AN IDEA OF LOVE as a power that conquers all prevails in cinematic narratives of romance. Such a representation taps into popular fantasies, yet it is utopian insofar as it overlooks the rigid social boundaries that constrain romantic desires. This article explores the representation of love in Fatih Akin's Gegen die Wand (Head On, 2004), which I argue reinforces the inescapable nature of certain norms that are set in place to regulate gender and sexuality, and thereby desire. Despite, or perhaps because of its pessimistic perspective regarding the possibility of transgressing boundaries, which ultimately reaffirms the moral imperatives that govern emotional lives, the film contests some of the most prevalent mythologies of love articulated by popular culture. Specifically, it lays bare how conforming to normative categories, compulsory as it may be, can be compromising and therefore not always conducive to happiness.

The meanings attached to the notion of love and the nature of intimacy have undergone a transformation in contemporary societies. Notwithstanding the dramatic changes that have taken place in the structure of interpersonal relationships, cultural representations of love remain rather narrow, largely defined by classic notions of romance, as Stacey and Pearce point out. Illouz demonstrates how social and cultural developments articulate a new utopia of romance, arguing that the prominence of love narratives in mass culture turned love into one of the most pervasive mythologies of contemporary life. This idea is also asserted by Evans, who argues that “the expectations of romance and sexual pleasure within intimacy are the subject matter of various dream factories of the West which endlessly threaten the fragile possibilities of human happiness.” Because love is so widely narrativized through certain conventions, these conventions have come to shape how it is experienced. As Illouz puts it, “culture operates as a frame within which emotional experience is organized, labeled, classified and interpreted. Cultural frames name and define the emotion, set the limits of its intensity, specify the norms and values attached to it and provide symbols and cultural scenarios that make it socially communicative.” Her observation exemplifies that love is not just an emotion but in fact a cultural practice and, as Jackson too asserts, it is socially constructed.

EPISTOLARY NOVELS BECAME increasingly popular in the eighteenth century as a consequence of two major developments: the emergence of the concept of romantic love1 and the formation of modern reflexivity. Epistolary novels like Richardson's Pamela (1740), Rousseau's Julie ou la Nouvelle Heloïse (Julie, Or The New Heloise, 1761), or Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774) explore the potential of this genre to express modern subjectivity in the context of romantic love as a medium with its own codes of communication. As a traditional genre of self-observation and observation of others, epistolary novels simulate face-to-face communication and are particularly suited to replicate modern forms of sociability and reflection. In the twenty-first century, even after the decline of letters as a preferred medium of communication, the genre is far from disappearing; with the development of the e-mail novel, it has transformed and accommodated itself to contemporary conditions.

This chapter explores the creation of intimacy and expression of love and desire in a twenty-first-century epistolary novel. Austrian writer Daniel Glattauer's Gut gegen Nordwind (translated as Love Virtually, 2006) revives and updates the genre of the epistolary novel by using e-mails as the medium of communication. Gut gegen Nordwind was a major success in Austria, as well as internationally, and was translated into twenty-eight languages. The novel is composed exclusively of e-mails exchanged between the protagonists Leo Leike and Emmi Rothner. An accidental conversation caused by a typographical error in an e-mail address soon turns into a contemporary romance, a virtual love story, as the English title anticipates. The novel tells the story of a fictionalized cyber-romance that mirrors literature's response to new information technologies. This chapter will study the narrative implications of the choice of a hybrid genre such as the e-mail novel. It will explore the possibilities and limits of the disembodied communication situation in the novel, and it will ask how the digital space shapes virtual desire and love.

Convergence of Media and Its Consequences

The novel itself classifies its genre as an “E-Mail-Roman” (GgN, 126), thus establishing a link to the tradition and genre of the epistolary novel. Readers are intended to establish a link between the genre of the epistolary novel and Glattauer's work, a process inherent in the reading process, as Dupont points out.

Helmut Schmitz, University of Warwick

IN HIS ESSAY “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Walter Benjamin comments on the concept of experience in Bergson's Matière et Memoire that the reader “is bound to conclude that only a poet can be the adequate subject of such an experience.” One is tempted to make a similar claim with respect to the phenomenon of love. While it would be foolish to claim that only a poet might be an adequate subject for the experience of love, it is certainly possible to say that s/he might be the adequate subject to give voice to this experience. In other words, it is poetry, or literature in general, that is perceived as the “adequate” form of expression of love's qualities. From the Middle Ages to the middle of the nineteenth century, literature is the dominant medium through which ideas and experiences of love find expression, at first through poetry, and, in the bourgeois age over the last two centuries, increasingly through fiction. Niels Werber points to the historically shared semantics between the terms “love” and “novel”: “Der Roman handelt also von der Liebe, aber auch umgekehrt bezeichnet man Liebesabenteuer als ‘Roman.’ Gattung und Sujet sind derart verknupft, dass der Begriff ‘Roman’ beide zu bezeichnen vermag.” Describing literary representations and literature on love as a “model” for lovers in society, Elke Reinhardt-Becker claims that love is the favorite topic of literature. Matthias Luserke-Jacqui comments at the end of his Kleine Literaturgeschichte der großen Liebe: “Liebe braucht Literatur.”

The historical, literary, and social field of love is too vast to be adequately summarized here; this introduction will therefore cast a light on a number of issues addressed by the chapters in this volume without attempting to be exhaustive. In the first instance, it is worth noting that the fields of literature, culture, and social theory are closely intertwined when it comes to the phenomenon of love, as a number of sociotheoretical studies either take their cue entirely from literary works or closely refer to literary or cultural models for their formation of central concepts.

“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.”

Helmut Schmitz, University of Warwick

“HAPPY LOVE,” remarks Denis de Rougemont, “has no history. Romance only comes into existence where love is fatal, frowned upon and doomed by life itself.” Noting that the history of love in Western European literature begins in the twelfth century with a story of an adulterous couple—Tristan and Isolde—de Rougemont reminds us that literature knows mainly unhappy and unfulfilled love stories. From the medieval love poetry of the Provencal troubadours via Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and Laura, to Romeo and Juliet; in the literary tradition of Europe between the medieval period and the Renaissance, love and suffering belong closely together.

In the modern “literary” novel, there is likewise no happiness in love to be found. However, modern love is unhappy for different reasons than pre-modern love. Love in the modern novel is unhappy not (just) as a result of the conflict-ridden structure of desire or because of insurmountable social obstacles but as a reflection of the overburdening of the subject in relation to an increasingly diversified, stratified, and administered society. A number of social theorists comment on the increasing fragmentation of the modern bourgeois subject into to a variety of social roles in the transformation from a feudal to a bourgeois society in the mid to late eighteenth century. This creates a situation where the public role of administrative work and the private, domestic existence of the bourgeois subject can no longer be easily brought into harmony. In this destabilizing social situation, love and intimate relationships become charged with the promise of restoring balance and happiness to the individual in the domestic sphere, promising him/her the recognition the outside world increasingly withholds. With reference to Niklas Luhmann's theory of social stratification, which sees the subject in an increasingly diversified set of social roles, Karin A. Wurst argues that love turns into a compensatory discourse that is supposed to stabilize the bourgeois self within a domestic harmony. The home and the relationship with the designated (female) Other becomes the space where the (male) subject wants to experience his whole persona in the exchange with the partner.

“DIE EINZIGEN LEBEN, die sich berühren, sind die, die einem Manuskript folgen, das nicht das eigene ist.” For contemporary German writer and director René Pollesch, love alone is an inadequate basis for long-term relationships. Since the feeling's initial intensity is impossible to sustain, love relations are destined to become unsatisfying or to end. Only on stage—and, one may add, in literature, film, or art—may audiences witness seemingly eternal passionate love, because the characters' “lives” are limited by the perspectives of the respective works. Arguably, this is most obvious in traditional romantic love stories, or romances, that conclude with the couples' happy unions.

The novels by Swiss writer Alain Claude Sulzer (1953–) evoke the popular romance genre and its ideal of unconditional, never-ending love. However, as Sulzer expands the scope of the typical romance plot beyond the height of the partners' emotional connection and explores the aftermath of infidelity and rejection, readers encounter figures who try to overcome the tensions pinpointed by Pollesch. The protagonists' efforts to preserve their relationships beyond the break-ups are informed by the ideals promoted in literary, operatic, and cinematic romances. Thus, Sulzer's characters try—though in vain—to emulate the heroes and heroines of the well-known genre and go to great length to protect their romantic stylizations of themselves and their lovers against the frustrations of reality. Simultaneously, Sulzer creates a similar experience for his readers, as his works conjure the traditional romance, yet only to subvert the romantic plot and reveal limitations of the romantic paradigm. As a result, his novels emerge as explorations into the ways in which the genre's conventions may shape audiences' expectations of relationships. Read through the lenses of Jean-Paul Sartre's work on subjectivity, Jacques Lacan's concept of desire, and Elke Reinhardt-Becker's comparison of romantic love and “sachliche Liebe,” Sulzer's novels Ein perfekter Kellner (A Perfect Waiter, 2006), Privatstunden (Private Lessons, 2009), Zur falschen Zeit (At the Wrong Time, 2010), and Postskriptum (Postscript, 2015) emerge as insightful depictions of the power of socially constituted and endorsed concepts of love and desire and of the difficulties involved in overcoming an all-pervasive, culturally idealized model such as that of romantic love.

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.

On my first trip to Bucharest after my talk in Sibiu, I requested an audience with Petru Groza at his office, as he had promised. In his office by a happy coincidence I found Ionel Pop, minister of Transylvania, who seemed to be good friends with Groza. They were on a first-name basis, at least. We discussed once again the problem of my trip to Washington, which Groza believed to be useful and urgent, and he promised to speak to Vişoianu, minister of foreign affairs, in the following few days.

“I’ll talk to him myself,” said Ionel Pop. “But it is not up to Vişoianu—whom Mr. Mărgineanu knows—but to the Allied Commission, namely the Soviet side, which has to give its approval, and which only you can obtain.” By “we” he meant the ministers from the Communist Party or affiliated parties, like the Plowmen's Front.

“Yes, you are right,” said Groza, his voice lowered. “Couldn't the Americans intervene?” he said right away, turning to me.

“It is our business, not theirs, Mr. Vice President. My relationship with them is too recent, and rather formal, so I would not be able to ask them for this favor.”

“Fine, I’ll do it. Postpone the visit to Vişoianu so I can talk to General Vinogradov first.” Approval was not within his purview, but he could intervene with his superior. Before going back to Sibiu, I also requested an audience with Minister Vişoianu, who received me with good will and friendship.

“Groza and Ionel Pop have spoken to me. But I told Mr. Groza that he doesn't need to talk to me, because I know you and I agree with you going. He needs to talk to the Allied Commission, namely the Soviet command, where my word counts for nothing. I’m afraid Mr. Groza's doesn't either, nor Mr. Pătrăşcanu’s, whom I myself could ask to intervene; Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca from the Soviet Union are the only ones that the Soviet Commission trusts at this point.”

In my postdoctoral dissertation I ran into the same difficulties as I had in my doctoral thesis, generated by the contradiction between units of efficiency with units of time, as well as with the substantive, relational, and process interpretation of the phenomenon of transfer. Is this due only to identical elements, as Thorndike claims, explainable through Aristotle's substantive logic? Or is it due to relational identity between structures, as in configurational psychology, in which case the explanation has to be provided through isomorphism? What is the role of process, which is based on the third dialectic principle of logic?

I could not provide satisfactory answers, but the horizon of the paper was wider than that of the doctorate, and the ideas are more fleshed out, and maybe even deeper. I felt more and more, though, a need to go deeper into mathematical methodology, without which I could not solve my problems in an entirely scientific manner. For this, I needed to go not only to Britain but also to America, where these mathematical psychology issues had started to be treated very competently, a fact which Professor Goangă had started to recognize.

Both in writing my doctoral and postdoctoral dissertations—and especially during my time in Germany—I became convinced that the central problem is that of the person itself, which requires even more logical and mathematical methodology. Would I be able to combine my interest for methodology with personality psychology?

While I was making my modest contribution to our attempts to get back Transylvania in its entirety, Alexandru Roşca and Cupcea, who had registered with the Communist Party after August 23, were making every effort to have me removed from the university. They filed a complaint with the department council, cosigned by Professor Goangă, accusing me of irregularities in the management of the Psychology Institute and the Psychotechnic Institute, as well as of neglecting my academic duties because of my obligations as scientific adviser in charge of labor organization at the industrial works at Reşiţa and ASTRA Braşov. To these they added my reactionary attitude toward the country's new socialist order, exemplified by my being a member of the Romanian-American Association of Transylvania, which was despised by the Communist Party leadership in Cluj, mostly made up of Hungarians, who—just like Roşca and Cupcea—had collaborated with Hungary's Nazi government, but then signed up for the Communist Party right away. The department council did not endorse the complaint. Upon their request, however, Daicoviciu, who was dean, and Petrovici, who was rector, forwarded the complaint to the Ministry of Education, but the minister, Ştefan Voitec, a member of the Social Democratic Party, did not endorse it either. The minister knew of my contribution to the Societatea de Mîine magazine, printed by Ion Clopoţel, a member of the Social Democratic Party, and also knew of my help in organizing the Workers University for the Union of Workers Trade Unions in Cluj. He greatly appreciated the two experimental technical schools at Reşita and the ASTRA Braşov industrial works, which cleared the way for apprentices to study toward an engineering degree. Engineer Manciu, who helped me set up the school in Braşov, was a former colleague of his from Bucharest Polytechnic. His cabinet secretary, Mrs. Iorgulescu, a psychology graduate, had told him about my struggle against the legionnaires and the progressive and anti-racial character of my papers and books.

I was in my office at the Psychotechnic Institute, in the building occupied today by the local branch of the Academy—where Avram Iancu Street ends in what was then Royal Street, today's Republic Street—when Miss Angheliu, a psychology student, came to me, scared, to tell me about the attempt on Professor Goangă's life. I ran out in my lab coat, without putting on my overcoat, to the scene of the crime, and while passing through the secretarial office I asked Mihail Peteanu to call an ambulance to take the rector to the clinic right away. Miss Angheliu stayed in the building's foyer. Down the road, on Avram Iancu Street, but across the street from the scene of the crime, I met Alexandru Roşca, the only member of the institute's scientific staff who regularly attended Professor Goangă's lectures in order to curry favor. Miss Angheliu heard the shots and saw the flashes, but could not see the professor.

“What happened?” I asked Roşca.

“They shot the old man,” he said.

“So what are you standing there for? Let's go help him.”

“Are you crazy? You want them to shoot us too?”

I left him there and ran to the professor, telling him the ambulance was on its way and would arrive at any moment. The minutes went by with difficulty, and his wounds were bleeding rather heavily.

“Mărgineanu, I’m dying, save me.”

“I have three kids, professor,” said the constable, who had also been shot. “Don't leave me here, my kids are gonna be left out in the streets.”

Two or three minutes later, Professor Vasiliu from the medical school passed by in his car. I stopped him right away and asked him to take Rector Goangă to the clinic, as the ambulance might be too late. Professor Vasiliu got out of the car right away and, with his driver, we tried to get Professor Goangă into the car without putting too much strain on him, aggravating his bleeding, as Professor Vasiliu told us. We couldn't manage. Meanwhile the ambulance arrived and took out a stretcher, which allowed Professor Goangă to be picked up without twisting his body. I went inside the ambulance too.

Kafk a's The Trial is so well known, and widely discussed, because people see in it not only an existentialist novel depicting pathological anxiety but also an anticipation of the Nazi trials, to which some add the Stalinist trials, which were easily their equal.

Both Hitler and Stalin were sinister figures. Maybe the most sinister in history, because their crimes surpass those of all other criminals recorded by history, combined. Both were insane and criminal, but Hitler seemed to have been first insane, then criminal. As a consequence, his trials are more like Kafk a's model. The same two attributes characterize Stalin, but in his case, he was first and foremost a criminal, as Solzhenitzyn showed without a doubt. Hitler has killed only three to four million people. Stalin seems to have killed ten times more, and his trials took place under the sign of systematic perfidy, and were even organized scientifically, as his henchmen, starting with Vyshinsky, have claimed. That is why the absurdity of the world in Kafk a's novel seems closer to that of the trials organizaed by Hitler, who was an epileptic, and less to Stalin's and Vyshinsky’s, who organized their trials with a cool head. Crime and insanity cannot be confused, even if they represent intersecting circles with common features.

The prelude to our trial started in the afternoon of October 24 or 25, when turmoil started in the detention area of the Interior Ministry. The metal doors on the cells opened every few minutes. At first I thought they were the usual trips to interrogation, but then I realized it sounded more like they were vacating the cells. I became sure of that when at short intervals the neighboring cell doors opened, which had held Admiral Măcelariu and engineer Balş for four months. A longer silence, about ten minutes, went by, and then I was taken out. Two strapping constables frogmarched me to the gate through which I had come in, and outside a car was waiting.

There have been memoirs written by any number of politicians who have played a part in the unfolding of history and have thus felt the need to explain and justify the ideas and motives that stood at the foundation of their actions.

There have been memoirs written also by men of science, literature, and the arts to clarify their process of creation and have their work better understood. In the beginning there were Rousseau and Goethe, and the example they set was followed not only by Van Gogh, Gide, Thomas Mann, and Lucian Blaga but also by less important figures whom history, in all likelihood, will forget.

Exceptionally valuable, however, are notes written on the manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci and Eminescu, which will be commented on throughout the centuries.

Testimonies—not just memoirs—about events and turmoil in a given era have also been written by eyewitnesses without great merit in political and cultural life, meant to facilitate the later judgment of history, which can be written sine ira et studio only when that era is over. This is the case with my modest person. And I am sure that this is the case with others who were the victims of Hitler and Stalin's dictatorships.

I felt the need to begin with the autobiography of my education—following the example of Professor Henry Adams of Harvard University—because a judgment on the century I lived in cannot be derived from my education, which started in my parents’ peasant house and in the school kept by the village, continued in the high schools in Blaj and Orăştie, and ended—only in its first part—at the University of Cluj, where I defended my degree and doctorate. For the second part of my education I went on to specialized studies in Germany, America, England, and France—in that order—which took almost as long as my studies in Cluj.

I didn't experience a feeling of discontinuity in my studies and education in foreign universities because, although the minds of my foreign instructors may have been more enlightened, their guiding principles were not that different from those in my country. Proof thereof that my fatherland's schools had, though younger and more modest, emerged within their century.