Glossen

Queering Violence and Desire in Kerstin Hensel’s Tanz am Kanal

von Melissa Sheedy

 

– I went out into the wide world to learn fear.

– You’ll learn about it very soon, says the policeman.[1]

Introduction

“I’ve been chosen to write,”[2] records Gabriela von Haßlau, a young woman navigating the fraught patriarchal spaces of her life via words spoken and inscribed, a process of meaning-making through narrative. Gabriela’s chronicled world is one all her own, a discursive realm made flesh through interventions on bits of packing paper, the backs of posters, and salvaged paper bags. Over the last thirty years, readers of Kerstin Hensel’s 1994 novel Tanz am Kanal (Dance by the Canal, 2017) have found themselves grappling with questions of narrative unreliability, conflicts—and continuities—between East and West, and shocking moments of violence, all focalized through the perspective of a young woman living beneath a bridge in the fictional city of Leibnitz. Spanning from the last decade of the crumbling East German regime to the initial years of a faltering unification, Hensel’s fairytale-like novel thematizes violence, queerly subversive desire, and transgression. The narrative constructs a fragile balance between the privileged and the precarious to show how the threat of brutality endures, particularly for those who live on the margins. Drawing on feminist theories of violence by bell hooks and Françoise Vergès as well as queer theories by Teresa de Lauretis, Kay Turner, and Pauline Greenhill, this article investigates the novel’s portrayal of abuse in both the family and in society at large, irrespective of social or economic system. The story extends beyond the fall of the Wall, and the shift from socialism to capitalism yields neither improvement nor deterioration for Gabriela. By emphasizing the continuing patterns of trauma in both private and public arenas, the narrative condemns neither the GDR nor unified Germany alone, but rather the enduring patriarchal structures of violence that target Gabriela’s counternormative actions and identities. In the novel, private struggles correspond to the larger sociopolitical landscape to reveal how queer[3] desires and identities are particularly vulnerable to violence and marginalization. Set in both a socialist and post-socialist context, Hensel’s novel opens in 1994, when protagonist Gabriela takes up her pen to write down the story of her childhood in the fictional town of Leibnitz[4] in the 1970s. Rife with fairytale imagery, the text is presented as her autobiography, interspersing memories of her childhood with scenes experienced by her adult self, all of which take shape on scavenged bits of paper. While the narrative seems to revel in its own ambiguity as it oscillates between Gabriela’s early life in the GDR and her current situation post-Wende, the reader is able to piece together an unusual childhood marked by abuse both in and outside of the home. From the aristocratic “von”[5] in her name to her family’s personal and political idiosyncrasies, Gabriela’s turbulent childhood is unlike those of her peers. Her mother’s role as homemaker (having given up her job after marriage) is already atypical in the socialist state of workers and farmers, and her father, Ernst von Haßlau, is a successful surgeon who enjoys a particularly privileged status in the GDR. Despite his prestige, his increasingly visible anti-socialist acts result in a gradually faltering reputation, and Gabriela often finds herself the target of his anger, a pattern of violence that she also experiences outside of the home. Following a traumatic attack one night after a concert, teenager Gabriela finds herself pushed further and further towards the margins of a society that is unwilling to believe her, and ill-equipped to understand her. Haunted by trauma and harassed by agents of the East German secret police (Stasi), she flees to the Mecklenburg countryside, only returning to Leibnitz during the Wende. Coming to live under a bridge in the city, Gabriela turns to writing as a means of navigating her own life, committing to paper a continuing pattern of violence that targets the queerly transgressive acts, words, and desires that have made her so vulnerable.

 

Queering violence

As an outsider and transgressor, Gabriela is exposed to violence both verbal and physical, in public and in private, in the GDR and in newly unified Germany. Gabriela’s story is marked by an underlying pattern of violence, resistance, and retribution, all of which revolve around a defiance of the stifling patriarchal norms that endure, regardless of social system. Attending to Gabriela’s vulnerability at the intersections of sexuality, gender, and social precarity as well as her counternormative transgressions, this investigation examines her story through queer theory and theories of violence.

Coined in 1991 by Teresa de Lauretis,[6] queer theory describes a set of critical approaches that transgress and transcend heteronormative structures. Queer theorists work to challenge conventional binaries that have long sought to categorize—and thereby understand—identities via a specious taxonomy comprised of dichotomous pairs such as male/female, heterosexual/queer, and civilization/nature. In Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms, Kay Turner and Pauline Greenhill provide a useful framework for queer readings that are particularly valuable for narratives such Hensel’s, which frequently employ Germanic fairytale discourses. In their introduction, Turner and Greenhill suggest that a queer theoretical paradigm “problematize[s] sex, gender, and sexuality. [It] refigure[s] the possibilities of relationality along lines that challenge fixed or normative categories but also address[es] concerns about marginalization, oddity, and not fitting into society generally.”[7] Drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s germinal Epistemology of the Closet (1990), Turner and Greenhill’s theoretical approach acknowledges texts as performative sites[8] that allow for and recognize readers’ individual interactions with stories that come alive in response to each person’s singular experiences and worldview. A queer lens, predicated not on explicit portrayals of same-gender attraction, but rather on the acknowledgement of underlying textual possibilities, implications, and eccentricities, makes possible a critical examination of violence, desire, and deviance that haunt Tanz am Kanal’s pages.

With its recognition of the marginal/ized and the inherent vulnerabilities of difference, queer theory can also be brought into conversation with theories of violence, such as bell hooks’s notion of “patriarchal violence,” to illuminate Hensel’s novel. In her book Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2000),[9] hooks describes the term as a type of repeated violence that results from the hegemony of a privileged few, an idea “based on the belief that it is acceptable for a more powerful individual to control others through various forms of coercive force.”[10] A derivative of patriarchal institutionalized sexism, racism, and conceptions of male dominance, “patriarchal violence” encompasses the kind of violence produced by imbalanced power structures. This type of violence has particular implications not only for gender, but also race, class, age, sexuality, and disability.[11] hooks thus places the onus of addressing and ending this kind of violence on persons of all genders, including both the men and the women characters[12] who are implicated as perpetrators in Hensel’s novel.

More recently, French political scientist, historian, and activist Françoise Vergès offers a decolonial approach in her 2020 book A Feminist Theory of Violence, presenting a robust indictment of the violence of the “State”: “As the instance that regulates economic and political domination, the State condenses all forms of imperialist, patriarchal, and capitalist oppression and exploitation.”[13] Based on the premise of inherent violence among state and police institutions, Vergès argues that this violence against women, racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, migrants, and queer communities[14] cannot be separated from what she terms a “global state of violence.”[15] Hensel’s novel seems to anticipate these discourses, both in Ernst von Haßlau’s railings against the state—particularly ironic given that both his resistance and reluctant conformity to authority result in real harm to his daughter—and in the ongoing patterns of systemic violence that underlie both the GDR and unified Germany. While Vergès’s framing of her theory within specifically capitalist systems sheds light on the structures of violence that uphold them, Hensel’s textual reinforcement of continued state-sanctioned force within the GDR suggests that those seeds of violence did not disappear under socialism, but rather endured throughout and after the Wende. Gabriela’s vulnerability at home and at the hands of these institutions before and after 1989 reveals a violence embedded in these systems regardless of economic or political mechanism, one that prioritizes the maintenance of the status quo and punishes oddity, queerness, and transgression.

 

“My shame was on the inside”:[16] queer desire in Tanz am Kanal

Queerness in Hensel’s narrative is expressed through the brief moments of subversion, transgression, and curiosity that characterize Gabriela’s childhood and formative years. As Turner and Greenhill point out, textual queerness often manifests as a fleeting moment, couched in hints or transient encounters: “Queer theory privileges the ephemeral, momentary sites and phenomena that appear and quickly disappear.”[17] Such moments are also to be found in Hensel’s novel, which hints at potential queerness rather than revealing overt or long-term same-sex relationships or storylines. For Turner and Greenhill, for instance, queer nods are also found in those Grimm tales that resist or otherwise problematize marriage as a heterosexual norm (19). Hensel’s text, too, highlights the failures of heterosexual marriage—following a string of infidelity and abuse, the von Haßlaus end their unhappy union when Gabriela is 13. Indeed, the text’s most fulfilling relationships, sexual or otherwise, are those forged between women and/or those that take place outside the marriage bed, for example the long-term romance between Gabriela’s mother and local actor Samuel. Notably, all of Gabriela’s substantive relationships with men, beginning with her father, are marked by violence. Here, queerness and queerly coded desire seem to shine through as a mode of resistance against the heteropatriarchal state, even when danger is also found in those relationships. From her fascination with her older violin teacher to the intimate friendship with schoolmate Katka, of whom neither teachers nor her parents approve, Gabriela’s desires express a craving to move beyond the stifling circles of home, school, and work.

Like most of Gabriela’s relationships in the story, her encounters with the mysterious violin teacher Frau Popiol are marred by violence and abuse. When five-year-old Gabriela first comes to Frau Popiol for violin lessons, the older woman kisses her “for a long time,”[18] an act that Gabriela views as odd, perhaps, but not unwelcome, as she herself is unused to receiving affection. As the abuse continues, the child embraces the attention: “Frau Popiol lifted me into the air. She was a strong, stunningly beautiful woman, I floated in her arms, flew from the distress, towards the bliss. That evening I told my parents about this bliss.”[19] The violin lessons come to an unsurprising end following this revelation, but Frau Popiol, like a fairytale villain, continues to play a role in Gabriela’s life. Described variously as a witch, a “conjuror of fairy tales”[20] through her music, and as a “nutcase”[21] who lives in a dilapidated house by the river, the enigmatic woman makes sporadic appearances in the novel and serves as a constant source of captivation for the girl, who finds herself unable to resist her. The abuse Gabriela endures recalls bell hooks’ assertion that patriarchal violence is a potential in all relationships in which one side is perceived to have power over the other—not only in constellations of adult male versus female, but also, for example, in adults against children.[22] While Gabriela’s fascination with Frau Popiol constitutes its own act of resistance toward her family, this extremely negative image of queer desire reminds us that women are perpetrators of abuse, too, and that for Gabriela, both conformity and defiance can lead to danger.

The compulsion that Gabriela feels towards the older woman, whom the text often compares to a witch, parallels a similar dynamic in fairytales, such as those made famous by the Brothers Grimm. In her chapter “Playing with Fire: Transgression and Truth in Grimms’ ‘Frau Trude,’” featured in Turner and Greenhill’s Transgressive Tales, Kay Turner explores the preponderance of fairytale relationships played out between young girls and older women, which are infrequently discussed by scholars: “The manifest and various relations between witches and girls in fairy tales, as between old women and young girls generally, have been undertheorized […]. Fairy-tale scholarship rarely dips a proverbial toe into interpretive waters that might impel readers to take account of attractions, rather than repulsions, between witches and maidens.”[23] Turner identifies a “complex narrative model of female relationships” in many tales that center on innocent protagonists and solitary “queer old women” who are charismatic, agentive, and often villainous.[24] Like Gabriela and Frau Popiol’s abusive relationship, these character dyads are often marked by inequality and violence. For Turner, these textual models represent the potential to symbolically overcome sexual and social taboos,[25] a rendering of the non-normative that prowls between the lines of seemingly conventional tales. This dynamic in Hensel’s novel plays out on a peculiar dual stage: the reader sees the relationship as abusive and exploitative, whereas Gabriela herself looks back on it as her first source of happiness.[26] When she encounters the woman years later at a concert, Gabriela expresses her belief that the teacher is the only person equipped to understand her: “I wanted to tell Frau Popiol that only she could help me, that only she knew what was to become of me – and the kiss, she doesn’t remember? – no, I’ve never kissed a boy.”[27] Gabriela rejoices in what she sees as Frau Popiol’s uniquely intimate knowledge of her, an intimacy based on a kind of woman-loving-woman “mentorship,” toxic though it may be. Fascinated by Frau Popiol’s bright red wig and physical strength, Gabriela does not see the abuse for what it is, but her fixation reveals to the reader the thin line between violence and dependence, patterns of trauma that play out again and again.

While the adults in her life variously represent explicit violence, abuse, or complicit silence, Gabriela finds both refuge and acceptance in her friendship with Katka Lorenz. Katka herself is an exuberant, larger-than-life figure whose joyful transgression of normative gender roles in both behavior and appearance renders her an immediate source of fascination for the relatively fastidious Gabriela. “[G]rubby, fat, cheerful and carefree,”[28] working class Katka merrily exceeds boundaries, both bodily and social, and navigates life her own way, irrespective of conventional mores, expectations, or even laws:

Katka showed me how to steal gobstoppers from the cooperative store. Katka was musical. She danced without music, she was always dancing, waltzed her tiny, dirty body, revolved it through chaos and squalor; ate entire slabs of Zetti chocolate or cooked a whole pan of oats with cocoa. She would consume the whole porridge all by herself; I never managed to get down anything that she offered me.[29]

Katka’s joy in life, in dance, and in food both draws and repels Gabriela, who constantly remarks on the other girl’s unruly body and appetites. Largely dedicated to her own pleasure, Katka is nevertheless Gabriela’s sole ally: she is the only one who believes her friend’s account of the attack and sexual assault she experienced as a teenager, and she even puts herself at risk writing a letter of support to the district council when Gabriela is refused admission to secondary school. From their naked, music-less dances by the canal[30] to their coincidental reunion at a club years later, Gabriela and Katka share a powerful bond. In what Annie Ring in her article “Kerstin Hensel’s Insecure Borders” calls a “queer reclaiming of shame,”[31] the women exchange triumphant stories of their “scandals and misdeeds”[32] and spend the night together. Gabriela’s “lusty encounters”[33] with other women are read by Ring as a “search for queer resistance” within the treacherous pre- and post-unification cityscape.[34]

These moments of resistance, of queer defiance of civil authorities, are both ephemeral and crucial to Gabriela’s life-sustaining project of chronicling her story, particularly in the hostile spaces of a city that upholds structures of power. Here, queerness in all of its forms—joy, resistance, shame, transgression—is a central aspect of Gabriela’s survival and expression of her own identity, short-lived though it may be. Queerness manifests in the text as moments, individual acts of resistance against a backdrop of intransigent authority that highlight the continuities of oppression across systems. The post-socialist spaces that Gabriela navigates as an adult, for instance, offer the same scant shelter as those of her youth in the GDR, and what refuge she manages to find is easily violated by figures in power: Gabriela is most visibly targeted by the police, particularly post-Wende, but she is also vulnerable to local unhoused men, who threaten her and chase her out of the most desirable spots to sleep in the city. The repeated intrusion of representatives of the police institutions both pre- and post-unification represent a constant threat to Gabriela, from the harassment of the Stasi to the appearances of Chief Inspector Paffrath both in the GDR and post-unification Germany. Further, the urban space itself seems to collude with the state, “omnipresent regimes of order (socialist and capitalist)”[35] that uphold existing patterns of oppression that target those on the margins. As Ring observes, Gabriela’s beloved bridges allow an ideal vantage for pursuers to spot her, and her shelters are anything but secure.[36] The material landscape of the city mirrors the discursive authority of the state institution, regardless of social or political system, and fleeting moments of queer resistance stand in contrast to—and defiance of—the permanence of hegemonic structures, both physical and social.

 

Exposing the “violence of the norm”[37] in Tanz am Kanal

Reading Hensel’s novel through a queer lens shows how queerness—as a manifestation of possibilities, fantasies, and subversive desire—exposes the violence inherent in patriarchal conventions; that is, in what readers frequently perceive as normalcy.[38] Gabriela’s efforts to find and articulate her own sense of fulfillment runs counter to the expectations of her family, educators, and state officials (and indeed, of her readers). Each act of noncompliance—which I read here as “queer”—is followed by a violent reaction, either verbal or physical. From her childhood in a “privileged” family to her time unhoused, Gabriela first experiences and negotiates abuse through language, revealing a pattern of discursive violence predicated on names and naming. While growing up, she is often referred to by either her nickname “Ehlchen” or by the derogatory term “Binka,” a slur that by itself is largely meaningless, but which takes on a strongly pejorative connotation within the universe of the text.[39] The use of each sobriquet corresponds to the speaker’s current attitude: “[My parents] used to call me Binka when they thought I was being stupid or silly, and Ehlchen when I was being a good girl. Gabriela only when they hated me.”[40] Beyond the simplistic equivalence of labels to inherent moral value (and the implied response to childhood moments of noncompliance), this practice of designation possesses further implications for gender and sexuality. “Gabriela von Haßlau” and “Binka” stand on either side of a ritualized femininity that on the one hand is associated with both purity and aristocracy (and, curiously, the “hatred” she feels from her parents), and on the other is representative of a lower-class sexual promiscuity. Notably, only the grammatically neutral “Ehlchen” corresponds to the sole positive view of their daughter, an unsexed—indeed presexual—nonthreatening entity.[41]

Her father’s name-calling[42] is particularly ironic in light of his insistence on correct nomenclature for other people and objects. As a child, Gabriela’s exuberant embrace of a language all her own vexes and frustrates her rule-following father. Ernst laments the child’s inclination toward creative names for common items, for instance the violin that she sees as an “enchanted dachshund,”[43] and he forces her to repeat the correct words after him, a practice that Ring describes as “performances of affect” and a “mimetic ventriloquy of shame.”[44] Whereas Gabriela’s engagement with language is a playful experimentation that probes the boundaries of correctness and helps to shape a world that for her makes little sense, Ernst von Haßlau’s rigid adherence to the lexicon—juxtaposed with an oddly lax approach to his daughter’s own name—comprises a pattern of violence immersed in patriarchal linguistic conventions. This practice of naming as a punitive measure asserts both power and knowledge over Gabriela,[45] mirroring a means of interpreting nature that originates with the Book of Genesis, in which Adam is given the right to name the animals in the garden as well as his wife. This type of violence in language expresses and is an expression of the power structures that inform patriarchal violence, and female and other marginalized figures are frequently the targets of such violence.

Name-calling in the novel extends to a form of traumatic recall and potential loss of self. For example, whenever Gabriela as a child or adult hears the word “Binka” as an insult, she wonders how the castigator knows her name. It also corresponds to a muddling, if not a full erasure, of Gabriela’s sense of identity. When two journalists from the international women’s magazine Mammilia interview Gabriela for a vaguely defined piece on women in need, they express delighted shock at Gabriela’s scar: “Do you have any tattoos? No? Pity, but wait a minute, what’s that? Did somebody hurt you?”[46] Gabriela’s response—“I’m a Binka”[47]—reveals the extent to which her identity has become inextricably linked to trauma: “Is my name Binka? Is my name Ehlchen? Perhaps my name is Gabriela? Gabriela von Haßlau?”[48] Drawing on Maurice Blanchot, Sabina Sestigiani remarks in Writing Colonisation that giving a name creates a distance between the physical nature of the signified and the idea evoked by the name, and that this practice is inherently tied to violence and death: “Every act of naming or designation alludes to a sacrifice, an act of annihilation of the thing which is named.”[49] Naming is thus tied first to a metaphorical, and then to the literal subjugation of the earth and the natural world.[50] This apparent loss of self pushes Gabriela even further toward the margins of both family and society. Jennifer Ruth Hosek points out that while the name “Binka” is one foisted on her by figures of authority, both within and outside the home, Gabriela eventually reclaims it for herself.[51] This reclamation, read through a queer lens, can be interpreted as a small yet triumphant recovery of identity, but a regrettably short-lived one, as her narrated story ultimately ends in silence.[52]

 

Continuities of violence during the Wende

Violence in the novel is not limited to the discursive realm; physical abuse also takes place as an expression of the brutality inherent in the patriarchal norm. Gabriela’s childhood and young adulthood are characterized by what Ring terms a “wider logic of sexual violence”[53] comprised of both threats and physical transgressions. This violence begins in the home, where Ernst pulls Gabriela’s braids when she cries[54] and frequently slaps her “for no reason.”[55] When he strikes Gabriela during an argument about her performance at school—and following her question about family identity: “Who are we, then?”[56]—she remarks that he had “never properly hit me before, but this question made him do it.”[57] The patriarchal father and husband also pushes his wife’s adult lover down the stairs. This pattern of violence within the family circle corresponds to hooks’s assertion that violence in the home is “connected to sexism and sexist thinking, to male domination.”[58] hooks suggests that this type of violence can also be linked to a sense of control within a patriarchal system: “Since masses of […] working-class men do not feel powerful […] within white supremacist patriarchy they are encouraged to feel that the one place where they will have absolute authority and respect is in the home.”[59] While Ernst von Haßlau is not working class, hooks’s observation nevertheless accords with his frustrated ambitions within a state that does not, to his mind, properly acknowledge his status as a surgeon. While privilege exists in the GDR for those under the umbrella of so-called “Intelligentsia,”[60] Ernst constructs for himself a philosophy of prestige that counters the GDR’s founding mythos of socialist egalitarianism: his desire for status extends to amassing and displaying the conventional trappings of wealth, such as extravagant parties and house cleaners hired in secret. His performance of privilege both complicates and threatens Gabriela’s role in a socialist society, and his frustration at his loss of prestige, either real or imagined, often manifests in his violence toward her.

While this violence may appear random to the child Gabriela, it functions to keep her in line—or put her in her place. According to French literary critic René Girard, violence possesses an order-restoring function that upholds difference, and thereby hierarchy (for example, between marginalizer and marginalized, working class and oppressive class, male and female).[61] The question here remains: what kind of order is being restored? What status quo, by whom and in whose best interests, is maintained in the brutalizing force behind the restoration of “order”? These questions are all important for both feminist and queer lines of inquiry, which in part seek to illuminate the violence inherent within the preservation of patriarchal norms. For Gabriela, the application of force compels assimilation into the expectations of those in power: her exposure to violence whether within the family circle or in public, in the GDR or unified Germany, reveals that these patriarchal structures thrive in arenas both public and private, socialist and capitalist.

This pattern of abuse and control extends outside of the home, culminating in a scene of shocking violence that takes place one night when Gabriela is a teenager. While walking home after a concert, Gabriela is attacked and raped by several unseen men in a park, one of whom cuts a cross into the flesh of her forearm. Names and naming once more take on a sinister weight during the attack, when one of her assailants whispers the repeated incantation: “Mygoodgirlmydarlingmybeauty”[62] and the other links past to present by calling her “Binka.” Her report of the attack is met with scorn and disbelief on the part of the law enforcement officers who hear her story, and she is accused of having made the cuts herself: “You’re trying to slander the state. You’re lying. You cut your own arm. We’ll get to the bottom of this. Comrade Paffrath, write down: self-mutilation.”[63] While the police refuse to believe Gabriela’s story, and in fact file charges against her, the scar on her arm remains a problem in the eyes of a government that views the wound as an act of defamation.[64] As a result, Gabriela is forced by the East German authorities to undergo an invasive operation to cover the mark. Moreover, her father himself is obliged to perform the procedure: “Father transplanted a circular piece of skin from my upper thigh onto the place on my arm.”[65] In first removing skin from another part of Gabriela’s body to conceal the scar, Ernst causes her even more injury, an unnecessary act that places more value on Gabriela’s conformity within the state than her health.

While Gabriela’s reliability as a narrator as well as the narrative instantiation of the rape itself as a “real” event have been called into question by scholars,[66] I read the text’s narrative ambiguity as the result of fractured recall and the processing of trauma, rather than as evidence of fabrication. That violence has taken place is not to be denied: Gabriela’s wounds and her subsequent treatment at the hands of the authorities illustrate the patriarchal violence to which she is subject. As Reinhild Steingröver observes, the ensuing abuse results not from a desire to heal, but rather to restore order:

The state, which can neither tolerate difference, nor accept the evidence of a violent act within its socialist society, responds to this marking with another act of violence. By forcing Gabriela’s father to transplant a piece of skin from her leg to her arm, the trace of violence and difference is to be wiped out. Gabriela is thus triply violated: by the rapists, the state and her father, all male figures of power.[67]

Gabriela’s harsh treatment at the hands of the police indicates a severe censure in the text of a system that spurns those who need its protection most.

The patriarchal violence born within insular spaces thus correlates to systemic violence played out on the larger political stage; Gabriela’s persecution at the hands of the authorities continues even after the dissolution of the GDR. During her time spent living under a bridge, she is vulnerable not only to local unhoused men, but also to the police, who at one point take her in for questioning, after which she is involuntarily, albeit briefly, remanded to a psychiatric ward.[68] The link established between private and political, intimate and systemic violence suggests that she is vulnerable both within the home and out in the city. Most frighteningly, the connections between Gabriela’s childhood, the assault in the park, and harassment she experiences post-Wende reveal that she is also endangered by the very social and political institutions that are meant to protect her: the family, the school and health care systems, and law enforcement. These patterns of violence associated with family, strangers, and even those who profess to shelter her illustrate a system of patriarchal abuse that extends from Gabriela’s childhood in the East to unified Germany. As a minor, as a woman, and as a queerly transgressive figure, Gabriela is multitudinously made Other in a society that largely grants power to white heterosexual adult men.

 

Queering the (unreliable) narrative

Despite a system that forcibly targets and undermines Gabriela’s identities and desires, she is not without recourse. Gabriela finds both solace and opportunity in the creative force of writing, a process that allows her to shape her own story, both for herself and her real and imagined readers: “I feel the momentum within me, a heaving, driving pleasure.”[69] Gabriela herself skews—or queers—the narrated events. One example of this queering comes at the novel’s conclusion when Gabriela seems to have at last found shelter and safety in the home of Chief Inspector Paffrath, one of the officers initially in charge of taking her statement following the attack. Paffrath, who appears in Gabriela’s life with curious regularity, eventually offers her a sofa in his apartment. As she considers the proposal, Gabriela’s thoughts seem to arrange themselves into potential headlines and she refers to the conclusion of her tale, one which may in fact be fabricated for Mammilia readers: “I have to bring my story to an end, devise something explosive to get me out of the last hole.”[70] At this point, readers must question to what extent the narrated events are “true,” or merely imagined fodder for future patrons of the magazine. Gabriela writes of accepting Paffrath’s hospitality and reluctantly deciding to sleep with him, an act that Ring notes is “arguably non-consensual” given the power dynamic and implicit sense of debt between them.[71] Gabriela’s past collides with the present when the menacing whisper she had heard during her attack as a teenager returns: “Mygoodgirlmydarlingmybeauty.”[72] The repetition of the disturbing litany together with other narrative parallels incriminate Paffrath in the original assault,[73] and this assertion of his involvement once more implicates the police institution (both pre- and post-unification) as a source of violence that targets female, queer, and other non-conforming identities across political and social systems.[74]

Hensel’s skillful deployment of an unreliable narrative voice here at the novel’s conclusion invites readers to question the veracity of the events, while also recognizing that the central concern is agency, not truth: As she puts pen to paper and imagines future readers engaging with her work, Gabriela’s queering of the events we presume to be “true” presents for her the possibility of escaping her situation, of finding power and independence through deliberate narrative transgression. This performative quality of Gabriela’s writing, operating on multiple levels, speaks to Sedgwick’s queer reading of texts as “sites of definitional creation, violence, and rupture in relation to particular readers.”[75] The novel ends in metaphorical and literal darkness: “The twinkle [in Paffrath’s eyes] flares up green and hot, then Paffrath closes his eyes and it goes out.”[76] The novel’s final note of hopelessness is transformed with a glance between the lines, which suggests a hidden story of success through despair as Gabriela imagines her readers at Mammilia reacting to her words—and, perhaps, buying up her interviews. Hensel’s readers may never know to what extent Gabriela’s written account matches her experience, but her words on the fine white paper she finds in Paffrath’s apartment could represent a final act of self-emancipation via a creative queering of her story.

 

Conclusion

Like many of her novels set largely—but not exclusively—in the GDR,[77] Hensel’s Tanz am Kanal illustrates the troubling reality of patriarchal violence behind both the façade of a socialist regime of purported equality and that of a capitalist regime of purported individual freedom. While Gabriela endures violence within the family realm and in public in the GDR, she finds support from neither law enforcement nor the state, which not only turns their backs on those who need help the most, but in fact participates in and reinforces these patterns. Indeed, patriarchal structures of violence within the home and family circle connect the private with the political and reflect the institutionalized violence within the system, a condoned and sustained cycle at odds with the GDR’s claims of peaceful egalitarianism. The novel further implicates capitalist unified Germany, as the violence does not end with the fall of the Wall. Critics have demonstrated how Hensel’s texts tend not to emphasize the differences between the former GDR and unified Germany, but rather the continuities across systems,[78] a dynamic that sets her work apart from many other examples of Wendeliteratur. These continuities manifest in the persecution Gabriela faces at the hands of the FRG police, her exploitation by the media, and her vulnerability to violence within both systems,[79] revealing that patriarchal structures flourish everywhere. In anticipation of what Vergès terms a “global state of violence,”[80] these patterns of violence and abuse also shape the very structure of Hensel’s narrative, in which the past is woven seamlessly into the present as Gabriela tells, remembers, and (re)constructs her life story. Gabriela’s queerly transgressive desires, behaviors, and identities render her a target of these oppressive systems while also at times expressing resistance to them. While the novel ends with a sense of hopelessness, small glimmers of light remain past the closing of its pages—fleeting sparks of curiosity shared by both Gabriela and her reader—to highlight the power in ephemeral moments of queer resistance, creation, and joy.

 

[1] Kerstin Hensel, Dance by the Canal. Trans. Jen Calleja. London: Peirene, 2017, p. 50. “- Ich bin ausgezogen, das Fürchten zu lernen. – Du lernst es gleich, sagt der Polizist.” Hensel, Kerstin. Tanz am Kanal. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994, p. 49. Hensel’s reference to the Grimm tale “Das Märchen von einem, der auszog, das Fürchten zu lernen” (“The Story of a Boy Who Went Forth to Learn Fear”) ties Gabriela’s fate with that of a boy who feels himself unable to relate to others on an emotional level, and it also hints strongly at the dangers outside of the home. Interestingly, Jen Calleja’s excellent translation foregoes the wordplay of ausziehen, which can mean to move out or to undress, in favor of a more straightforward phrasing that is closer to most English renderings of the German tale’s title.

All translations of Hensel’s Tanz am Kanal are by Jen Calleja.

[2] Hensel, Dance 7. “[I]ch bin auserwählt zu schreiben” (Hensel, Tanz 7).

[3] I use the term “queer” here to indicate behaviors, attitudes, and desires that counter, resist, or threaten conventional heteronormative and patriarchal practices. For a similar definition, see Bacchilega, Cristina. “Whetting Her Appetite. What’s a ‘Clever’ Woman To Do in the Grimms’ Collection?” In: Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms. Eds. Kay Turner and Pauline Greenhill. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012, pp. 27-47, 43.

[4] As Reinhild Steingröver points out, the town name is a portmanteau of East German cities Leipzig and Chemnitz. See Steingröver, Reinhild. “‘Not Fate – Just History’: Stories and Histories in Tanz am Kanal and Gipshut.” In Kerstin Hensel. Eds. Beth Linklater and Birgit Dahlke. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002, pp. 91-106, 105.

[5] The term “von” in German names often indicates nobility, a distinction rendered largely irrelevant in the socialist landscape of the GDR. Ernst von Haßlau clings to the preposition as evidence of “[n]oble Anhaltinian stock” (Dance 23; “Alter anhaltinisher Adel” Tanz 23), though most of his peers consider it a “bourgeois relic” (Dance 23; “Ein bürgerliches Relikt” Tanz 23).

[6] de Lauretis, Teresa. “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities: An Introduction.” In: differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 3, no. 2 (1991), pp. iii-vxiii.

[7] Turner, Kay, and Pauline Greenhill. Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012, p. 11.

[8] Turner and Greenhill, 13, citing Sedgwick, Eve Kosofky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990, 3.

[9] hooks, bell. Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. Cambridge: South End Press, 2000.

[10] hooks, 61.

[11] See for instance hooks’s chapters “Feminist Class Struggle,” pp. 37-43, and “Total Bliss: Lesbianism and Feminism,” pp. 93-99.

[12] First published in 2000, hooks’s excellent book frequently relies on binary gender designations that do not explicitly make room for non-binary identities. My initial instinct in paraphrasing hooks was to write “all genders” rather than “women and men,” as hooks’ work foreshadows and enables such more recent theory. I have decided that this alteration would nevertheless not be an authentic representation of hooks’s words. Accounting for anachronism, hooks has long been at the forefront of discussions of life under the patriarchy at the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and her work and activism show a strong capacity for change. In 2014, for example, hooks sat down with trans actress and activist Laverne Cox in a 90-minute conversation about gender identity, sexuality, and race under colonial patriarchy. See bell hooks and Laverne Cox in a Public Dialogue at the New School. https://youtu.be/9oMmZIJijgY (cited on 16. May 2024).

[13] Vergès, Françoise. A Feminist Theory of Violence: A Decolonial Perspective. Trans. Melissa Thackway. Pluto Press, 2022, p. 13.

[14] Like hooks, Vergès resists a conception of the patriarchy—which she defines as a “structure of domination” (17) —as a system predicated on the male/female binary; instead, she examines it as a result of a wider public reliance on police and other social structures: “I avoid viewing patriarchy through the female victim / male perpetrator prism—even if there are many among the latter who uncontestably deserve this qualification. I propose a critique of dependency on the police and the judicialization of social issues—in other words, of the spontaneous recourse to the criminal justice system to protect so-called ‘vulnerable’ populations” (14).

[15] Vergès, 13.

[16] Hensel, Dance 30. “die Peinlichkeiten waren in mir” (Hensel, Tanz 29).

[17] Turner and Greenhill, 14.

[18] Hensel, Dance 15. “lange” (Hensel, Tanz 15).

[19] Hensel, Dance 21. “Frau Popiol hob mich hoch. Sie war eine starke wunderschöne Frau, ich schwebte in ihren Armen, flog vor Angst, vor Glück. Am Abend erzählte ich das Glück meinen Eltern” (Hensel, Tanz 21).

[20] Hensel, Dance 66. “Märchentönerin” (Hensel, Tanz 64).

[21] Hensel, Dance 32. “’ne Bekloppte” (Hensel, Tanz 31).

[22] hooks, 62. In contrast to the problematic term “domestic violence,” hooks writes that “patriarchal violence” is a more useful framework because it recognizes that violence within the home is predicated on sexism and misogyny (61-62). hooks also reminds us that women (and people of all genders) can also be perpetrators of violence (64). Like hooks, Christine Künzel similarly focuses on the family realm as a site of violence in her essay “Gewalt / Macht,” concentrating on the power structures that exist in these relationships in which the person perceived as weaker is victimized. Künzel also asserts that women and people of all genders themselves can be perpetrators, observing that violence of one gender against another is a culturally codified norm, and the fulcrum of these acts lies in the power differential between the sexes (118). While Künzel focuses her analysis on female victims rather than potential female perpetrators, both she and hooks emphasize the patriarchal constellations that engender this kind of violence, as well as the patterns of cultural acceptance that normalize it. See Künzel, Christine. “Gewalt / Macht.” In: Gender@Wissen. Ein Handbuch der Gender Theorien. Eds. Christine von Braun and Inge Stephan. Böhlau: UTB, 2005, pp. 117-38.

[23] Turner, Kay. “Playing with Fire: Transgression and Truth in Grimms’ ‘Frau Trude.’” Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012, pp. 245-74, 246. As Turner points out, this attraction made manifest in the “old woman/young girl character dyad” (246) is a frequent constellation in the Grimms’ tales. For an analysis of a similar dynamic in Ludwig Tieck’s Der blonde Eckbert (1797), see Sheedy, Melissa. “Queering Material Nature: Bewitched Bodies and the Limits of the Enlightenment.” In: Goethe Yearbook: Publications of the Goethe Society of North America. Volume 30. Eds. Patricia Anne Simpson and Birgit Tautz. Rochester: Camden House, 2023, pp. 155-161.

[24] Turner, “Playing with Fire” 246.

[25] Turner, “Playing with Fire” 247.

[26] Hensel, Dance 67.

[27] Hensel, Dance 67. “Ich wollte Frau Popiol erklären, daß nur sie mir helfen kann, daß nur sie weiß, wohin mit mir – und der Kuß, erinnere sie sich nicht – nein, ich habe noch keinen Jungen geküßt” (Hensel, Tanz 65).

[28] Hensel, Dance 62. “schmuddelig, dick, fröhlich und frei” (Hensel, Tanz 61).

[29] Hensel, Dance 28. “Katka machte vor, wie man im KONSUM Stundenlutscher klaut. Katka war musikalisch. Sie tanzte ganz ohne Musik, immerfort tanzte sie, wälzte den kleinen schmutzigen Körper, kugelte durch Chaos, Dreck; aß ganze Zetti-Schokoladentafeln oder kochte einen Topf voll Haferflocken mit Kakao. Den Brei verspeiste sie ganz allein, ich bekam nichts herunter, von dem, was sie mir anbot” (Hensel, Tanz 27-28).

[30] Hensel, Dance 32.

[31] Ring, Annie. “Kerstin Hensel’s Insecure Borders: Shame and the Surface of Subject and City in Tanz am Kanal.” In: German Life and Letters 63, no. 4 (2010), pp. 504-520, 514.

[32] Hensel, Dance 106. “Schandtaten,” (Hensel, Tanz 104).

[33] Ring, 514.

[34] Ring, 514.

[35] Ring, 515.

[36] Ring, 515.

[37] Bacchilega, 34.

[38] Those whom these systems are designed to best serve (straight white cis normatively abled men) and those most closely aligning with those categories, may perceive equitable normalcy where many others experience oppression, violence, and exploitation. An intersectional approach to social structures is therefore crucial in understanding the inequities of the white supremacist patriarchal society. “Intersectionality,” a term first coined by Black feminist professor and lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, describes structures of oppression faced by women of color and other marginalized identities within a system that centers men and white women. See Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” In: Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1989), pp. 1241-99.

[39] Hosek, Jennifer Ruth. “Dancing the (Un)State(d): Narrative Ambiguity in Kerstin Hensel’s Tanz am Kanal.” In: Kerstin Hensel. Eds. Beth Linklater and Birgit Dahlke. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002, pp. 107-19, 119.

[40] Hensel, Dance 8. “[Meine Eltern] haben mich Binka und Ehlchen genannt. Gabriela nur, wenn sie mich haßten” (Hensel, Tanz 8).

[41] Curiously, the word “Ehlchen” is one that Gabriela attributes to her mother: “Ehlchen was my mother’s word” (Hensel, Dance 15). “Das Wort Ehlchen gehörte meiner Mutter” (Hensel, Tanz 15). Gabriela’s taxonomy of words and their respective owners marks an attempt at meaning-making and provides particular insight into her interlocutors. Her father’s words, such as “septic” (19), “varicosis” (10), “state” (37) and “prestige” (47), speak to an authoritative, masculine worldview embedded within a system of health and pathology, status and obscurity. Gabriela’s own words, like “violin” and “pâté” (10) or the crude words she adopts from her contentious Onkel Schorsch (consequently forbidden by Ernst von Haßlau), represent a queerly exuberant embrace of the positive or peculiar elements in her life.

[42] Hensel’s use of significant or meaningful names is well-attested in her œuvre, as well as the textual links she forges between language, words, and creation (See, for instance, the 2008 novel Lärchenau and the 1989 collection Hallimasch as well as her recent children’s book Rusalko: Ein Unterwassermärchen, published in 2022). This practice is also linked to the fairytale-like structures that Hensel frequently builds into her texts, which she uses to both draw on and subvert reader expectations. The potential of names and naming recalls the central role they play in fairytales, in which both power and weakness are discovered within a name. The eponymous Rumpelstiltskin’s name, for example, represents the ability to truly know, and thus to control, an adversary. In the Grimm tale, as in most retellings, the miller’s daughter bargains her first-born child in exchange for Rumpelstiltskin’s assistance with an impossible task. Later, he gives her a chance to keep her child if she can guess his name within three days. When she successfully names him, many versions of the story end in Rumpelstiltskin ragefully pulling himself in two. In Gabriela’s case, her father’s assumed right to name her likens her to another fairytale character, Cinderella. The new name given to the protagonist in the Grimms’ tale—we never learn her original one—connotes the domestic and subordinate role she is to play in her household: “In the evening, when she was completely exhausted from work, she didn’t have a bed but had to lie down next to the hearth in ashes. She always looked so dusty and dirty that people started to call her Cinderella.” (Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. “Cinderella.” In: The Classic Fairytales. Ed. Maria Tatar. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999, pp. 117-122, 117.) Similarly, Gabriela is also expected to play the role implied by her names, variously embodying the silly child, the disappointment, and the unwanted heir to an aristocratic, if obsolete, family name. For more on Hensel’s engagement with fairytales, see Sheedy, Melissa. “Feminine Paradigms and Fairy-tale Transformations in the Works of Kerstin Hensel: The Political Implications of Telling a Tale.” In: Protest und Verweigerung. Neue Tendenzen in der deutschen Literatur seit 1989/Protest and Refusal. New Trends in German Literature since 1989. Eds. Hans Adler and Sonja E. Klocke. Paderborn: Fink, 2018, pp. 157-77, and Sheedy, Melissa and Brandy E. Wilcox. “Es war (noch) einmal: Grimm Versions of New Fairytales in the GDR.” In: Colloquia Germanica: 50, no. 1 (2019): pp 77-100.

[43] Hensel, Dance 8. “ein[…] verzaubert[er] Dackel” (Hensel, Tanz 8).

[44] Ring, 512.

[45] The act of naming as an assertion of dominance and power also plays a role in Hensel’s short narrative “Der Deutschgeber” from the collection Federspiel (2012). Like Ernst von Haßlau, German teacher Waldemar Schetelich insists on correct language use. Waldemar enjoys the power over semantic structures that comes with the knowledge of a name. He insists, for example, on calling his wife by her full name: “Hannelore Schetelich, maiden name Metze.” Like the etymological roots of the words he admires, Hannelore’s name contains her origins and traces her path to the present. Determined that his daughter should likewise remember where she came from, Waldemar selects a first name—Wanda—that derives from his own (118). Although not physically violent, his insistence on linguistic accuracy reflects a desire to control the German language itself, and by extension, the women in his family. See Hensel, Kerstin. “Der Deutschgeber.” In Federspiel. München: Luchterhand, 2012. 117-92.

[46] Hensel, Dance 81. “Haben Sie Tätowierungen? Nein? Schade, aber hier, was ist das? Hat man Sie verletzt?” (Hensel, Tanz 80).

[47] Hensel, Dance 81. “Ich bin eine Binka” (Hensel, Tanz 80).

[48] Hensel, Dance 82. “Heiß’ ich Binka? Heiß’ ich Ehlchen? Heiß ich vielleicht Gabriela? Gabriela von Haßlau” (Hensel, Tanz 80).

[49] Sestigiani, Sabina. Writing Colonisation: Violence, Landscape, and the Act of Naming in Modern Italian and Australian Literature. New York: Peter Lang, 2014, p. 73.

[50] Sestigiani, 79.

[51] Hosek, 119.

[52] Following her last encounter with Paffrath in his apartment and her realization that he was likely one of her attackers, Gabriela lies in silence while he smokes (Hensel, Dance 122).

[53] Ring, 518.

[54] Hensel, Dance 8.

[55] Hensel, Dance 52. “grundlos” (Hensel, Tanz 50).

[56] Hensel, Dance, 64. “Wer sind wir denn?” (Hensel, Tanz 62).

[57] Hensel, Dance 64. “Noch nie hatte er mich richtig geschlagen, aber diese Frage brachte ihn dazu” (Hensel, Tanz 62).

[58] hooks, 62.

[59] hooks, 64.

[60] The novella illustrates the remnants of class in a supposedly class-less system in a variety of ways, including the letters next to children’s names on the school roster: “I” stands for “Intelligentsia,” “L” for “Laborer,” and “C” for Clerk. As Gabriela discovers, both privilege and inconvenience are tied to the “I.”

[61] See Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick Gregory. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977, p. 127.

[62] Hensel, Dance 71. “MeineGutemeineLiebemeineSchöne” (Hensel, Tanz 69).

[63] Hensel, Dance 72. “Du willst unseren Staat verleumden. Du lügst. Du hast dir die Wunde selber beigebracht. Wir werden das klären. Genosse Paffrath, schreiben Sie. Selbstverstümmelung” (Hensel, Tanz 70).

[64] Some scholars have posited that the mark on her arm may in fact be a swastika, which would explain the strong reaction on the part of the East German officials. See Ring, 519, and Kormann, Julia. Literatur und Wende: ostdeutsche Autorinnen und Autoren nach 1989. Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universitäts-Verlag, 1999, p. 325.

[65] Hensel, Dance 73. “Vater transplantierte ein kreisrundes Stück Oberschenkelhaut auf die Stelle am Arm“ (Hensel, Tanz 71).

[66] An example is Hosek, “Dancing the (Un)State(d).”

[67] Steingröver, 99.

[68] Hensel, Dance, 50-51.

[69] Hensel, Dance 17. “Ich spüre den Fluß in mir, eine ziehende treibende Freude” (Hensel, Tanz 17).

[70] Hensel, Dance 115. “Ich muß meine Geschichte zu Ende bringen, einen großen Knall erfinden, damit ich ‘rauskomme aus dem letzten Loch” (Hensel, Tanz 113).

[71] Ring, 519.

[72] Hensel, Dance 121. “MeineGutemeineLiebemeineSchöne” (Hensel, Tanz 118).

[73] See Ring, 519 and Kormann, 330.

[74] Further continuities can also be seen if one considers the possible identity of Gabriela’s other attacker, whom I suggest to be Ernst von Haßlau himself. During the assault, the unsettling endearments of the first assailant—whom I take to be Paffrath—stand in stark contrast to the other man’s hissed imprecation: “It’s a stupid Binka!” (Hensel, Dance 71). “[D]as ist eine Binka!” (Hensel, Tanz 69). The term “Binka” is used beyond the von Haßlau’s household, but it nevertheless recalls the familiar malediction of her childhood. This second assailant also takes time to forcefully plait Gabriela’s hair during the assault, which he pulls painfully. As Ring remarks, the aggressive plaiting of her hair, which recalls her father’s former habit of pulling her braids in moments of frustration, implies a general pattern of violence that endures beyond Gabriela’s childhood (518), but I take this further to suggest that the narrative’s inclusion of this detail implicates the father himself, and that the repetition of these acts in a moment of extreme violence might represent a restoration in his eyes of how Gabriela used to—and therefore should—be. Regardless of the identity of the aggressors, however, the narrative’s intentional ambiguity tied with these specters of Gabriela’s cruel homelife links the post-Wall present to the socialist past and reminds readers once more of the systemic continuities that target difference, Otherness, and queerness.

[75] Sedgwick, 3, also quoted in Turner and Greenhill, 13.

[76] Hensel, Dance 122. “Grün und heiß flammt das Funkeln [in Paffraths Augen] auf, dann schließt sich Paffrath die Augen, dann erlischt es” (Hensel, Tanz 119).

[77] See for instance Lärchenau (2008) and Gipshut (1999), both of which chart character and family histories throughout the GDR and beyond the fall of the Wall.

[78] See for instance Steingröver, 93.

[79] In fact, Ring even argues that Gabriela’s abuse can also be linked to violence during the Third Reich and World War II, pointing out that “Gabriela’s victimhood [exceeds] the borders of the historical period in which her tale is set” (518).

[80] Vergès, 13.