{"id":8492,"date":"2024-10-23T02:24:27","date_gmt":"2024-10-23T06:24:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/?page_id=8492"},"modified":"2024-11-08T03:39:46","modified_gmt":"2024-11-08T08:39:46","slug":"narrative-ventriloquism","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/glossen-51-current-issue\/narrative-ventriloquism\/","title":{"rendered":"Narrative Ventriloquism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Writing Between Citation and Imagination in Kerstin Hensel\u2019s Tanz am Kanal<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n

von Elizabeth Mittman<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Writing after the Wende<\/em>: conditions and concerns<\/strong><\/p>\n

Kerstin Hensel\u2019s 1994 novella, Tanz am Kanal (Dance on the Canal)<\/em>, begins and ends with writing.[1]<\/a> In its opening lines Gabriela von Ha\u00dflau, 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 \u201causerw\u00e4hlt zu schreiben. Zu nichts sonst auf der Welt, als mein Leben zu erz\u00e4hlen; an diesem Tag werde ich damit beginnen.\u201d[2]<\/a> At the novella\u2019s end she finds herself alone in a (too?) friendly policeman\u2019s 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 \u201closer\u201d of unification.[3]<\/a> In this altered situation, she calculatedly sets out to write a new installment of her story to titillate her readers: \u201cDie 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 mu\u00df anders enden, v\u00f6llig unerwartet.\u201d[4]<\/a><\/p>\n

As other scholars have pointed out, this revelation\u2014and the shocking closing scene that follows\u2014renders 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\u2019s problematic search for representations of the \u201cauthentic\u201d East German.[5]<\/a> In this respect, Hensel\u2019s 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<\/em> that directly thematize the problem of telling one\u2019s story as an East German.[6]<\/a> For example, Thomas Brussig\u2019s Helden wie wir<\/em> (Heroes Like Us<\/em>, 1995) is comprised of a series of taped interviews between the bumbling Stasi agent, Klaus Uhlzscht, and a New York Times<\/em> reporter. This confessional narrative reaches its climax with Klaus\u2019s 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: \u201cWar es das, was Sie wissen wollten?\u201d[7]<\/a> And in Brigitte Burmeister\u2019s 1994 novel, Unter dem Namen Norma <\/em>(Under the Name of Norma<\/em>), 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: \u201cIch h\u00e4tte mir f\u00fcr meinen Aufenthalt auf dieser Erde schon einen besseren Verlauf gew\u00fcnscht. Trotzdem danke f\u00fcr Ihr geduldiges Zuh\u00f6ren. Ohne Sie h\u00e4tte ich die Geschichte nie erz\u00e4hlt.\u201d[8]<\/a><\/p>\n

Like Brussig\u2019s and Burmeister\u2019s protagonists, Hensel\u2019s fictional autobiographer has a Stasi story, too\u2014without 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\u2019s text links the West\u2019s 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]<\/a> In an essay accompanying a collection of GDR photography published a few years after Tanz am Kanal<\/em>, Hensel feels compelled to break open this binary in blunt language:<\/p>\n

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. [\u2026] Jede Existenz auf dieser Welt wird von Br\u00fcchen bestimmt und von Irrt\u00fcmern tangiert [\u2026] Die DDR war [\u2026] kein Laboratorium und das Dasein dort kein Experiment.[10]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hensel thus casts the prospect of regarding \u201cbroken\u201d 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<\/em> can be productively understood as an instantiation of one such life story\u2014\u201cvon Br\u00fcchen bestimmt und von Irrt\u00fcmern tangiert\u201d\u2014as a means to fight through the complex web of desires and pressures precisely by representing them: the desire<\/em> to be heard, to be seen, to participate in a more expansive public discourse amidst the pressure<\/em> to speak and to appear in particular ways that satisfy the voyeuristic cravings of a new public.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Authenticity, duplicity, ventriloquy<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019 respective biographies. The outrageous, grotesque, and sometimes even fantastical nature of the characters\u2019 various confessions makes their satirical purpose clear. In Hensel\u2019s 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\u2014what became Tanz am Kanal<\/em>\u2014in the first person: \u201c[E]s geht um einen anderen Blickwinkel. [\u2026] ich muss mich selbst zu einer anderen Sicht zwingen.\u201d[11]<\/a> The process of writing another\u2019s \u201cI\u201d-voice creates a relationship of intimacy while pushing open the door to inhabiting another\u2019s subjective, embodied experience (even that of a fictional character). Put differently, in Tanz am Kanal<\/em> Hensel uses the first person as a sort of literary ventriloquy.<\/p>\n

In his cultural history of ventriloquism, Steven Connor discusses voice as fundamentally different from other identifying attributes of a person in that it<\/p>\n

[\u2026] does not merely belong or attach to me. For I produce <\/em>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]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hensel\u2019s \u201cI\u201d 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\u2019s own verbal dis-identification: that is, the fictional autobiographer\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

In some respects, this narrative strategy recalls the ventriloquistic play of Irmtraud Morgner\u2019s Amanda<\/em>.[13]<\/a> In that novel, Morgner conceptualizes ventriloquism as an emancipatory tool born of women\u2019s 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:<\/p>\n

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]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In Amanda<\/em>, 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\u2019s subject is in quite the opposite situation, more puppet than ventriloquist. The utopian impulse behind Morgner\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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 erz\u00e4hlte Zeit<\/em>) and narration of the present (the time of writing, or Erz\u00e4hlzeit<\/em>). The text\u2019s 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 \u201closer\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019s imagination and contributes to her sense of who she is and how she fits in her world (or not).<\/p>\n

In the simultaneous telling of multiple stories, Gabriela\u2019s 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:<\/p>\n

Vater skandierte mir ins Gesicht:<\/p>\n

–Vi-o-li-ne! Vi-o-li-ne! Sprich nach!<\/p>\n

Ich weinte \u00fcber dem verzauberten Dackel. [\u2026]\n

–Pa\u00df auf! sagte Vater, und der Geigenbogen strich \u00fcber die Dackelhaare, die Vater Saiten nannte.<\/p>\n

–Sai-ten! sprich nach! sagte er.[15]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When she begins taking violin lessons soon thereafter, the child initially persists in claiming that the violin is a dachshund, but eventually capitulates, enunciating \u201cVi-o-li-ne\u201d as her father had modeled. On the most banal level of a child\u2019s 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 \u201cviolin,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Early on she attaches the concept of ownership to language\u2014identifying specific words as being the property of specific speakers (whether her father, another family member, or the state)\u2014and frequently expresses her own alienation from it, even or perhaps particularly when it regards her own person: \u201cIch schreibe unter meinem wirklichen Namen Gabriela von Ha\u00dflau. Sie haben mich Binka und Ehlchen genannt. Gabriela nur, wenn sie mich ha\u00dften.\u201d[16]<\/a> \u201cBinka\u201d originates with a beloved uncle whose rough speech is derided by her parents; after her violin teacher calls her \u201cEhlchen\u201d Gabriela notes: \u201cDas Wort Ehlchen<\/em> geh\u00f6rte meiner Mutter.\u201d[17]<\/a> 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 \u201cvon\u201d\u2014an empty signifier\u2014is 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 \u201cI\u201d for intelligentsia. This early mark of both exceptionality and exclusion finds its apotheosis in her father\u2019s mantra\u2014\u201cwir sind doch wer!\u201d\u2014which is repeated frequently throughout the passages charting the family\u2019s social and emotional decline. As a teenager, Gabriela hurls the empty phrase back at him (\u201cWer sind wir denn?\u201d[18]<\/a>), inciting his wrath and her further indifference. And while the surgeon\u2019s 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: \u201cMan ist noch wer. Aber die meisten Menschen wissen nicht, wer sie sind. Saufen und pennen\u2014ein Leben! Die<\/em> wissen nicht ihre Geschichte zu erz\u00e4hlen. Sind einfach abgefallen. Ganz nach unten. Ich geh\u00f6re nicht zu ihnen.\u201d[19]<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Telling tales<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the quote directly above, Gabriela implies that she in fact does<\/em> know how to tell her story. But there are at least two, contradictory sides to this ability. On the one hand, her father\u2019s tragicomic bravura\u2014and the language it comes wrapped up in\u2014serves her purpose in frontally addressing the new media landscape, one in which being \u201csomebody\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019 divorce and father\u2019s physical and social decline, her betrayal and subsequent reconciliation with Katka and, crucially, her discovery of a trunk filled with her grandmother\u2019s old books: \u201cDen ganzen Tag und die halbe Nacht las ich M\u00e4dchengeschichten. Ich war nun dankbar, [\u2026] da\u00df sich mir eine Welt er\u00f6ffnete.\u201d[20]<\/a> A few years later, on the cusp of adulthood, she begins to write stories herself: \u201cKurze freche Geschichten. B\u00f6se-M\u00e4dchen-Streiche, Tr\u00e4ume von gro\u00dfen Verf\u00fchrungen.\u201d[21]<\/a><\/p>\n

For Gabriela, writing appears at first glance to be situated in contradistinction to, and as an escape from, reality. [22]<\/a> 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\u2014when she crawls to the police, bloody and literally branded by her assailants\u2014is met with derision and disbelief: \u201cDu willst unseren Staat verleumden. Du l\u00fcgst. Du hast dir die Wunde selber beigebracht.\u201d[23]<\/a> 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: \u201cIch schrieb und schrieb. Verr\u00fcckte unwirkliche Geschichten. Voller Fehler, voller Stolz.\u201d[24]<\/a> 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\u2026.<\/p>\n

At this point, the reader of Tanz am Kanal<\/em> may be swept up completely in Gabriela\u2019s 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 \u201ccrazy\u201d stories. And if so, is it meant to mislead its audience just as her informant reports were meant to mislead her Stasi audience\u2014an audience that was as interested in getting a genuine insider scoop as her Mammilia<\/em> readers after 1989? While Gabriela von Ha\u00dflau\u2019s story apparently emerges first from that character\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2014or disturbing?\u2014story about her seduction of\u2014or violation by?\u2014policeman 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\u2014an act of withholding that is part of the dynamic of ambiguity undermining authenticity while superficially cashing in on it.<\/p>\n

Following Connor\u2019s 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]<\/a> 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 \u201cI\u201d 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<\/em> consciousness,[26]<\/a> a confusing enterprise that critics have read alternately as an attempt to avoid being defined by others\u2019 narratives and as an act of memory that preserves Gabriela\u2019s humanity as a homeless person.[27]<\/a> 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<\/em> opens and closes confers both urgency and open-endedness, pressing the reader to acknowledge their role in the constitution of the text\u2019s meaning and also to grapple with the uncertainty of (self-) representation. The mise-en-ab\u00eeme proffered by Hensel\u2019s text admonishes us that any search for the \u201creal\u201d East German or the \u201cgenuine\u201d 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\u2019s voice.<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Hensel subtitles the text, which runs to just over 100 pages, \u201cErz\u00e4hlung\u201d or story; however, its complex narrative structure indicates a closer alignment to the form of a novella or short novel.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Hensel, Kerstin. Tanz am Kanal<\/em>. Suhrkamp Verlag, 1994, p. 7.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> \u201cAus dem Plastikbeutel, der mein Eigentum birgt, ziehe ich Packpapier, ein zerrissenes Plakat, halbrunde Kirscht\u00fcten, Klopapier, Zahlungsbl\u00f6cke hervor, alles bleistiftbeschrieben.<\/p>\n

–Das ist meine Geschichte.<\/p>\n

–Sie schreiben?<\/p>\n

–Mein Leben.<\/p>\n

Eva notiert auf den Schreibblock: Frau schreibt. [\u2026]\n

–Das wird die<\/em> Story, wir bringen Sie gro\u00df \u2018raus!\u201d (Tanz<\/em>, pp. 79-80)<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Tanz<\/em>, p. 113.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> See for example Skare, Roswitha. \u201cIdentit\u00e4tskonstrukte in Texten junger ostdeutscher Autoren nach 1989\/90: Zu Kerstin Hensel: Tanz am Kanal <\/em>(1994)\u201d. In: Nordlit<\/em> 16 (2004), pp. 95-112, esp. pp. 103-5; Hosek, Jennifer Ruth. \u201cDancing the (Un)State(d): Narrative Ambiguity in Kerstin Hensel\u2019s Tanz am Kanal<\/em>\u201d. In: Kerstin Hensel.<\/em> Eds. Beth Linklater and Birgit Dahlke. U of Wales Press, 2002, pp. 107-19, esp. pp. 107-9, 117.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> The literary careers of Brussig, Burmeister, and Hensel all began in the mid to late 1980s, shortly before the upheaval of the Wende<\/em>.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> Brussig, Thomas. Helden wie wir<\/em>. Aufbau Verlag, 1995, p. 322.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> Burmeister, Brigitte. Unter dem Namen Norma<\/em>. Klett-Cotta, 1994, p. 244.<\/p>\n

[9]<\/a> 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\u2019s 2023 bestseller Der Osten: Eine westdeutsche Erfindung. <\/em>Ullstein Buchverlage, 2023.<\/p>\n

[10]<\/a> Hensel, Kerstin. \u201cVorspann: Einstellungen.\u201d In: Alles war so.<\/em> Alles war anders: Bilder aus der DDR<\/em>. Thomas Billhardt and Kerstin Hensel. Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1999, pp. 5-31; here, pp. 5-7.<\/p>\n

[11]<\/a> Dahlke, Birgit. Papierboot: Autorinnen aus der DDR\u2014inoffiziell publiziert<\/em>. K\u00f6nigshausen & Neumann, 1997, p. 280.<\/p>\n

[12]<\/a> Connor, Steven. Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism<\/em>. Oxford UP, 2000, p. 3.<\/p>\n

[13]<\/a> Morgner, Irmtraud. Amanda: Ein Hexenroman<\/em>. Aufbau Verlag, 1983.<\/p>\n

[14]<\/a> Lewis, Alison. \u201cThe Art of Ventriloquism: Feminism and the Divided Self in the Works of Irmtraud Morgner\u201d. In: Australian Feminist Studies<\/em> 22 (1995), pp. 31-58; here, p. 47.<\/p>\n

[15]<\/a> Tanz<\/em>, pp. 8-9.<\/p>\n

[16]<\/a> Tanz<\/em>, p. 8.<\/p>\n

[17]<\/a> Tanz<\/em>, p. 15.<\/p>\n

[18]<\/a> Tanz<\/em>, p. 62.<\/p>\n

[19]<\/a> Tanz<\/em>, p. 37.<\/p>\n

[20]<\/a> Tanz<\/em>, p. 52.<\/p>\n

[21]<\/a> Tanz<\/em>, p. 82.<\/p>\n

[22]<\/a> For a discussion of the central role that storytelling plays in Hensel\u2019s work more broadly, see Sheedy, Melissa . \u201cFeminine Paradigms and Fairy-tale Transformations in the Works of Kerstin Hensel: The Political Implications of Telling a Tale\u201d. In: Protest und Verweigerung: Neue Tendenzen in der deutschen Literatur seit 1989\/\/Protest and Refusal: New Trends in German Literature since 1989<\/em>. Eds. Hans Adler and Sonja E. Klocke. Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2019, pp. 157-77.<\/p>\n

[23]<\/a> Tanz<\/em>, p. 70.<\/p>\n

[24]<\/a> Tanz<\/em>, p. 98.<\/p>\n

[25]<\/a> \u201cAs 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.\u201d Connor, p. 5.<\/p>\n

[26]<\/a> \u201cMeine Krankheit hei\u00dft Erwachen. Immer, wenn ich aufh\u00f6re zu schreiben, droht sie mich zu ern\u00fcchtern. Sie ist das einzige, wovor ich Angst habe.<\/em>\u201d Tanz<\/em>, p. 58.<\/p>\n

[27]<\/a> See Hosek; also Steingr\u00f6ver, Reinhild. \u201c\u2018Not Fate\u2014Just History\u2019: Stories and Histories in Tanz am Kanal<\/em> and Gipshut<\/em>.\u201d In: Kerstin Hensel<\/em>. Eds. Beth Linklater and Birgit Dahlke. U of Wales Press, 2002, pp. 91-106.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Writing Between Citation and Imagination in Kerstin Hensel\u2019s Tanz am Kanal von Elizabeth Mittman   Writing after the Wende: conditions and concerns Kerstin Hensel\u2019s 1994 novella, Tanz am Kanal (Dance on the Canal), begins and ends with writing.[1] In its opening lines Gabriela von Ha\u00dflau, the first-person narrator and a homeless woman living under a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":282,"featured_media":0,"parent":8403,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-8492","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/282"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8492\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}