It is December 1982 in Dresden, and the lights of a defective string of
plastic lemons flicker on a public Christmas tree. Uwe Tellkamp begins Der
Turm (The Tower) with a classic image of Eastern Bloc shoddiness, but the
novel soon swoops up towards a far less familiar GDR – a genteel hillside
district of Jugendstil mansions and wrought-iron balconies high above
Dresden, home to a group of people who were not supposed to exist in this
people’s republic: the bourgeois intelligentsia. Tellkamp’s book, which won
the 2008 German Book Prize and set critics swooning, addresses a question
that has greatly preoccupied German culture of late: What was the GDR? This
year, German-language fiction provided some provocative answers, and none
were more resonant than those offered in Tellkamp’s 976-page work.
Born in 1968, Tellkamp grew up in the Dresden milieu his characters inhabit. A
practising doctor until 2004, he was briefly imprisoned and banned from
studying medicine after refusing, during his East German military service,
to help suppress a demonstration in October 1989. Der Turm’s Christian
Hoffmann, who must volunteer for the army in order to be allowed to pursue
his medical studies, bears elements of the author’s life. He chafes against
his military service, lands in a dismal military prison and finds himself
condemned to a further two-year spell in the army. Christian’s father
Richard, a prominent surgeon, navigates a system steeped in corruption,
where his extramarital dalliances have left him especially vulnerable to
Stasi blackmail. Richard’s brother-in-law Meno Rohde, a zoologist barred
from his profession because of his ties with the church, works as an editor
at a publishing house where he must carry out the day-to-day tasks of the
East German censorship apparatus. As the three protagonists move through
1980s Dresden and are joined by an ever-swelling cast of characters,
Tellkamp opens up a kaleidoscopic view on to a world of endless queues,
bureaucratic mazes, bribery, pervasive shabbiness and general decline, which
his characters try to counter by retreating into the past. Following the
characters’ experiences, the narration is sometimes matter-of-fact,
sometimes caustic and sometimes desperately angry. This is a society out of
proportion, in which necessary things are in short supply and useless ones
available in excess. Poison trickles through the book: industrial pollution
gives rise to strange microclimates on the islands in the Elbe, where
tropical butterflies flourish; the characters’ insular nostalgia becomes an
illness, “the sweet malady called yesterday”. Der Turm is a novel that
overflows and overpowers: it is rendered in sentences as baroque as the old
Dresden Tellkamp’s characters long for. Memories and impressions grow wild
across the lattice of the plot, bringing the symphonic book to – but never
over – the brink of cacophony. Tellkamp has said the tower of the title
refers to the geography of the neighbourhood inhabited by his characters, to
the ivory tower of their hermetically sealed subculture, as well as to the
GDR itself, a latter-day Tower of Babel. Both the characters and the GDR
live in denial of the passage of time, but in the background the clocks tick
down to November 9, 1989. On the day the Wall falls, the book grinds to a
halt, ending not in a full stop but a colon.
Marcel Beyer’s finely wrought Kaltenburg, another novel dealing with the
question of what the GDR was, is set in striking proximity to Tellkamp’s
tower. Beyer’s main character, the Austrian ornithologist Ludwig Kaltenburg,
rules over an animal research institute in the same Dresden district – and
amid the same GDR-denying intellectual salon culture. Strolling through this
neighbourhood decades later, Kaltenburg’s onetime protégé Hermann Funk
recounts for a young translator his life with the enigmatic Kaltenburg. Funk
is fictional; Kaltenburg, less so. He is based on the Nobel Prize-winning
Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz. Among the characteristics Kaltenburg
shares with Lorenz are his knowledge of jackdaws and his murky Nazi-era
past. Funk is a young boy in wartime Posen, when he first meets Professor
Kaltenburg, an academic colleague of his father’s. At the end of the war,
Funk flees with his family to Dresden, where Kaltenburg – barred from a
professorship in Austria because of his membership of the Nazi party – soon
also takes up residence. The institute Kaltenburg founds in Dresden is, in
its 1950s heyday, a raucous menagerie: fish in the basement, ducks and dogs
wandering the main floors, hamsters nesting in the cabinets, a cockatoo
squawking through the house, Kaltenburg’s prized flock of jackdaws in the
attic. Beyer is at his best when describing animals: they anchor the book’s
most memorable scenes. Kaltenburg’s birds circle over many of the grimmest
moments of twentieth-century German history, and the human–animal
relationship finds an unexpected portal into this history. In one haunting
and beautifully rendered scene, a group of apes wanders the rubble of
Dresden the morning after Funk loses his parents in the Allied firebombing
of February 1945. Seeing the human corpses strewn on the street, these
escaped zoo animals join the human survivors in piling up the dead. “Leben
heißt Beobachten” is Ludwig Kaltenburg’s motto:observation is life.
Kaltenburg, a book as fine-boned as the birds that flock its pages, is a
meditation not only on the observation of nature but also on the nature of
observation, and the varieties and limits of memory. Gaps in our knowledge
of the past go unfilled: we assume Funk’s parents died in the bombing, but
are never certain; the extent of Kaltenburg’s war guilt also remains
unclear. Funk’s wife Klara changes the subject to Proust whenever the
post-war past is discussed, and Funk laments the inadequacy of his memory:
“It could be that my memory seamlessly joins together a row of scenes that
are actually separated by months or even years, could be that even in
remembering one is allowed no breathing time”.
Ludwig Kaltenburg dies in 1989, the eventful year in which Adam und Evelyn,
Ingo Schulze’s new novel about the end of the GDR, is set. In late summer,
as the Soviet satellite states groan with impending collapse, we meet the
title characters of this prelapsarian romp. In an unnamed provincial East
German town, Adam is enjoying his lot in life. A gifted dressmaker, he makes
beauties of the otherwise ordinary local women who come to him cradling
bolts of cloth obtained from the West. For this the women love him, and he
beds as well as outfits his adoring clientele – a habit that sets the novel
in motion when Evelyn, Adam’s girlfriend, walks in on him naked with Lilli.
The indignant Evelyn takes off without him on their planned holiday to Lake
Balaton; like a jovial stalker, Adam chases after her across Czechoslovakia
and Hungary. Along the way, the pair fall into further entanglements with a
lively East German hitchhiker Katja, a West German cell biologist Michael,
who is working on a project to make human immortality possible, and a
Hungarian family who offer them all hospitality. While characters couple and
uncouple, the local border controls slacken and the campsites of Hungary
flood with East Germans hoping to reach the West. Schulze’s novel is
formally impressive. It consists almost entirely of snappy, naturalistic
dialogues, portioned out in tasty little morsels in chapters of a few pages
each: that the reader is able to deduce the plot events is in itself no
small feat. Adam und Evelyn is a light, airy confection, and the Adam and
Eve references that overlay this love story in the form of a road trip are
more playful than systematic. In one of the book’s witty scenes, Adam and
Evelyn find a Gideon bible in their first Western hotel room. Adam reads the
Creation story aloud to Evelyn, who coaxes him to eat bits of – not fruit,
but Leberkäse, a kind of Bavarian meatloaf. And, as in the Bible, it is the
woman who comes off looking worst when this couple fall from paradise. The
character of Evelyn never particularly charms. While the cigar-smoking Adam,
trailing her in his vintage Wartburg with a pet turtle riding shotgun, is
decorated with quirky character traits, she is young, pretty and little
else. As long as she remains in the GDR, at least her grounds for going to
the West seem admirable (she wants to pursue the academic studies she has
been barred from in the East), but Evelyn turns out to have been lured not
so much by forbidden knowledge as forbidden consumerism – spacious flats and
expensive Swiss chocolates. Adam never wanted to cross over in the first
place. His East Germany may or may not have been Eden – the book is far too
coquettish to pin down the location of its lost paradise – but in any case
he was content with his life there. His GDR was a place of ripe, succulent
fruits, not of sad blinking plastic lemons. And paradise the West certainly
is not. This is “original sin”, he says to Evelyn: “the drive always to want
more and more money”.
While Schulze deftly flirts his way through paradise, another remarkable new
novel performs a searing excavation of Hell. Like Tellkamp, Beyer and
Schulze, the Swiss playwright Lukas Bärfuss has written a book that deals
provocatively with history. But Bärfuss’s new novel Hundert Tage (2008) is
set thousands of miles from Dresden, confronting not the GDR but the hundred
days of the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Bärfuss has earned a reputation for
taking his country to task for smug do-gooding and self-satisfied
orderliness, and Hundert Tage, his first novel, proves no exception. As snow
falls outside his home in the Jura mountains, the Swiss former aid worker
David Hohl – the last name means hollow – tells an old school friend how he
witnessed the massacres in Kigali. A young idealist who has dutifully read
his Conrad and Césaire, David arrives in Rwanda in 1990 to work for the
Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. He finds a life of
postcolonial privilege and boredom, inhabited by expats who know little
about Rwandans and cannot be bothered to learn the local language. Rwanda is
seen as the African Switzerland: a tidy alpine landscape where quiet,
hard-working farmers tend to longhorn cattle. Not yet ready for democracy,
but a lovely target for aid money. David is uncomfortable with this
condescension, but his criticism is uneven, impetuous. His morality comes in
impulsive outbursts. Relief from boredom arrives with the outbreak of civil
war. David watches with excitement as troops march through Kigali; Agathe,
the cosmopolitan Rwandan woman he has been haplessly courting, finally
succumbs to his advances. But she continues to puzzle David. Is the real
Agathe a Europeanized student, a daughter of African farmers, locked in an
eternal struggle with nature, or a militant Hutu inciting murder through a
megaphone from the back of a flatbed truck? As the conflict escalates,
David’s botched acts become a metaphor for the ineptitude of foreign
intervention. Whether nursing an injured buzzard back to health against the
locals’ protestations or inadvertently feeding ethnic tensions by giving his
cleaning woman part of his garden to grow vegetables, the worst always comes
of his attempts to set an upstanding example for the natives. In a final
childish burst, wanting to prove to Agathe that he isn’t like the other
white people and won’t run away at the first sign of trouble, he hides in
his garden as the last foreigners are evacuated. The horrors of the ensuing
hundred days are born of order, not chaos: “I know now that perfect order
rules the perfect hell”, David says. Bärfuss takes the reader step by step
down the path to genocide. He emphasizes the role of Western – and
particularly Swiss – aid in supplying the modern tools of organization and
communication that made atrocities on such a scale possible: “we gave them
the pencil with which they wrote the death lists . . . we laid the telephone
lines over which they gave the murder commands . . . we built the streets
upon which the murderers drove to their victims”. David returns to
Switzerland – home to “people who know what right and wrong are” – a “broken
man”. When his tale of his experiences in Rwanda draws to its harrowing end,
the broken man is left within a broken narrative frame. He is disabused of
the illusions his countrymen hold, but can find nothing to replace them
with. While Hundert Tage never directly addresses the Swiss role in the
Holocaust, guilt beyond Rwanda is implicit: David remarks that the
particular penchant of the Swiss is to swim in bloodbaths of others’
creation – and their particular good fortune to escape reprimand, as some
greater wrongdoer is always present at the scene of their crimes to deflect
attention. Hundert Tage is written in the spare, distilled language that
befits its task, never sensational and never squeamish. A complex and
exhaustively researched book, it never crosses into excessive didacticism.
It is an unflinchingly political novel that brings across its devastating
message without making any narrative compromises.
“Tale from a lost country” is the subtitle of Der Turm, and the making of
histories and geographies of loss has long been a forte of German
literature. Tellkamp, Beyer and Schulze have explored the GDR with
commendable depth and complexity. Bärfuss’s book, meanwhile, has pointed to
a promising new direction for German literature. The next literary
generation will be well served if others of its best writers follow his lead
in turning their considerable powers of observation outwards, towards losses
less often chronicled by German-language writers.
Uwe Tellkamp
DER TURM
Geschichte aus einem versunkenen Land
976pp. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ¤25.50.
978 3 51842 020 1
Marcel Beyer
KALTENBURG
394pp. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.¤19.80.
978 3 51841 920 5
Ingo Schulze
ADAM UND EVELYN
320pp. Berlin Verlag. ¤18.
978 3 82700 810 7
Lukas Bärfuss
HUNDERT TAGE
Göttingen: Wallstein. ¤20.50.
978 3 83530 271 6
Jane Yager is a freelance writer and translator living in Berlin.
