Mothers, Masculinities, and Queer Potentials: Jonathan Franzen's Rereading of Thomas Brussig and Phillip Roth

Summary

IN RECENT DECADES, the increasing fluidity, overlap, and ambiguity of sex-gender identities has been accompanied by, if not actually brought about, a reevaluation of hegemonic masculinity both as an analytic concept and as cultural practice; we see an increasing complexity and ambiguity in performances and representations of masculinity—used ever more often now in the plural form “masculinities”—in the public sphere. A careful analysis of such trends in German-speaking Europe must account for the influence of Anglo-American popular culture, media, and literature without assuming that their meaning and function are maintained without alteration when transferred to a different linguistic and cultural setting.

The complexity of cultural adaptation and the impossibility of ever just appropriating cultural forms without altering them can be illustrated using an episode from one of the three texts examined in this essay: Thomas Brussig's 1995 novel Helden wie wir(Heroes Like Us, 1997), in which protagonist Klaus Uhltzscht comes across a copy of John Irving's 1978 novel The World according to Garp(or rather, a German translation entitled Wie Garp die Welt sah) while breaking into the apartment of an individual under surveillance by the Stasi. The title immediately attracts the attention of Klaus's colleague Gerd Grabs, who steals the book with the intent to prove to the Standesamt(registry office) that Garp is a common first name. Grabs, who has given all his children one-syllable names that start with G, is excited about the possibility of naming his next son Garp, but ultimately he fails in his efforts to get the Standesamtto recognize the name. In this fashion, Brussig hints at his American literary influences, even suggesting that he has stolen from them, but also points out the impossibility of simply reusing the American source material unchanged if it is to be recognizable to a German-speaking readership.

This essay examines Helden wie wiras part of an intertextual and intercultural semiotic web in which gendered meanings are spun for the psychosexual development of young males, of adolescents who become men in their respective societies. I situate Brussig's novel in the center of the web, which looks backward chronologically to Phillip Roth's novel Portnoy's Complaint(1969) and forward to Jonathan Franzen's novel Purity(2015).