten eines Tages. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Zemanek, Evi. 2012. Endliches Eis und engagierte Literatur: Ein Gespräch mit Ilija Trojanow über seinen Roman EisTau. Literatur für Leser 3 (12): Literatur und Umwelt, ed. Sabine Wilke: 189–95.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: Towards New Masculinities in Contemporary German Literature

Towards the end of my close reading of Ilija Trojanow’s explorer in EisTau (The Lamentations of Zeno), I introduced the notion of “post-­ masculinity.” This term is also a fitting one for viewing masculinity in a transnational rather than “native” German context as seen in my discussions of novels by Clemens Meyer, Maxim Biller, Navid Kermani, Feridun Zaimoglu, and Ilija Trojanow, if for different reasons. I am not suggesting that masculinity as such has become a redundant term, but what has become clear over the course of this study is that the link between nationality and masculinity has become rather fragile; this traditional nexus no longer captures the contemporary transnational experience adequately. This is not to say that the nation as a concept is no longer relevant in literary manifestations of masculinity: as Stuart Taberner has pointed out, “German-language fiction is, for the most part, […] fixated on the nation” (2017, 82). Following Taberner’s argument, the nation indeed often remains a reference point in literary constructions of masculinity, especially when the texts’ protagonists are shown to deal or struggle with others’ or their own otherness. These self-other interactions, often in terms of nationality or national belonging, remain crucial when trying to find or maintain a place in the “world gender order” (Connell 2000, 40–43). Yet shifting our attention away from what constitutes “German” or “native” constructions of masculinity towards reading those masculinities transnationally has allowed me to find new masculinities. That is to © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Matthes, New Masculinities in Contemporary German Literature, Global Masculinities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10318-6_7

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say, these masculinities—“post-masculinities” to take up my opening remark—clearly reveal the complexities and instabilities of concepts such as hegemonic masculinity, marginalization, hypermasculinity, “effeminized” masculinity, specific models of masculinity, or “masculinity in crisis.” In that regard it would also be more fitting to speak of “masculine subjectivities” rather than “masculinity” as such, as Chris Haywood et al. suggest (2018, 124–28). Their argument that “we need to think about men’s identifications and practices that are not reducible or contained by identity categories” (ibid., 126) can also help us think about masculinities as they move away from the “native” towards the transnational.1 In my readings, these complexities came to the fore in relation to others, often in the form of re-evaluations of self-other relations: with women, men of different backgrounds in terms of class, culture, or nationality, hegemonic men, and even nature. Combined with moments of historical, political, or personal “crises” or changes, they appeared in the novels selected for this study as the drivers behind the evolution of “post-masculinities.” It is in this vein that the first chapter of close readings opened. Chapter 2, “Men Without Women,” took as a starting point the post-Wende years and their impact on perceptions of masculinity shortly following what was perhaps the most significant event in recent German history. In his novels Als wir träumten (2006, When We Were Dreaming) and Im Stein (2013; Bricks and Mortar, 2016), Clemens Meyer was shown to create marginalized homosocial worlds marked by the exclusion of others, that is, by misogyny, racism, and suspicion towards those of different political persuasions or social backgrounds. Yet by offering a glimpse into his characters’ engagement with each other and with others, especially as they become aware of their local positions in a now noticeably transnational world, Meyer challenges the dichotomy of “marginalization” and hegemony, thereby engaging those concepts in a productive dialogue (compare Connell 2005, e.g. 81). In his work, Maxim Biller (Chap. 3, “Masculinity in Conflict”) re-­ evaluates another binary: that of hypermasculinity versus “effeminized” masculinity, the latter of which had long been seen as a marker of Jewish masculinity. In many ways Biller’s male protagonists were shown to reproduce gender discourses based on clear self-other divides—a form of the infamous “battle of the sexes”—in order to establish their own masculinities. 1  Haywood et al.’s sociological study revolves around hegemony, homosociality, homophobia, and heteronormativity as aspects of masculinity.

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Their endeavours are rooted in the “negative symbiosis” (Diner 1987) between Germans and Jews (in Die Tochter, 2003a [2000]/The Daughter) and in a desire to create a Jewish-Jewish symbiosis with a woman whose Jewish background the protagonist only imagines (in Esra, 2003b). These differing symbioses depend on traditional, often stereotypical, perceptions of Germanness and Jewishness, yet also drew our attention to the fact that such perceptions can no longer hold considering the transnational circumstances in which the protagonists as an Israeli and a German Jewish man with a Czech background, respectively, find themselves. Ultimately, the protagonists’ attempts to “prove” their “Jewish” masculinity in Germany result in their failure to love and thus perhaps as their failure to overcome their own willingness to let go of clear categorizations of self and other. Similar categorizations of self and other, or notions of difference, played a crucial role in my analysis of Navid Kermani’s Kurzmitteilung (2007, Short Message) and Große Liebe (2014, Great Love) (Chap. 4, “Masculinity and Religion”). In these novels difference in the form of religion (Islam) is not seen as something that necessarily divides the self from the other, but as something that can enable agency, especially when it comes to challenging established forms of hegemonic masculinity by religiously and ethnically “marked” men. Consciously marketing difference for a Western audience in a post-9/11 world, perhaps the event to bring home people’s transnational interconnections (as in Kurzmitteilung), or negotiating difference in order to navigate first love under the nuclear threat of the 1980s Cold War (as in Große Liebe) thus highlights the intersection of hegemonic forms of masculinity, and of challenges to these, with wider political questions. As a more general critique of norms or “normality,” Kermani’s novels also point us towards a wider perspective on the instability of anything perceived as “native.” As has become clear, the three writers discussed up to this point in the book (Meyer, Biller, and Kermani) more or less consciously challenge established patterns of masculinity by engaging with, looking beyond, but also sometimes reproducing binaries in order to explore how the national, local, or “native” relate to the transnational. These binaries may well play crucial roles in these texts, yet the writers also bring to the fore the ambivalences and ultimately the blurring of categories of self and other, “native” and other. At first sight, ambivalence does not seem to capture the masculinities that Feridun Zaimoglu and Ilija Trojanow construct in their work as they draw on traditional models of masculinity. Yet they, too, create equally

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thought-provoking, new forms of masculinity. As such, Feridun Zaimoglu’s re-interpretations of German Romantic masculinity in Liebesbrand (2008, Love Fire) and Hinterland (2009) and working-class masculinity in Ruß (2011, Soot) come across as “masculinities across borders,” as the chapter title already suggests. These masculinities not only cross geographical borders, thus already drawing attention to their literally transnational dimension, but also those of identity, in terms of nationality, culture, and class as well as gender. Yet the fact that Zaimoglu’s (“native” German) protagonists in Ruß are largely stuck in their local environs whereas the (German Turkish) protagonists in Liebesbrand and Hinterland actively “do” transnationalism by freely travelling around Europe in pursuit of the women they love also demonstrates how transnationalism is something that is also felt at a local level in the form of global capitalism. Here readers may be reminded of Meyer’s local masculinities and their socio-economic marginalizations that are largely caused by the political shifts following the Wende. Despite these different contexts, Meyer’s protagonists are equally entangled in the transnational movements of capital, people, and opportunity. By constructing such differing transnational masculinities, Zaimoglu can then also re-appropriate both German Romantic and working-class models of masculinity as (German) literary models to challenge their stability as “native” subjects and to embrace them as transnational ones. The failed traveller-hero is the “man in crisis” in the final chapter of close readings on Ilija Trojanow’s EisTau (2011; The Lamentations of Zeno, 2016). Yet his crisis is much more than a personal one as it intersects with the larger crisis of global warming. This last literary text thus directed us to perhaps the most pressing issue of our transnational world: climate change. With his novel Trojanow not only undermines the idea of a traveller who goes out to conquer unknown lands and nature, but, more significantly, raises urgent ethical questions of responsibility for the other beyond that which has a face (in a Levinasian sense [see Levinas 1989]): namely, here, nature. Yet this sense of responsibility does not free Trojanow’s protagonist from ideas of masculine authority and control as he interacts with “his” glacier in the Alps or with his surroundings in Antarctica. Ultimately, Zeno’s is a “double struggle”: for the preservation of nature that he so loves and for his own sense of masculine self. Yet both these struggles are at odds with each other and ultimately end in failure, thus inviting readers to scrutinize human agency in the age of the Anthropocene. This book has examined a variety of transnational masculinities, from their local manifestations in Meyer’s work via reconsiderations of national,

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ethnic, and religious difference in Biller’s and Kermani’s texts towards differing, transnational forms of masculinity in Zaimoglu’s novels and ending with Trojanow’s protagonist grappling with his masculinity in the midst of the global environmental crisis. These manifestations of masculinity, or their “practices,” to reprise Haywood et  al.’s terminology (2018, 126), demonstrate that transnational masculinities can have a variety of meanings; indeed masculinities do not even need to travel, or come from elsewhere, in order to be understood as transnational. Reading masculinities transnationally also acknowledges the anxieties and the precariousness surrounding masculinities situated at the intersections of nationality, locality, class, ethnicity, and sexuality, something that the instabilities of the male protagonists’ romantic relationships, or rather their overarching failure at (lasting) love, brings to the fore particularly well. For instance, Im Stein ends with AK’s love for a trans woman, a “ladyboy,” the future of which remains unclear; Adam’s (unsuccessful) love for Esra, a male name in Hebrew, undermines his own sense of his male Jewish self; traditional power dynamics between men and women are undermined in Große Liebe and Liebesbrand; and in EisTau the protagonist is in love with nature, a glacier, which is gradually disappearing. So, do these new masculinities also tell us something about “the new man,” as he has been frequently invoked in the media in the past few years?2 In some ways they do, in so far as they expose a noticeably greater awareness and more conscious negotiation of the male self in relation to others and a critical scrutiny of different forms and meanings of masculinity under changing social and political circumstances. More significantly, though, they reflect a world in which ideas of the “native” are frequently being contested, and are already deemed redundant in many places, and in which the transnational has become our “social reality,” to recall Taberner’s observation (2017, 51 and 289). Their embodiment of this social shift is what makes these literary manifestations of masculinity new.

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Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS 7/7, 108, 110, 111, 120, 123, 125, 126, 139, 140 9/11, 4, 20, 22, 110, 111, 119, 126, 156 See also Terrorism, terrorist attacks/ suicide attacks 1989/90, 29, 193 See also German (re)unification; Wende/fall of the Berlin Wall A Adams, Rachel, 13, 200 Adelson, Leslie A., 151, 161 Adolescence, 37–39 Adventurer, figure of the, 203 Affect, 21, 22, 152, 163, 164, 173, 178, 194, 202, 207–218 affective turn, 209

Agency, 112–114, 113n21, 132, 136–138, 141, 174, 213–215, 220, 225, 233, 234 Ahmed, Sara, 5, 6, 9, 10, 21, 92, 93, 129, 147, 148, 153, 159, 162, 164, 168, 208, 209, 211, 212, 214 Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), 6, 105 Ambiguity, 50, 88, 110, 113, 118, 124, 130, 141, 160, 224–225 of love, 131 Ambivalence, 127, 233 Antarctica, 194, 201–203, 210, 215, 218, 220, 221, 224, 234 Anthropocene, 207, 209–211, 215–217, 221, 224, 225, 234 Anti-Semitism, 71, 72, 72n15, 75, 80–82 Arab, 72, 73, 76, 77, 89, 104, 107n8, 120, 121, 139

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Matthes, New Masculinities in Contemporary German Literature, Global Masculinities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10318-6

265

266 

INDEX

Authority, 45–48, 112, 117, 134, 139, 158, 160, 167, 219, 234 authoritative masculinity, 133 B Bach, Susanne, 33, 33n7, 37, 39, 40, 40n20, 47 Backlash (against feminism), 14, 15, 204 See also Faludi, Susan Baldwin, Claire, 109 Barrett, Frank J., 15, 41 Battle of the sexes, 19, 65, 232 Baudrillard, Jean, 119, 123 Beasley, Chris, 113 Belonging, 11n8, 39, 45, 47–49, 55, 91, 107, 109, 111, 115n24, 118, 139, 141, 170, 231 belonging in/to Germany, 103n1, 109, 118, 125n33, 129, 141 Beutin, Wolfgang, 153 Bezos, Jeff, 205, 206 Bhabha, Homi K., 116 Biendarra, Anke S., 12 Biller, Maxim, 17, 19, 22, 65–98, 103, 116n25, 148, 154, 162, 162n17, 184, 185, 209, 231–233, 235 Der gebrauchte Jude, 69 Die Tochter, 19, 67, 67n7, 69n11, 73–92, 73n17, 94n53, 95n54, 96, 116n25, 233 Esra, 19, 67, 69n11, 91, 91n42, 91n43, 92, 92n48, 92n49, 95n55, 103, 154, 162, 162n17, 209, 233 Binary thinking/binaries, 10n7, 34, 70, 75, 88, 97, 151, 165, 211, 223, 232, 233 Bischoff, Dörte, 11 Blagojević, Marina, 10, 12, 15 Bly, Robert, 14n11

Body, 9, 10, 43–45, 58, 71, 72, 80, 82, 86, 106n7, 107, 116, 117, 121, 122, 136n40, 137, 147, 148, 163, 164, 166 male body, 9, 43, 75, 148 Border/s, 20, 21, 105, 109, 147–185, 234 “border thinking,” 21, 147–156, 175, 185 (see also Mignolo, Walter D.) national borders, 105, 181, 221 Bourdieu, Pierre, 40n20, 179 Bourgeois family/society, 54–56, 134 Boxer/boxing, 37, 43 Boyarin, Daniel, 73n16, 81n24 Brandes, Holger, 34 Branson, Richard, 205, 206 Braun, Rebecca, 3, 11 Brittan, Arthur, 54, 71 Burton, Sir Richard Francis, 197, 198, 198n6, 201–203, 202n12 Butler, Judith, 6, 8–10, 13, 39, 41, 45, 55, 118, 138, 149, 176–178, 177n32, 199, 222n37 C Campbell, Anne, 43 Capitalism/capitalist, 4, 21, 22, 30, 31, 35, 46, 53–56, 72, 116, 120, 123, 125n33, 129, 130n38, 155, 156, 158n11, 159, 160n14, 176, 177, 184, 185, 203, 209, 211, 223, 234 Catholicism, 166 Chase, Jefferson, 74, 77, 79, 80, 83, 86, 87 Cheesman, Tom, 119, 150, 169, 176 Cherry, Peter, 106n7 Chin, Rita, 104, 104n3, 106 Christianity, 107, 108, 119, 122, 123, 165, 168

 INDEX 

Class, 7n5, 9, 10, 15, 18, 22, 41n21, 48, 52, 148, 153, 156, 178, 181, 183, 185, 232, 234, 235 Codrai, Bettina, 67n7, 87, 87n38, 91, 91n42, 92n49, 93, 93n50, 94, 96 Cold War, 132, 139, 159, 237 NATO-Doppelbeschluss/NATO Double-Track Decision, 132, 139 nuclear armament/power, 131, 132, 134 Collectivity, 34, 35, 39, 126, 134, 180–182, 209 Compulsory heterosexuals/ heterosexuality, 15, 41, 42, 55 See also Butler, Judith Conflict, 4, 19, 43, 45, 65–98, 111, 128, 140, 154, 194, 200, 216, 232 Connell, Raewyn, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 12, 14–19, 31, 35, 40, 43, 48, 54, 55, 57, 58, 72, 72n15, 112–114, 113n22, 113n23, 116, 117, 129, 129n37, 131, 139, 158, 160, 180, 199, 202, 231, 232 Consumerism, 46 Control, 6, 14, 30, 35, 44, 51, 57, 70, 82, 93, 126n36, 136–138, 176, 177, 198, 234 Cooke, Paul, 33, 35, 54 Counter-image, 70, 74, 106, 164 Coury, David N., 104 Crisis, 4, 6–9, 21, 30, 36n15, 105, 147, 156, 185, 199–204, 209–212, 216, 218–225, 238, 239 crisis discourse, 8, 199 crisis of intimacy, 30, 58 (see also Lewis, Alison) crisis of masculinity, 7, 7n5, 8, 17, 22, 194–208, 218, 225, 232

267

crisis of nature, 194–208, 225 environmental crisis, 194, 200, 221, 235 financial crisis of 2008, 147, 156 men in crisis, 199 refugee crisis, 4, 6, 10n7, 105 Cultural exchange, 11, 41, 53, 56, 162, 163 Culture industry, 120, 123, 126 D Demetriou, Demetrakis Z., 16 Desire, 8, 39, 41, 42, 68, 75, 82, 88, 95, 120, 128, 136–138, 147, 156, 160, 167, 168, 171, 214, 217, 220, 237 male desire, 156, 214n23 object of desire, 214, 217 Dichotomy, 3, 19, 74, 75, 107, 163, 209, 217, 236 of femininity vs. masculinity, 163 of Islam and the West, 107, 140 Difference, 9–11, 18–20, 69, 88, 92, 95, 104, 105, 107, 110–114, 121, 124, 128–134, 137–141, 157n9, 162, 164, 170, 177, 208, 227, 237 cultural difference, 103n1, 106, 109, 164 ethnic difference, 19, 20 religious difference, 103, 112, 131, 235 Diner, Dan, 19, 67, 67n7, 68, 70, 72–74, 82, 85n34, 88, 94, 233 Dreams/dreaming, 37–39, 50, 78, 167, 181 Dürbeck, Gabriele, 194, 201, 203, 207, 211, 213–215, 217n29, 222

268 

INDEX

E Eck, Matthias, 13, 13n10, 15, 72n15 Eco-cosmopolitanism, 228 See also Heise, Ursula K. Ecocriticism, 22, 201, 207, 209, 217 Eco-warrior, 195–208, 221 Eke, Norbert Otto, 77–79, 79n22, 86 Elias, Amy J., 208 El-Kaddouri, Warda, 115n24, 120n28, 122, 129 El-Tayeb, Fatima, 10, 106 Emotion/s, 20, 22, 43, 80, 88, 90, 97, 112, 116, 135, 147, 152, 158, 161–163, 185, 204, 208, 212, 219–222 Encounter, 12, 21, 22, 49, 73–88, 137, 158, 174, 177, 195, 197, 198, 201, 202, 204, 208–210, 213, 214, 216–218, 220, 224, 225 Environment, 20, 31, 36n14, 44, 45, 53, 85, 112, 114, 133, 194, 200–205, 208, 219, 224, 225 Esposito, John L., 117, 164 Ethics, 17, 21, 196, 197, 201, 202, 207–209, 211, 221–225, 234 ethical responsibility, 200, 229 ethical turn, 208 Ethnicity, 2, 4, 5, 7n5, 9, 10, 13, 17–22, 48, 82, 89, 92, 97, 103, 104, 104n2, 108, 110, 112, 129, 148, 162, 175, 235 Europe/European, 4, 10, 20, 21, 31, 71, 75, 103n1, 104n3, 105, 108, 108n11, 115n24, 127, 147, 152–159, 160n14, 165, 168–170, 172–177, 173n28, 183, 185, 198, 234 European Union, 13, 113, 147, 157, 173n29, 185 Everyday experience, 33 Explorer, 21, 193–195, 197–207, 210, 211, 215, 218, 221–225, 231

F Faith, 82, 104n2, 122, 123, 151, 164–167 Faludi, Susan, 14, 14n12, 15, 200 Father, 35, 37, 47, 48, 78, 79, 83, 84, 87, 91, 180 fatherhood, 19 Femininity, 5, 5n3, 69, 70, 81n24, 133, 134, 163, 185 Feminism, 14, 14n11, 133 West German feminist discourse, 133 Ferree, Myra Marx, 3, 10, 13, 121n29, 132–134 Fetishization, 211 Fischer, Klaus P., 71 Flâneur/flânerie, 52, 53 Freud, Sigmund, 86, 86n36 Frevert, Ute, 4 Frisby, David, 52, 53 Fundamentalism/fundamentalist/s, 118, 120, 123, 124, 129, 131 G Gang/s, 37, 39, 40, 45, 47, 48, 181–183 Gardiner, Judith Kegan, 13 Garloff, Katja, 68, 69n10, 88, 89 Garrard, Greg, 209 Gastarbeiter/guest worker, 4, 57, 105, 106, 148 GDR, 33, 34, 37, 39, 45–47, 50, 183 Gellner, Ernest, 153 Gender gender discourse, 14, 65, 69, 81, 88, 117, 147, 152, 232 gender fluidity, 22 gender roles (conservative, traditional), 21, 47, 84, 134 Geppert, Alexander C.T., 205

 INDEX 

German-Jewish relations, 66, 68, 70, 74 German-Jewish symbiosis, 66, 66n3, 80, 87, 90 “negative symbiosis,” 67 (see also Diner, Dan) Germanness constructions of, 70, 122 perceptions of, 17, 33n10, 69, 79, 90, 97, 104 German (re)unification, 4, 85n35, 86, 88, 89, 97, 150 Gersdorf, Catrin, 217 Ghetto, 40, 42, 45, 48, 49 Gilman, Sander L., 67, 68, 69n12, 70, 71, 78, 80, 81, 81n24, 82n28, 83n30, 83n31, 88n39 Glacier, 21, 194, 202–204, 209–222, 213n21, 213n22, 217n30, 234, 235 Glaciologist, 21, 201, 203, 209, 210, 214, 217 Global, 4, 6, 11, 12, 15, 16, 18, 21, 22, 29–31, 30n1, 35, 36, 40, 45, 54–56, 105, 105n6, 111, 113, 120, 125n33, 130n38, 134, 139, 156, 170, 172, 175, 176, 196, 203, 207, 208, 214, 218, 224, 234, 235 global warming, 194, 201, 203, 204, 211, 216, 225, 234 Globalization, 4, 9, 11, 12, 14, 21, 29, 31, 129, 175 globalized world, 22, 30, 40, 120 “Glocal,” 29, 30n1 Goodbody, Axel H., 201, 202n13, 204, 206, 207, 211, 212n20, 213n22, 215, 217n30, 219, 222–224, 222n37 H Habermas, Jürgen, 216n25 Halberstam, Jack, 18, 57, 163

269

Hamann, Christof, 195 Hardt, Michael, 21, 175, 176 Hatty, Suzanne, 42, 43, 48 Haywood, Chris, 232, 232n1, 235 Hearn, Jeff, 10, 12, 13, 15, 113 Hegemony, 14–16, 22, 35, 44, 55, 56, 112, 113, 117, 129, 131, 158, 180, 198, 225, 232, 232n1 hegemonic system, 129 Heimat/home, 10n7, 41n21, 48, 75, 77, 82–84, 147, 148, 171, 172, 173n29, 175, 178, 179, 198, 205, 209, 233 Heimerl, Theresia, 155, 156 Heise, Ursula K., 218, 220, 224 Hensel, Jana, 33, 33n9 Herminghouse, Patricia, 2 Hero/heroism, 22, 35, 57, 76, 168, 169, 194, 198, 200, 205, 210, 215, 223 Herrmann, Elisabeth, 11 Hoffmann, Torsten, 111n19, 117, 124n31 Hofmann, Michael, 131, 140, 151, 169, 174n30, 175, 178, 183 Holocaust, 67, 72, 77, 78, 80 Homonationalism, 20, 122 See also Puar, Jasbir K. Homosociality, 17, 19, 36n13, 49, 178, 232n1 Homosocial space /world(s), 17, 29, 31, 35, 37, 45, 50, 51, 54, 57, 77, 117, 179n33, 228, 229, 236 homosocial experiences, 38, 39, 42 homosocial relations, 39, 174, 178–180 Honold, Alexander, 195 Honour, 39, 43, 45, 71, 182 hooks, bell, 152 Horrocks, Roger, 7, 8

270 

INDEX

Høystad, Ole Martin, 163, 165, 168 Huggan, Graham, 22, 175, 210, 211, 220 I Ideals, masculine, 34, 45, 181 Identity constructions of identity, 73, 206, 207 Jewish identity, 69, 83, 96 Muslim identity, 110, 117 national identity, 2, 3, 17, 78, 172 “nonidentitarian,” 154 Illouz, Eva, 156, 159, 161–163 Incest/incestuous relationship, 80, 86 incest taboo, 86, 86n36 (see also Freud, Sigmund) Innocence, 37–39, 49, 135 Intersectionality, 10 Iran/Iranian, 105, 107, 111n18, 114–116, 115n24, 118, 120, 123–125, 127, 130, 132, 138 Islam, 19, 20, 92n46, 103–115, 117–120, 120n28, 121n29, 122, 123, 125–127, 130, 131, 140, 150, 151n2, 152, 153, 164, 165, 168, 233 commercialization of, 111 marketing of, 118, 120 “Islamic Rage Boy,” 106, 106n7, 112 See also Morey, Peter; Yaqin, Amina Islamism, 104, 110, 115, 122, 128, 139 Islamist terrorism, 115, 139 Israel/Israeli, 19, 70, 72–83, 76n20, 86, 87, 89–91, 89n41, 94, 97, 233 J Jameson, Fredric, 120, 123 Jay, Paul, 11

Jeremiah, Emily, 15, 208, 209 Jerome, Roy, 13 Jewish man/person, 19, 66, 66n5, 69, 74, 77, 80, 83, 89–92, 96, 97, 237 Jewishness, 70, 78–80, 81n24, 83, 84, 86, 88–94, 96–98, 233 notions of, 69 perceptions of, 75 Jewkes, Yvonne, 44, 45 Jordan, Jim, 107, 110, 111n18, 114, 119, 120, 124n32, 128 Judaism, 71, 74, 81, 84, 108, 123 K Kabbani, Rana, 116 Kaiser, Susanne, 5, 6, 6n4, 14 Kermani, Navid, 17, 19, 20, 22, 103–141, 147, 160n14, 162, 162n17, 163n18, 198, 209, 231, 233, 235 Große Liebe, 20, 109–112, 110n17, 114, 130–140, 136n40, 162, 233, 235 Kurzmitteilung, 20, 108, 110–112, 110n16, 111n19, 114–132, 136, 139, 140, 160n14, 161n16, 162, 162n17, 163n18, 171n27, 209, 233 Wer ist Wir? Deutschland und seine Muslime, 108 Kimmel, Michael S., 13 Komfort-Hein, Susanne, 11 Kontje, Todd, 153 Köppen, Manuel, 80, 81n25, 82, 82n29, 83 Kraenzle, Christina, 196n4, 200n8, 203 L Layla and Majnun, 131, 131n39, 136 Lebanon War, 19, 73, 74, 76–78 Leipzig, 18, 31, 32, 40, 46, 49, 50, 57 Lerner, Paul, 71, 72, 75

 INDEX 

Levinas, Emanuel, 21, 208, 208n17, 209 Lewis, Alison, 29, 30, 34, 58 Literary models, 17, 20, 147–156, 234 Littler, Margaret, 149, 156, 162, 164, 164n20 Local, 2, 10–12, 11n8, 18, 19, 21, 29–32, 30n1, 36, 40, 45, 49–57, 105n6, 114, 115, 129, 129n37, 134, 139, 149, 156, 173–185, 194, 202, 207, 208, 224, 225, 232–234 Longing, 20, 126, 139, 154, 156n8, 158–160, 163, 168, 170, 180, 184, 216, 220, 220n35, 221 Love, 19, 20, 57–58, 88–98, 111, 112, 130, 131, 135–141, 154–156, 158–168, 172, 177, 178, 206, 210, 216, 217, 237–239 courtly love, 158 divine love, 131, 137 love for nature, 212 Loyalty, xi, 45, 54, 74n19, 127, 182 M Machtans, Karolin, 108, 109, 131, 136–140, 138n41 MacInnes, John, 13, 14 Male dominance/domination, 16, 39, 65, 93, 107, 136, 150, 167, 179, 183, 199 Manhood, 3, 42, 47, 180, 182, 198, 200, 201 Männerbund/Männerbünde, 182 See also Mosse, George L. Marginality/marginalization, 16, 17, 22, 31, 32, 34–36, 44, 49, 51, 52, 55, 56, 93, 107, 112, 150, 154, 175, 181, 182, 229, 236, 238 margins of society, 55, 56, 150, 175, 176

271

socio-economic marginalization, 35, 234 Martschukat, Jürgen, 8, 36n13, 199 Masculinism, 54, 71 See also Brittan, Arthur Masculinity, 65, 67, 69 anxious masculinity, 97 complicit masculinity, 72n15 (see also Connell, Raewyn) constructions of masculinity, 5, 10, 15, 17, 18, 21, 22, 58, 113, 148, 149, 152, 155, 231 discourses of masculinity, 1, 5, 7, 14, 18, 29, 148 East German masculinity/ masculinities, 29–36, 193 “effeminized” masculinity/ effeminacy, 17, 19, 70, 73, 75, 77, 88, 90, 232 emasculation, 72, 81, 90, 122, 179 hegemonic masculinity/hegemonic forms of masculinity, 9, 14–17, 19, 20, 31, 40, 54, 103–114, 117, 118, 121, 129–132, 135, 139–141, 160, 180, 194, 201, 210, 218, 232, 233 (see also Connell, Raewyn); hegemonic masculinities in the GDR, 35; hegemonic masculinity in West Germany, 34 hypermasculinity/hypermasculine, 17, 19, 70–73, 75, 77, 81n25, 88, 108, 110, 116, 149, 163n18, 200, 211, 232 Jewish masculinity/Jewish men, 69–73, 70n13, 72n15, 75, 77, 79, 80, 83, 88–92, 97, 232, 233 marginalized masculinity, 16, 40, 49–57, 95, 185 (see also Connell, Raewyn) militarized masculinity, 76–78, 89

272 

INDEX

Masculinity (cont.) models of masculinity, 17, 20, 22, 132, 135, 147–156, 174, 185, 195, 198, 216, 232–234 multicentricity of masculinities, 35 (see also Smith, Tom) post-masculinity/ies, 218–224, 231, 232 protest masculinity, 48 (see also Connell, Raewyn) relations among masculinities, 17, 65 (see also Connell, Raewyn) Romantic masculinity, 20, 154, 157, 168–173, 234 subordinate masculinity, 16, 72n15, 149 (see also Connell, Raewyn; Messerschmidt, James) transnational business masculinity, 54, 55, 57, 117 (see also Connell, Raewyn) working-class masculinity, 180, 182, 234 Massey, Doreen, 36, 52, 53, 56 Matthes, Frauke, 2, 3, 5n3, 10, 13, 14n13, 31n3, 32, 33, 35, 50, 51, 57, 106, 110, 116, 149, 150, 151n2, 155, 157n9, 208–210 Mayer, Sylvia, 211, 217 Mayer, Tamar, 19, 72, 73, 75–77, 202n13 McGlothlin, Erin, 66n6, 68, 82, 89 Melancholia, 49, 180, 212 Memory, 37, 38, 45, 46, 50, 50n33, 130, 131, 139–141 Men’s studies, 13 Menke, Bettine, 203, 206n16, 219, 219n34 Mesh, 21, 177, 184, 185, 198 See also Morton, Timothy Messerschmidt, James, 5, 6, 12, 15, 16, 35, 48, 112–114, 113n23 Meuser, Michael, 35, 39, 40, 40n20

Meyer, Clemens, 17, 18, 22, 29–58, 65, 68, 117, 175n31, 178, 179n33, 193, 231–234 Als wir träumten, 18, 30, 30n2, 31, 32n6, 33, 33n8, 34, 36–50, 50n33, 53, 56, 58, 58n41, 193, 232 Im Stein, 18, 30, 30n2, 32, 34, 49–58, 193, 232, 235 Mignolo, Walter D., 21, 147–156, 175, 185 Migration, 4, 10n7, 14, 68, 68n9, 104n3, 105, 106n7, 109, 113, 113n23, 115n24, 134, 148, 160, 164, 185 “literature of migration,” 160 “migration background,” 164 Militarism, 72, 73, 75, 77, 183 Militarization, 47, 76–78, 89, 133, 183 Military, 4, 19, 34, 47, 71, 73, 76, 76n20, 77, 89, 105, 114 Modernism, 53 Modernity, 3, 34, 45, 53, 77, 81n24, 149, 150, 153, 155, 156, 161, 175, 176, 211n18, 218 Moral adequacy/dilemma/ responsibility/values, 21, 134, 148, 201, 211, 214, 220–224 “moral novel,” 222 Moraru, Christian, 208 Morey, Peter, 106, 106n7 Morton, Timothy, 21, 177, 178, 184, 185 Mosse, George L., 3, 43, 45, 70, 71, 78, 148 Mueller, Agnes, 68 Mueller, Magda, 2 Musk, Elon, 205, 206 “Muslim self-justification,” 110, 120 “Muslim Turn,” 104 See also Yeşilada, Karin Mysticism, Islamic, 20, 112, 138

 INDEX 

N Nagel, Joane, 3, 71 Nation, 2, 4, 5, 9, 10, 12, 15, 54, 71, 71n14, 73, 75, 76, 107, 109, 122, 129, 130n38, 148, 162–164, 170, 171, 183, 194, 202, 218, 224, 231 Nationalism, 3, 19, 71, 71n14, 72, 77, 105, 141, 153, 173n28, 205, 207 Nationality, 2–5, 9, 13, 15, 17, 18, 22, 71, 148, 155, 156, 162, 170–173, 182, 231, 232, 234, 235 National Socialism/Nazi, 3, 4, 71, 72, 75, 78, 148, 183 “Native,” 1, 16–22, 57, 72, 98, 111, 119, 141, 149, 153, 155, 174, 185, 193–195, 208, 224, 231–235 Nature consumption of nature, 211 nature writing, 207 post-nature, 218–224 “Nature/culture divide,” 211 Negri, Antonio, 21, 175, 176 Niekerk, Carl, 153 Nolden, Thomas, 89n40 “Normalization”/“normality,” 9, 19, 68, 69, 89, 122, 128, 139, 141, 233 “normalized” masculinity, 122 “normalized other,” 122 Norm/s, 14, 18, 35, 71, 72, 121, 127, 130, 133, 135, 138–140, 148, 179, 217, 237 gender norms, 14, 130, 135, 138, 140 O Obligation, 208 Orient/Oriental, 20, 93, 109, 116–118, 120, 127, 128, 132,

273

149, 152, 153, 160, 161, 163, 168, 171 feminized Oriental, 149 “hot-blooded” Oriental, 171 Orientalism, 202 German Orientalism, 153 Orientalist discourse, 116 See also Said, Edward W. Orientalization, 35 Ostalgie, 33 Other(s)/the other, 5–12, 5n3, 14, 21, 37, 78, 88, 90, 93n50, 94n52, 96, 109n14, 110, 117, 120, 122, 126, 129, 165, 195, 198, 200–202, 204, 208, 209, 211, 215, 217–219, 225, 233, 234 otherness, 10, 16–18, 21, 78, 81, 107, 149, 195n2, 197, 208–218, 225, 231 Outsider, 38, 40, 50, 54, 66n6, 70, 86, 116, 124, 152, 180, 182, 184 P Patriarchy, 13, 14, 16, 47, 54, 113, 152 Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident (PEGIDA), 106 Paul, Georgina, 3, 17, 81n24 Peace movement, 111, 130–133, 138–140 Pease, Bob, 12n9 Philo-Semitism, 68, 81, 82 Plumwood, Val, 194, 209, 210 Postindustrial subjects, 181, 184 Postmigrant context, 10 See also Ring Petersen, Anne; Schramm, Moritz Post-war Germany, 134

274 

INDEX

Power, 8, 14, 21, 30, 39, 40, 42–44, 48, 52, 53, 55, 57, 71, 72, 81n25, 82, 90, 92, 93, 96, 110, 112, 113, 116, 120, 129n37, 132, 134, 136, 160, 167, 179, 181, 198, 200, 212, 219, 225, 235 Precarity, 176–178, 177n32 See also Butler, Judith Preece, Julian, 196, 198n7, 202, 211, 212, 215, 219, 222, 223 Pringle, Keith, 13 Prison, 37, 41–45, 44n26, 47, 174 Privilege, 1, 6, 17 white male privilege, 14, 148 Profit, 56, 120, 122, 126, 211n18 economic profit, 120, 164 Prostitution, 18, 30, 50–54, 56–58 Puar, Yasbir K., 10, 20, 106, 106n7, 107, 121, 122, 128, 129 “Pure”/“purity,” 108, 125, 203, 204, 206, 211, 214, 220n35, 221 pure ice, 221 “pure” wild nature, 208, 210 Pye, Gillian, 30, 31, 33, 36n14, 50n33 Q Queernesss, 122, 128, 171, 217n30 Quest, 125, 156, 158, 158n11, 168, 172 Romantic quest, 158, 159 R Race/racialization, 9, 10, 18, 22, 42, 48, 71, 75, 103n1, 106n7, 116, 117, 121, 122, 128, 216 Reeser, Todd W., 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 44, 117, 118, 121, 132 Relationality, 5

Religion, 10, 13, 19, 21, 103–141, 150, 153n7, 154, 166, 173, 177, 196, 197, 233 Remmler, Karen, 67n7, 69, 79, 91 Responsibility, 21, 54, 85, 134, 196, 202, 208–218, 220, 224, 225, 234 Ring Petersen, Anne, 4, 10, 10n7, 11, 11n8, 104, 161, 172 Robertson, Ritchie, 81n24 Robinson, Sally, 199, 200 Roca Lizarazu, Maria, 66, 67, 70, 85n35, 88, 97 Romanticism, 20, 149–158, 163, 165, 168, 169, 171, 172, 174, 174n30 neo-Romantic novel/s, 95, 151, 154, 169, 170, 173, 175, 184, 207 Romantic tradition, 151 Roy, Olivier, 104n2, 105 S Said, Edward W., 105, 110, 116, 127, 152, 153, 198, 198n7 Savran, David, 13, 200 Schäfer, Martin Jörg, 36, 36n15, 38, 41, 44n26, 50, 58n41 Schlegel, Friedrich, 152, 153, 158n10, 166, 173 Schmidt, Gary, 148, 149 Schmidt, Ricarda, 159 Schmitz, Helmut, 94n52, 158 Schofield, Benedict, 3, 11 Scholz, Sylka, 34, 35 Schonfield, Ernest, 198n6 Schramm, Moritz, 4, 10, 10n7, 11, 11n8, 104, 161, 172 Schruff, Helene, 67n7, 78n21 Schulz, Gerhard, 167, 207, 216 Schwering, Markus, 154 Scientology, 111, 124, 124n32, 125n33, 126–128, 126n34, 126n35, 126n36, 160n14

 INDEX 

Second World War, 13, 147, 181 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 18, 39, 41, 53, 53n39 Segal, Lynne, 8, 41n21, 182 Self-other, 5, 19, 21, 22, 65, 87, 111, 162, 196n4, 197, 198, 201, 202, 207, 208, 210, 232 Self-perceptions, 2, 4, 70, 88, 104, 110, 114, 116, 123, 160, 163, 181, 201 of Muslims, 104 “Sense of belatedness,” 203, 218 Sentimentality (Empfindsamkeit), 171 Sexuality, 9, 13, 54, 73, 80, 83, 88, 95, 97, 103n2, 106, 117, 135, 148, 163, 239 heterosexuality, 121, 122 homosexuality, 39, 80, 122 Sex work/sex workers, 18, 41, 50–53, 56–58, 179 Showalter, Elaine, 13 Smith, Tom, 34, 34n12, 35, 44, 45 Smith-Prei, Carrie, 22, 202, 209 Space, 29, 31, 32, 35, 39–43, 47, 53, 55, 57, 77, 107, 113, 126n36, 148, 158, 168, 172, 178, 196, 198, 200, 203–206, 210, 211n18, 218, 221 SpaceX, 209 See also Musk, Elon Sprinkle, Annie, 217n30 Steinecke, Hartmut, 69 Stephan, Inge, x, 13 Stephens, Beth, 217n30 Stereotypes, 45, 70, 73, 78, 93, 95, 97, 106n7, 116, 163n18, 172 Stewart, Lizzie, 151 Stieglitz, Olaf, 8, 36n13, 199 Stranger, figure of the, 9, 212 stranger fetishism, 21, 93, 209 See also Ahmed, Sara

275

Style/writing style, 3, 37, 44n26, 49–52 Subversion, 9, 150, 172 ironic subversion, 171 Sufism, 111, 122, 123, 131, 138, 140, 153n7, 156, 165 T Taberner, Stuart, 4n2, 10–12, 29, 68, 69, 79, 80, 81n26, 82, 88, 89, 91, 92n46, 92n47, 92n49, 93–95, 105, 105n6, 109n14, 111, 114, 115, 118, 120n28, 121, 122, 125n33, 128, 129, 130n38, 139, 154, 162, 169–171, 173, 173n28, 231, 235 Tasker, Yvonne, 44 Terrorism, 104, 105, 111, 115, 130, 139 terrorist attacks/suicide attacks, 104, 122 “war on terror”, 105 Tester, Keith, 52 Theweleit, Klaus, 4 Tiffin, Helen, 22, 210, 211, 220 Transnationalism/transnationality, 1–22, 154, 157n9, 168–172, 173n29, 175–178, 199, 204, 209, 212, 238 transnational literary context, 51 transnational movements, 30, 156, 174, 178, 199, 223, 234 transnational space, 51, 155 transnational turn, 11 (see also Jay, Paul) Trauma, 78, 80, 86 Travel, 14, 153, 160n14, 178, 199–201, 200n3, 200n4, 204, 207–209, 214, 215, 217, 223, 227, 239

276 

INDEX

Traveller/traveller-explorer, 21, 114, 153, 158, 160n14, 178, 183, 194–197, 196n4, 199–207, 209–211, 213–215, 217–220, 222–224, 234, 235 Trojanow, Ilija, 17, 21, 22, 193–225, 231, 233–235 Der Weltensammler, 21, 197, 198, 201, 202n12, 222 Eistau, 21, 194, 194n1, 195, 201–211, 202n12, 211n18, 214, 217, 218, 220n35, 222–225, 231, 234, 235 Nomade auf vier Kontinenten, 203, 222 Twist, Joseph, 104, 111n19, 125, 126, 131, 131n39, 136–138, 140, 151, 152, 153n7, 154, 156, 157, 157n9, 158n11, 164, 165, 170, 172, 173 U Universal, 40, 57 Uysal Ünalan, Saniya, 157n9, 160 V Values cultural values, 3, 120, 175, 217 masculine values, 35, 134 traditional values, 134 Vertovec, Steven, 11 Vickery, Amanda, 198, 200 Violence, 4, 37, 40, 42, 43, 49, 51, 53, 57, 106, 112, 124, 133 anti-violence/nonviolence, 133, 134, 138 Volpp, Leti, 121

W Walklate, Sandra, 45, 47, 48 War, 4, 20, 65, 75–80, 89, 90, 105, 128, 136, 163, 182 Weber, Beverly M., 103n1, 106, 148, 152, 163 Weidermann, Volker, 154 Wende (turning point)/fall of the Berlin Wall, 18, 29, 30, 32, 33n7, 34, 37, 46, 139, 193, 234 (post-)Wende writing, 32 The West, 20, 40, 54, 104, 104n2, 105, 107, 108, 110, 111, 116, 117, 122, 124, 126, 127, 129–131, 139, 140, 153, 160, 168 Western anxieties about Islam, 110 Whitehead, Stephen M., 7, 7n5, 8, 15, 16, 41, 113, 199 Wilke, Sabine, 201, 206, 213n21 Wogenstein, Sebastian, 92n48, 94 Working-class background, 21, 35, 181, 183 literature, 151, 183, 185 subjectivity, 174 World “new world order,” 105, 110 “world gender order,” 231 (see also Connell, Raewyn) Worldliness, 173, 197 Y Yaqin, Amina, 106, 106n7 Yeşilada, Karin, 104, 151n2, 169, 176 Yildiz, Yasemin, 104, 149, 184 Yuval-Davis, Nira, 2 Z Zaimoglu, Feridun, 17, 17n16, 20–22, 103n1, 147–185, 197n5, 198, 231, 233–235

 INDEX 

Hinterland, 20, 151, 155, 156, 168–171, 173, 174, 176–178, 183–185, 234 Leyla, 150, 151 Liebesbrand, 20, 151, 154–157, 157n9, 160, 163, 165, 168–174, 176–178, 180, 184, 185, 209, 214n23, 234

277

Ruß, 21, 151, 155, 156, 173–178, 180, 182–185, 234 Zemanek, Evi, 215, 222, 223 Zionism, 71, 73, 75 Zionist idealization of masculinity, 75 Zionist movement, 75 Zipes, Jack, 68, 81n26