“I Am Dismantling Everything Down to the Very Skeleton”: Rupture, Multiplicity, and the “Queer Encounter” in Angela Krauß's <em>Die Überfliegerin</em> (1995)

Abstract

In this article, I investigate the relationship between space and gender in Angela Kraus's Die Uberfliegerin (1995, High-flying woman), one of the earliest and most unique explorations in fiction of East German identity after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Kraus depicts the immediate post-Wall era as an exhilarating moment of rupture with the past, sending her protagonist to America and Russia to reevaluate her sense of self outside the spatial and historical parameters of her everyday life. I demonstrate how the narrator's negotiations with both space and gender are central to her search for a sense of self, paying special attention to her encounter with two transvestites, which fundamentally changes her understanding of gender. Framing my reading of Die Uberfliegerin with both spatial and queer theory, I show how the story addresses concerns about the fluidity of identity that proliferated in both literature and theory during the post-Wall era.