Glossen

Writing Between Citation and Imagination in Kerstin Hensel’s Tanz am Kanal

von Elizabeth Mittman

 

Writing after the Wende: conditions and concerns

Kerstin Hensel’s 1994 novella, Tanz am Kanal (Dance on the Canal), begins and ends with writing.[1] In its opening lines Gabriela von Haßlau, the first-person narrator and a homeless woman living under a bridge in the early years after unification, delights in the discovery of a full, clean sheet of blue packing paper and declares that she is “auserwählt zu schreiben. Zu nichts sonst auf der Welt, als mein Leben zu erzählen; an diesem Tag werde ich damit beginnen.”[2] At the novella’s end she finds herself alone in a (too?) friendly policeman’s apartment, where, poking around in his things, she comes across a pad of fine white writing paper that similarly begs to be written upon. The context for her writing has changed significantly since the beginning, however: rather than writing her own story for herself, she has become a published writer with a reading public, following her discovery by a team of journalists from a West German feminist magazine who have come to her town on the hunt for the gripping story of an East German woman, the quintessential “loser” of unification.[3] In this altered situation, she calculatedly sets out to write a new installment of her story to titillate her readers: “Die Leserinnen der MAMMILIA warten auf die Fortsetzung der Story. Das mit dem Adel ist gut. Mein Vater war ein bedeutender Arzt. Das hatten wir schon. Es muß anders enden, völlig unerwartet.”[4]

As other scholars have pointed out, this revelation—and the shocking closing scene that follows—renders the narrator entirely unreliable and turns the text as a whole from a revelatory narrative about the singular, heartrending fate of an East German woman before and after unification, into a commentary on the West’s problematic search for representations of the “authentic” East German.[5] In this respect, Hensel’s text does not stand alone, but rather must be seen as one of a cluster of fictional first-person narratives penned by a variety of emergent authors in the first few years following the Wende that directly thematize the problem of telling one’s story as an East German.[6] For example, Thomas Brussig’s Helden wie wir (Heroes Like Us, 1995) is comprised of a series of taped interviews between the bumbling Stasi agent, Klaus Uhlzscht, and a New York Times reporter. This confessional narrative reaches its climax with Klaus’s outlandish revelation that he brought down the Berlin Wall by flashing his super-sized penis at border guards. The novel concludes as he finishes telling his story, asking the reporter: “War es das, was Sie wissen wollten?”[7] And in Brigitte Burmeister’s 1994 novel, Unter dem Namen Norma (Under the Name of Norma), Marianne, a free-lance translator from East Berlin, fabricates a personal narrative about her past as a Stasi informer for the benefit of Corinna, her conversation partner at a West German garden party. At the conclusion of the telling, she comments wistfully: “Ich hätte mir für meinen Aufenthalt auf dieser Erde schon einen besseren Verlauf gewünscht. Trotzdem danke für Ihr geduldiges Zuhören. Ohne Sie hätte ich die Geschichte nie erzählt.”[8]

Like Brussig’s and Burmeister’s protagonists, Hensel’s fictional autobiographer has a Stasi story, too—without it, all three authors make clear, the East German subject is illegible, even invisible, to the West. More pointedly than those other novels, however, Hensel’s text links the West’s prurient interest to already existing pressures on the speaking East German subject, provocatively linking the Stasi and Western media as problematic solicitors of her writing. With this, she offers a deep reflection on the unique conundrum facing East German writers after unification, in terms of both the production and the reception of their work. Within state socialism, institutional structures of censorship and self-censorship set constraints on which stories were told, and how. After 1989, GDR writers confronted an entirely different set of limits, as the pressures of a monological official discourse and censorship apparatus were replaced by a hegemonic Western media apparatus that was driven by market demands. Simultaneously, the expansion of their potential audience meant that alongside an existing readership of East Germans accustomed to hunting for subversive messages smuggled in between the lines, and hungry for more open, critical representation of their society and their experiences, writers needed to address West Germans, whose knowledge of the East, generally paltry at best, relied heavily on grotesque Cold War stereotypes and who thus expected certain kinds of stories. Ultimately, public discussion of writing from the East boiled down to a single question about two possible types of East Germans: Stasi agent or Stasi victim? Collaborator or resister? Government tool or brave dissident?[9] In an essay accompanying a collection of GDR photography published a few years after Tanz am Kanal, Hensel feels compelled to break open this binary in blunt language:

Die Wahrheit steckt hinter den Fassaden. Letztendlich aber ist sie in den Menschen, und man kann sagen: Es gab so viele Deutsche Demokratische Republiken, wie es Menschen gab, die dort gelebt haben. […] Jede Existenz auf dieser Welt wird von Brüchen bestimmt und von Irrtümern tangiert […] Die DDR war […] kein Laboratorium und das Dasein dort kein Experiment.[10]

Hensel thus casts the prospect of regarding “broken” biographies (an implicit nod to the reductive victim-perpetrator image of the GDR) in a larger framework at once of multitudinous individual destinies and of universal human experience. Tanz am Kanal can be productively understood as an instantiation of one such life story—“von Brüchen bestimmt und von Irrtümern tangiert”—as a means to fight through the complex web of desires and pressures precisely by representing them: the desire to be heard, to be seen, to participate in a more expansive public discourse amidst the pressure to speak and to appear in particular ways that satisfy the voyeuristic cravings of a new public.

 

Authenticity, duplicity, ventriloquy

Taken together, the fictional texts mentioned above all provide a provocative point of departure for thinking about voice, identity, and autobiographical expression after 1989. None of them is autobiographical per se: the stories contained in their pages have no direct connection to their authors’ respective biographies. The outrageous, grotesque, and sometimes even fantastical nature of the characters’ various confessions makes their satirical purpose clear. In Hensel’s case, the aesthetic decision to turn to first-person narration is explicitly framed by the author as an attempt not to move closer to her own experience, but rather away from it. In a 1993 interview with Birgit Dahlke, Hensel talks of her imminent plans to enter new territory for herself by writing a story—what became Tanz am Kanal—in the first person: “[E]s geht um einen anderen Blickwinkel. […] ich muss mich selbst zu einer anderen Sicht zwingen.”[11] The process of writing another’s “I”-voice creates a relationship of intimacy while pushing open the door to inhabiting another’s subjective, embodied experience (even that of a fictional character). Put differently, in Tanz am Kanal Hensel uses the first person as a sort of literary ventriloquy.

In his cultural history of ventriloquism, Steven Connor discusses voice as fundamentally different from other identifying attributes of a person in that it

[…] does not merely belong or attach to me. For I produce my voice in a way that I do not produce these other attributes. To speak is to perform work, sometimes, as any actor, teacher, or preacher knows, very arduous work indeed. The work has the voice, or actions of voice, as its product and process; giving voice is the process which simultaneously produces articulate sounds, and produces myself, as a self-producing being.[12]

Hensel’s “I” narrator opens up new territory to explore the dynamic relationship between experience and self-conception. In doing so Hensel punctures any presumed wall between reality and fiction, between authenticity and duplicity, revealing it to be as false as all of the other binaries undergirding Cold War epistemologies. This structure is echoed within the text itself through the representation of the narrator’s own verbal dis-identification: that is, the fictional autobiographer’s voice issues not from a site of unmediated truth but is itself forged in the world(s) outside her own body. The entire narrative can in fact be read as a representation of a systematically constructed disunity of body and voice, of body and consciousness.

In some respects, this narrative strategy recalls the ventriloquistic play of Irmtraud Morgner’s Amanda.[13] In that novel, Morgner conceptualizes ventriloquism as an emancipatory tool born of women’s experience in patriarchal society, a trainable skill by which women can convert their suppressed speech into intentionally deployed utterances that advance their own needs and desires in a given social context. As Alison Lewis succinctly summarizes:

It involves two stages whereby words can be swallowed down into the belly and regurgitated at a later date when circumstances permit. In this way women can reproduce suppressed speech and themselves as other, as the ventriloquist’s dummy, so to speak. As a strategy it has political import in providing women with a means of bypassing forms of internal and external censorship.[14]

In Amanda, the speaking subject is thus able to divide and control her own utterances, a process that centers consciousness and supposes a certain autonomy of both mind and body. Hensel’s subject is in quite the opposite situation, more puppet than ventriloquist. The utopian impulse behind Morgner’s optimistic vision of ventriloquism is supplanted by a far bleaker one that measures the toll taken on the long-subjugated subject that has already absorbed a lifetime of traumatizing blows and for whom speech has long been alienated from the outside in.

While Gabriela is a complex narrator who grapples with the imperative of performing multiple roles for different audiences, her ability to analyze or reflect on her situation(s) with a fully developed consciousness is constrained at best. Hensel uses a variety of formal tools to give us the portrait of a disempowered female figure with limited understanding and limited agency across the contexts of her life before and after 1989. Most notable among these is a two-track narrative structure, whereby the text alternates between narration of past events (the retrospective life story Gabriela is writing, the erzählte Zeit) and narration of the present (the time of writing, or Erzählzeit). The text’s oscillation between these levels, made explicit through the switching between present and preterite tenses throughout, traces the continuities across the two temporal planes of experience. Gabriela is an outsider figure in both storylines; a “loser” on all fronts. However, the cardboard cutout figure her Western journalist editors delight in having found is undermined precisely by this juxtaposition of levels: Gabriela’s othering in the pre-1989 frame is dense with detail and hardly reducible to a single experience or aspect of identity. That world is populated by a rich cast of characters who all exercise competing pulls on her, from her demanding father, a vein surgeon with an elitist bourgeois background, to Frau Popiol, her thrilling and mysterious violin teacher, to her friend Katka, whose working-class background and anarchic disregard for all authority draws Gabriela into her orbit over and over again. Each of these figures, alongside the more statist authority figures such as schoolteachers, exercises power over Gabriela’s imagination and contributes to her sense of who she is and how she fits in her world (or not).

In the simultaneous telling of multiple stories, Gabriela’s split-screen narrative simultaneously counters false notions of a homogeneous GDR and reveals the enduring, hegemonic power of discourse. Among the many motifs that travel across the textual time zones, the power of spoken language and of naming takes center stage. The earliest childhood memory Gabriela recounts revolves around the gift of a violin on her fourth birthday, which she takes to be an enchanted dachshund, and the disciplining that accompanies it:

Vater skandierte mir ins Gesicht:

–Vi-o-li-ne! Vi-o-li-ne! Sprich nach!

Ich weinte über dem verzauberten Dackel. […]

–Paß auf! sagte Vater, und der Geigenbogen strich über die Dackelhaare, die Vater Saiten nannte.

–Sai-ten! sprich nach! sagte er.[15]

When she begins taking violin lessons soon thereafter, the child initially persists in claiming that the violin is a dachshund, but eventually capitulates, enunciating “Vi-o-li-ne” as her father had modeled. On the most banal level of a child’s language acquisition, the familial relationship is thereby turned into an object lesson in the mechanisms by which naming is equated with power. When Gabriele says “violin,” she is no longer articulating her own perception of the material world; rather, she has been introduced into a citational field where words become means of social control, and vocalizing becomes re-citation.

Early on she attaches the concept of ownership to language—identifying specific words as being the property of specific speakers (whether her father, another family member, or the state)—and frequently expresses her own alienation from it, even or perhaps particularly when it regards her own person: “Ich schreibe unter meinem wirklichen Namen Gabriela von Haßlau. Sie haben mich Binka und Ehlchen genannt. Gabriela nur, wenn sie mich haßten.”[16] “Binka” originates with a beloved uncle whose rough speech is derided by her parents; after her violin teacher calls her “Ehlchen” Gabriela notes: “Das Wort Ehlchen gehörte meiner Mutter.”[17] Within the family and in broader East German society, competing social hierarchies work their power on Gabriela, inculcating her with their distinct linguistic norms. In the GDR, the noble “von”—an empty signifier—is at once a source of singular pride for her father, who clings to the social order of a pre-socialist Germany, and cause for derision in school, where she is marked with the label of “I” for intelligentsia. This early mark of both exceptionality and exclusion finds its apotheosis in her father’s mantra—“wir sind doch wer!”—which is repeated frequently throughout the passages charting the family’s social and emotional decline. As a teenager, Gabriela hurls the empty phrase back at him (“Wer sind wir denn?”[18]), inciting his wrath and her further indifference. And while the surgeon’s daughter has roundly rejected him and his values in many ways by the time we arrive in the present tense narrative, she ventriloquizes his ghost, as it were, taking the phrase as her mantra now: “Man ist noch wer. Aber die meisten Menschen wissen nicht, wer sie sind. Saufen und pennen—ein Leben! Die wissen nicht ihre Geschichte zu erzählen. Sind einfach abgefallen. Ganz nach unten. Ich gehöre nicht zu ihnen.”[19]

 

Telling tales

In the quote directly above, Gabriela implies that she in fact does know how to tell her story. But there are at least two, contradictory sides to this ability. On the one hand, her father’s tragicomic bravura—and the language it comes wrapped up in—serves her purpose in frontally addressing the new media landscape, one in which being “somebody” as an East German can equal living under a bridge as long as one has a decipherable story to tell. But merely parroting, or citing, her father’s empty phrases in this context points less to an act of empowerment and more to the fraudulent nature of the foundation upon she attempts to erect her sovereign subjecthood. On the other hand, the enchanted dachshund of Gabriela’s early childhood points toward an alternate space beyond paternal commands, beyond official discourse. The power of imagination begins as a space before alienation, and in childhood continues to resurface, not attached to language but to non-verbal communication: a dance on the canal, the sound of a violin, the sheer joy in theater. In these elements, the potential for a kind of inarticulate, anarchic, even erotic freedom peeks through the cracks. It is not until adolescence that Gabriela is able to link imagination with language, at a point where several critical events collide: her parents’ divorce and father’s physical and social decline, her betrayal and subsequent reconciliation with Katka and, crucially, her discovery of a trunk filled with her grandmother’s old books: “Den ganzen Tag und die halbe Nacht las ich Mädchengeschichten. Ich war nun dankbar, […] daß sich mir eine Welt eröffnete.”[20] A few years later, on the cusp of adulthood, she begins to write stories herself: “Kurze freche Geschichten. Böse-Mädchen-Streiche, Träume von großen Verführungen.”[21]

For Gabriela, writing appears at first glance to be situated in contradistinction to, and as an escape from, reality. [22] Between her discovery of stories and her writing of them, however, what is perhaps the most critical episode in the entire story occurs: a brutal rape in the park at night whose reporting—when she crawls to the police, bloody and literally branded by her assailants—is met with derision and disbelief: “Du willst unseren Staat verleumden. Du lügst. Du hast dir die Wunde selber beigebracht.”[23] The literal erasure of the event by her father, whom the authorities force to cover the mark with a skin graft, underscores the ineffectiveness of truthtelling. Her own turn to storytelling can thus be linked directly to this traumatic experience and the concommitant realization that her authentic voice is worthless. In this context, telling (fictional) tales becomes an act of self-preservation and empowerment. When the Stasi come to her after she has begun writing stories and ask her to work as an informant and write reports, she is able to enact a kind of (unintended?) revenge on them when, rather than reporting truthfully on her co-workers, she follows her beloved stories as a guide: “Ich schrieb und schrieb. Verrückte unwirkliche Geschichten. Voller Fehler, voller Stolz.”[24] And when she is asked to infiltrate the independent artistic scene in Leibnitz, her Stasi handlers advise her to do so by doing a public reading of her own stories to them. This event leads directly to a joyous reunion with all of the colorful figures of her childhood, and then to her abduction by, and rather sudden and dramatic escape from (and murder of) her handlers….

At this point, the reader of Tanz am Kanal may be swept up completely in Gabriela’s narrative. Or, remembering the present tense framing, they may be wondering whether what they have just read is, in fact, precisely one of her self-described “crazy” stories. And if so, is it meant to mislead its audience just as her informant reports were meant to mislead her Stasi audience—an audience that was as interested in getting a genuine insider scoop as her Mammilia readers after 1989? While Gabriela von Haßlau’s story apparently emerges first from that character’s deep need to articulate a personal history of keenly felt exclusions and abuses, its own unfolding leaves us with a series of unanswerable questions. As Gabriela’s story enters public circulation, the autobiographical narrator becomes increasingly unreliable, spinning wild tales of both victimhood and heroic deeds, culminating in the explicit invention of the ending to her story. When she mulls over the publicity value of closing with a steamy—or disturbing?—story about her seduction of—or violation by?—policeman Paffrath before it occurs (and as it then also unfolds), it becomes clear that reality is already changing to accommodate the narrative that she creates in advance for her readers. Gabriela never reveals her own truth fully—an act of withholding that is part of the dynamic of ambiguity undermining authenticity while superficially cashing in on it.

Following Connor’s work on ventriloquism, the spatial relationship between body and voice offers ground for ambiguity, and how it operates depends on the social relations in which it is embedded.[25] Just as our speaking voices separate from our physical bodies, one might say that the narrative voice separates from the textual body, and the narrating “I” has the freedom to reveal or conceal equally. Particularly in communicative contexts that are defined by coercion, whether direct or indirect, the speech act can function paradoxically as a shield between the subject and its audience. In other words, writing counters the chaos of reality with the kind of containment and control that come from authorial power in the production of fiction. Gabriela repeatedly intones her need to write as a hedge against consciousness,[26] a confusing enterprise that critics have read alternately as an attempt to avoid being defined by others’ narratives and as an act of memory that preserves Gabriela’s humanity as a homeless person.[27] Framed somewhat differently, one might say that writing amounts to a different kind of ventriloquist act, one that ironically moves away from the alienated, citational nature of language in her childhood, and toward a guarantor of autonomy, whereby her narrating voice produces that autonomous self through an act of separation from its point of origin. Maintenance of that gap is imperative in order to sustain integrity of selfhood. The present tense of narration with which Tanz am Kanal opens and closes confers both urgency and open-endedness, pressing the reader to acknowledge their role in the constitution of the text’s meaning and also to grapple with the uncertainty of (self-) representation. The mise-en-abîme proffered by Hensel’s text admonishes us that any search for the “real” East German or the “genuine” East German experience is looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place and suggests that we pay less attention to the reductive lure of the confessional voice and turn our focus instead toward the rich and indeterminate plenitude of the stories behind even the narrator’s voice.

[1] Hensel subtitles the text, which runs to just over 100 pages, “Erzählung” or story; however, its complex narrative structure indicates a closer alignment to the form of a novella or short novel.

[2] Hensel, Kerstin. Tanz am Kanal. Suhrkamp Verlag, 1994, p. 7.

[3] “Aus dem Plastikbeutel, der mein Eigentum birgt, ziehe ich Packpapier, ein zerrissenes Plakat, halbrunde Kirschtüten, Klopapier, Zahlungsblöcke hervor, alles bleistiftbeschrieben.

–Das ist meine Geschichte.

–Sie schreiben?

–Mein Leben.

Eva notiert auf den Schreibblock: Frau schreibt. […]

–Das wird die Story, wir bringen Sie groß ‘raus!” (Tanz, pp. 79-80)

[4] Tanz, p. 113.

[5] See for example Skare, Roswitha. “Identitätskonstrukte in Texten junger ostdeutscher Autoren nach 1989/90: Zu Kerstin Hensel: Tanz am Kanal (1994)”. In: Nordlit 16 (2004), pp. 95-112, esp. pp. 103-5; 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. U of Wales Press, 2002, pp. 107-19, esp. pp. 107-9, 117.

[6] The literary careers of Brussig, Burmeister, and Hensel all began in the mid to late 1980s, shortly before the upheaval of the Wende.

[7] Brussig, Thomas. Helden wie wir. Aufbau Verlag, 1995, p. 322.

[8] Burmeister, Brigitte. Unter dem Namen Norma. Klett-Cotta, 1994, p. 244.

[9] More than thirty years after unification, effects of the reductive treatment of the former East are still highly contentious, as illustrated by the lively reception of Dirk Oschmann’s 2023 bestseller Der Osten: Eine westdeutsche Erfindung. Ullstein Buchverlage, 2023.

[10] Hensel, Kerstin. “Vorspann: Einstellungen.” In: Alles war so. Alles war anders: Bilder aus der DDR. Thomas Billhardt and Kerstin Hensel. Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1999, pp. 5-31; here, pp. 5-7.

[11] Dahlke, Birgit. Papierboot: Autorinnen aus der DDR—inoffiziell publiziert. Königshausen & Neumann, 1997, p. 280.

[12] Connor, Steven. Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford UP, 2000, p. 3.

[13] Morgner, Irmtraud. Amanda: Ein Hexenroman. Aufbau Verlag, 1983.

[14] Lewis, Alison. “The Art of Ventriloquism: Feminism and the Divided Self in the Works of Irmtraud Morgner”. In: Australian Feminist Studies 22 (1995), pp. 31-58; here, p. 47.

[15] Tanz, pp. 8-9.

[16] Tanz, p. 8.

[17] Tanz, p. 15.

[18] Tanz, p. 62.

[19] Tanz, p. 37.

[20] Tanz, p. 52.

[21] Tanz, p. 82.

[22] For a discussion of the central role that storytelling plays in Hensel’s work more broadly, 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. Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2019, pp. 157-77.

[23] Tanz, p. 70.

[24] Tanz, p. 98.

[25] “As a kind of projection, the voice allows me to withdraw or retract myself. This can make my voice a persona, a mask, or sounding screen. At the same time, my voice is the advancement of a part of me, an uncovering by which I am exposed, exposed to the possibility of exposure.” Connor, p. 5.

[26] “Meine Krankheit heißt Erwachen. Immer, wenn ich aufhöre zu schreiben, droht sie mich zu ernüchtern. Sie ist das einzige, wovor ich Angst habe.” Tanz, p. 58.

[27] See Hosek; also Steingröver, Reinhild. “‘Not Fate—Just History’: Stories and Histories in Tanz am Kanal and Gipshut.” In: Kerstin Hensel. Eds. Beth Linklater and Birgit Dahlke. U of Wales Press, 2002, pp. 91-106.