Healthy Socialists and Kinky Heroes: Carnivalesque Deconstruction of Heteronormativity in Thomas Brussig's Helden wie wir

Summary

“SIE STECKTE KERZEN an und setzte sich auf meinen Schos. Wir kusten uns, und ich geriet in eine echte ethisch-moralische Notsituation, weil ich merkte, das ich sie jetzt—nennen wir die Dinge beim Namen—ficken will. Kann ich es mit meinem Gewissen vereinbaren, einen Engel zu ficken? Noch dazu einen Engel, den ich liebe?” Yvonne appears in the life of Klaus Uhltzscht, the GDR protagonist of Thomas Brussig's 1995 novel Helden wie wir (Heroes Like Us, 1997) almost as a celestial being. The young Klaus falls in love for the first time and his world is shaken up: Are love and sex compatible? Is he allowed to have sex with an angel?

Naive and inexperienced, Klaus works through the different narratives of love, partnership, and sexuality that are available to him. However, erotic encounters with women are extremely rare for him and always end in fiasco. He is an anti-hero with an unpronounceable name, a repressed nerd who refrains from masturbation for years only to later focus on it almost incessantly and with increasingly sophisticated methods. Over many pages of the novel he suffers from—what else could it be—“den kleinsten Schwanz, den man je gesehen hat” (Hww, 101), until multiple “Wenden” finally occur. Due to an accident and mysterious surgery, Klaus' genitals expand in such a way that they are eventually able to overcome the impotence of a self-repressed people and, in a virile act, cause a “Wende” of national proportions: while thousands of GDR citizens hesitantly stand at the border checkpoint exclaiming “Wir sind das Volk” (Hww, 315), Klaus unzips his fly and gets the border guards, who are paralyzed at the sight of his gigantic penis, to open up the Berlin Wall.

Thus, a historic event is swiftly turned into something lewd—a downright carnivalesque technique reminiscent of Bakhtin's culture of popular laughter. Bakhtin looks at the medieval and early modern culture of laughter and describes ostentatiously staged bodies with oversized genitalia, who eat and excrete excessively and thus showcase “the grotesque image of the body.”