6 - The Dialectic of Vulnerability and Responsibility: Jenny Erpenbeck's Heimsuchung (2007)

Summary

SIMILAR TO TANJA DÜCKERS's Himmelskörper, Heimsuchung by Jenny Erpenbeck reflects a postwall shift in German memory discourse, integrating narratives of German wartime suffering into wider reflections on moral and political responsibility. A triumvirate of difficult histories forms the backbone of the novel: the Holocaust, the mass rapes of 1945, and the GDR past. In Erpenbeck's acclaimed novel, these contested pasts are structurally related by the symbol of the closet. During the Third Reich, a young Jewish girl, Doris, hides in a cupboard after the rest of her family has been cleared from the Warsaw ghetto. In 1945, the architect's wife hides from Soviet soldiers in the walk-in wardrobe of her home. Half a century later, the same closet conceals the illegal tenant (who had lost the rights to the property after unification) when an estate agent shows around potential buyers. The closet, like the house of which it is a part, symbolizes the individual's desire for protection and ontological security. These containers condense questions about the sovereignty of the individual subject and his or her relatedness to others, issues that were catalysts of the vast suffering and upheaval of the twentieth century. Germany's totalitarian pasts and its political failings intersect with the suffering of the population on the symbolic stage of the closet. As Gillian Pye notes, the unifying figure of the wardrobe “allows for the juxtaposition of very different historical situations, whilst retaining the uniqueness and discreteness of each moment. The closet or cupboard links the three figures as women, signifying their vulnerability.”

The central narrative symbols of the closet and the house disclose the metaphorical logic that underlies the desire for Heimat (homeland). This longing unites the figures of the novel, many of whom are displaced by the political turmoil of the long twentieth century. The metaphorical and referential aspects of the elusory concept of Heimat meet in notions of “home,” which connotes both a specific place of origin and dwelling and transcendental ideals of belonging and security. For Elizabeth Boa and Rachel Palfreyman, implicit in most usages of the term “is the notion of a linking or connecting of the self with something larger through a process of identification signified by a spatial metaphor.” To use the terms of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Heimat is an ontological metaphor with distinct spatial dimensions.