The Power of Language and Silence: Reinhard Jirgl’s Die Stille

Summary

Introduction

Reinhard Jirgl (1953–) is an emphatically German author. He insists that German is “die Sprache in der ich denke, spreche und schreibe,” and the award of several prestigious prizes (including the Büchner Prize in 2010) has confirmed his place in the German literary tradition. Yet Jirgl uses the German language in consistently and characteristically iconoclastic ways to challenge the authority of historical, political, and institutional discourse. Precisely because his work went against the ideological prescriptions of the East German state, it remained unpublished in the GDR, where Jirgl lived and worked. Since unification he has become a prolific author, but has also been criticized for his pessimistic, misanthropic view of history, his focus on German suffering (at the exclusion of the Holocaust), as well as his insistence on what some regard as little more than a linguistic tic, namely his idiosyncratic orthography. His peculiar use of German is bound inextricably to the Third Reich and its legacy, specifically, the radical challenge this period of history posed to language as a mode of representation. Jirgl takes his cue from Arno Schmidt, who responded to the upheavals of war and fascism by rejecting conventional modes of writing and developing an idiosyncratic orthography. Influenced by Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Vilém Flusser, amongst others, Jirgl is also interested in language as a system, which, on the one hand, transcends history, but on the other, is made to function differently according to context. Fundamental to Jirgl’s project is his concern for the role of language in the machinations of power and the subjugation of the individual: “Die Kommandohöhen allgemein bilden die Sphäre der Parolen; in den untergeordneten Schichten innerhalb der Gesellschaft verzeichnet man die Wirkungen dieser Parolen.” For Jirgl, the act of remembering is similarly subject to external control through language: in order to remember, the traces of the past must be made part of an objective, external order; but, being made to conform to the rules of language, this version of the past is no longer proper to the individual. In the act of retrieval, something is lost.

As a literary author, Jirgl seeks to reclaim language for the individual by writing against what he calls the “verbindlichen Duden-Norm.”