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South Atlantic Modern Language Association
Animal Triste by Monika Maron; Brigitte GoldsteinReview by: Kerstin T. GaddySouth Atlantic Review, Vol. 65, No. 3 (Summer, 2000), pp. 104-106Published by: South Atlantic Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3201544 .
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Book Reviews Book Reviews
But all in all, Natter's Literature at War is a genuine contribution to a better understanding of German history, literature and culture in the first half of the twentieth century.
Wolfgang D. Elfe, University of South Caroina
Animal Triste. By Monika Maron. Translated by Brigitte Goldstein. Lin- coln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. 133 pp. $40.00.
Since the huge success of Bernhard Schlink's The Reader there has been an increased interest in English translations of modern German literature. Brigitte Goldstein's excellent translation of Monika Maron's Animal Triste is unlikely to reach the popularity of The Reader. Neverthe- less it is a book of great interest for anyone concerned with issues re- lated to modern Europe and German reunification.
On the surface the novel is a love story between the narrator and "Franz." The narrator is a woman born during the Second World War who has grown up in East Germany and now lives in Berlin. As the book starts, the narrator is perhaps a hundred years old and has with- drawn completely from the world. She has lived on the memories of her love story with Franz, a West German, and now she slowly begins to remember other aspects of her past. She met her lover in the sum- mer after the fall of the Berlin wall. Franz, an expert at ants, has come to East Berlin to be in involved in the reorganization of the museum where the narrator works, the Natural History Museum. Franz is mar- ried and lives in West Berlin. He spends the nights with the narrator, but at 12:30 a.m. he has to return to his wife. The narrator herself lives in a vacuum. She has been married and has a child but has lost contact with husband and child. She becomes so obsessed with the love affair and with Franz that she starts to stalk him and his wife. He subsequently leaves her, and in the end she kills him by pushing him under a bus.
However, it is not as a love story that this novel has its merits or warrants a review in a scholarly journal. Rather, it is in the context of German reunification that it takes on significance. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Berlin wall in 1989 and German reunification a year later, a multitude of literary works have emerged which directly or indi-
rectly deal with the cultural, emotional, and psychological problems fac-
ing East and West Germans as they try to form a new identity as one nation after 40 years of separation. Even though the wall has fallen, many are of the opinion that the "wall in one's mind" (Mauer im Kopf)
But all in all, Natter's Literature at War is a genuine contribution to a better understanding of German history, literature and culture in the first half of the twentieth century.
Wolfgang D. Elfe, University of South Caroina
Animal Triste. By Monika Maron. Translated by Brigitte Goldstein. Lin- coln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. 133 pp. $40.00.
Since the huge success of Bernhard Schlink's The Reader there has been an increased interest in English translations of modern German literature. Brigitte Goldstein's excellent translation of Monika Maron's Animal Triste is unlikely to reach the popularity of The Reader. Neverthe- less it is a book of great interest for anyone concerned with issues re- lated to modern Europe and German reunification.
On the surface the novel is a love story between the narrator and "Franz." The narrator is a woman born during the Second World War who has grown up in East Germany and now lives in Berlin. As the book starts, the narrator is perhaps a hundred years old and has with- drawn completely from the world. She has lived on the memories of her love story with Franz, a West German, and now she slowly begins to remember other aspects of her past. She met her lover in the sum- mer after the fall of the Berlin wall. Franz, an expert at ants, has come to East Berlin to be in involved in the reorganization of the museum where the narrator works, the Natural History Museum. Franz is mar- ried and lives in West Berlin. He spends the nights with the narrator, but at 12:30 a.m. he has to return to his wife. The narrator herself lives in a vacuum. She has been married and has a child but has lost contact with husband and child. She becomes so obsessed with the love affair and with Franz that she starts to stalk him and his wife. He subsequently leaves her, and in the end she kills him by pushing him under a bus.
However, it is not as a love story that this novel has its merits or warrants a review in a scholarly journal. Rather, it is in the context of German reunification that it takes on significance. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Berlin wall in 1989 and German reunification a year later, a multitude of literary works have emerged which directly or indi-
rectly deal with the cultural, emotional, and psychological problems fac-
ing East and West Germans as they try to form a new identity as one nation after 40 years of separation. Even though the wall has fallen, many are of the opinion that the "wall in one's mind" (Mauer im Kopf)
104 104
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South Atlantic Review
still remains, suggesting that East and West Germans have a long way to
go before the cultural differences have been overcome. The literature
dealing with these problems has been called 'Wende" literature and includes major works by some sixty authors, Monika Maron being one of the more well known.
On this level, Animal Triste is much more than a love story. Precisely because the characters in the novel are not very well developed, they beg to be interpreted as something more or other than themselves. The narrator's name is never mentioned, and since her history is so vague, she could be any middle-aged woman who formed her identity in East Germany after the war. Like so many of her countrymen and women, she has a complicated relationship to the German Democratic Republic (GDR). On the one hand she calls the forty years of communist rule "the peculiar time" and the leadership "a gang of criminals" (12-13). At first she claims that she has forgotten what happened during those years. That, however, changes as she tells her story, and she becomes both specific and critical, above all criticizing the absurdities of life in the GDR and the lack of individual freedom. But even though she clearly is against the leadership of the GDR, her identity had been formed during the 40 years she lived in that country. So, when the wall falls, she feels as if her whole life has been washed away. She was accustomed to life in the GDR and now nothing makes sense anymore. Just like her- self, the city she lives in, Berlin, has gone mad. Construction sites are everywhere, and streets, busses, and trains are being rerouted. All of a sudden everything is new-new money, new laws, new politicians, new names for old streets, etc One day she cannot even find her way to work anymore. She is desperately seeking a new identity and thinks she has found it with the West German Franz.
As an individual, Franz's character is even less developed than the narrator's. Franz is not his real name but one the narrator has given him because she has forgotten his name. He could be any West German who came to the East after the wall came down. And he, like many West Germans in the euphoric years of 1989-90, is infatuated with East Germany and the East Germans. This infatuation, however, does not last long. His main loyalty is to the West, in this case represented by his wife. Franz never understands the narrator and her sense of lost iden- tity
If the narrator lacked an identity before she met Franz, the situation becomes even worse after he leaves her. She withdraws completely from the world and tries to recreate the happy moments with Franz. She even
105
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puts on his glasses in a futile attempt to see the world as he saw it, the West German way, but instead she goes blind.
Appearing in University of Nebraska Press's European Women Writers Series, Goldstein's translation is a welcome contribution, not only for scholars with limited knowledge of German who are interested in Ger- man literature in the post-reunification era, but also for feminist schol- ars exploring women's issues in present day Europe.
Kerstin T. Gaddy, Catholic University of America
Nimble Believing: Dickinson and the Unknown. By James McIntosh. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. xiii + 194 pp. $42.50.
A rebellious oxymoron appears in a letter Emily Dickinson sent to her close friend and sister-in-law, Susan Dickinson: "Faith is Doubt." Dickinson's willingness to entertain doubt as a bedrock principle of her unorthodox Christian faith is one of the more seemingly contemporary characteristics of her poetic voice. And yet, as this book reminds us, religious skepticism was equally integral to the thought of other ca- nonical nineteenth-century American writers such as Melville, Thoreau, and Emerson. According to James McIntosh, however, Dickinson "in- sists more consequentially on the separateness of the self and the per- vasiveness of the unknown than any of her predecessors and contem-
poraries" (127). For Dickinson, the existence of the Unknown was not cause for despair, but rather a stimulus for continued spiritual and artis- tic growth. Its presence provoked Dickinson's imagination; indeed, an
openness to possibility became a hallmark both of her religious faith and of her poetic style. According to McIntosh, she cherished her me- dial position between doubt and faith "on the working assumption that this very dialectical process is a way to live in the spirit" (6). Entertain- ing doubt became a way of living, thinking, and writing for Dickinson, a habit of "nimble believing," which was, as McIntosh defines it, "be-
lieving for intense moments in a spiritual life without permanently sub-
scribing to any received system of belief" (1). In tracing the means by which Dickinson learned to thrive by con-
templating the Unknown, McIntosh examines the paradoxical culture that produced her. Western Massachusetts, despite being a reactionary stronghold of Calvinism, did not proscribe the importation of more liberal religious opinions from the coast, first in the form of Unitarian- ism, and then of Emersonian transcendentalism. A significant strength
puts on his glasses in a futile attempt to see the world as he saw it, the West German way, but instead she goes blind.
Appearing in University of Nebraska Press's European Women Writers Series, Goldstein's translation is a welcome contribution, not only for scholars with limited knowledge of German who are interested in Ger- man literature in the post-reunification era, but also for feminist schol- ars exploring women's issues in present day Europe.
Kerstin T. Gaddy, Catholic University of America
Nimble Believing: Dickinson and the Unknown. By James McIntosh. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. xiii + 194 pp. $42.50.
A rebellious oxymoron appears in a letter Emily Dickinson sent to her close friend and sister-in-law, Susan Dickinson: "Faith is Doubt." Dickinson's willingness to entertain doubt as a bedrock principle of her unorthodox Christian faith is one of the more seemingly contemporary characteristics of her poetic voice. And yet, as this book reminds us, religious skepticism was equally integral to the thought of other ca- nonical nineteenth-century American writers such as Melville, Thoreau, and Emerson. According to James McIntosh, however, Dickinson "in- sists more consequentially on the separateness of the self and the per- vasiveness of the unknown than any of her predecessors and contem-
poraries" (127). For Dickinson, the existence of the Unknown was not cause for despair, but rather a stimulus for continued spiritual and artis- tic growth. Its presence provoked Dickinson's imagination; indeed, an
openness to possibility became a hallmark both of her religious faith and of her poetic style. According to McIntosh, she cherished her me- dial position between doubt and faith "on the working assumption that this very dialectical process is a way to live in the spirit" (6). Entertain- ing doubt became a way of living, thinking, and writing for Dickinson, a habit of "nimble believing," which was, as McIntosh defines it, "be-
lieving for intense moments in a spiritual life without permanently sub-
scribing to any received system of belief" (1). In tracing the means by which Dickinson learned to thrive by con-
templating the Unknown, McIntosh examines the paradoxical culture that produced her. Western Massachusetts, despite being a reactionary stronghold of Calvinism, did not proscribe the importation of more liberal religious opinions from the coast, first in the form of Unitarian- ism, and then of Emersonian transcendentalism. A significant strength
106 106 Book Reviews Book Reviews
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