Thomas Mann in Furs: Remediations of Sadomasochism in Maxim Biller's Im Kopf von Bruno Schulz and Harlem Holocaust

Summary

MAXIM BILLER IS in many respects a writer of extremes: as an author, journalist, and public persona, he is commonly associated with feelings such as hatred, hostility, and a notoriously provocative style. His 1980s Tempo column “100 Zeilen Hass” established his reputation as a polemicist and one of German literature's most renowned enfants terribles, while his more recent—and short-lived—contributions to the renowned Literarisches Quartett further cemented his image as “der Unzumutbare.” On the other end of the spectrum, the topics of love, desire, and sexuality emerge as central features of Biller's work, as is for example demonstrated by the 2007 collection of short stories Liebe heute. However, love does not conquer hate in Biller's work: the majority of the (mostly German-Jewish) love relationships depicted in Biller's fiction fail miserably, and the surrounding erotic universe is populated by tabooed, unconventional, and provocative forms of desire, such as incest in Die Tochter (The Daughter, 2000), and sadomasochism in Harlem Holocaust (1998) and Im Kopf von Bruno Schulz (Inside the Head of Bruno Schulz, 2013). Biller's fascination with sadomasochism as a literary motif, figuration, and tradition is particularly noteworthy, as it forms a bridge between the early novella Harlem Holocaust and the more recent Im Kopf von Bruno Schulz.

The reappearance of sadomasochism raises questions about the specific function of this discourse in the context of Biller's work. I want to argue here that Im Kopf von Bruno Schulz invokes the sadomasochistic constellation to reflect on and complicate the so-called German-Jewish symbiosis. In order to achieve this, sadomasochism is transposed from the realm of gender onto the terrain of ethnicity, which is staked out via the novella's fictional relationship between the Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz and the German cultural icon Thomas Mann. Biller's text incorporates literary and iconographic traditions of sadomasochism, ranging from Bruno Schulz to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, and then revaluates this heritage in the novella. This produces an interesting parallel to Harlem Holocaust, which also uses a sadomasochistic relationship between a Jew and two Germans to comment on the state of German-Jewish relationships in postunification Germany.