Inscription and rebellion: illness and the symptomatic body in East German literature

Abstract

Klocke, Sonja E. Inscription and Rebellion: Illness and the Symptomatic Body in East German literature. rochester, Ny: Camden House, 2015. 248 pp. $80.00 (hardcover).Inscription and Rebellion represents a unique and provocative intervention in GDr literary studies. Noting a conspicuous proliferation of symptomatic bodies and GDr-specific medical discourses in east German literature written before and 1989 (11), klocke launches an interdisciplinary investigation in an attempt to diagnose the phenomenon, interweaving detailed close readings of prose literature with discussion of east German healthcare and medical discourse. in the first two chapters, klocke offers a tightly focused case study of texts by Christa Wolf that thematize the symptomatic body (chapter 1, Before 1989, places special emphasis on nachdenken uber Christa T.; chapter 2, after the fall of the Wall, focuses on readings of leibhaftig and Stadt der Engel). the two chapters expand the frame to consider Wolf 's influence on four last generation GDr authors, examining post-unification texts by kerstin Hensel, kathrin schmidt, thomas Brussig, and antje ravic strubel. in chapter 3, focusing on texts reflecting back on the east German experience, the diseased, damaged, or otherwise traumatized body offers a source of knowledge about legacies of oppression across regimes, in some cases reaching back in history to the third reich. Chapter 4 makes the case for structural similarities in the post-unification landscape as well, where the abjection of the east German subject via the logic of unification itself provides another surface for critique.At the core of klocke's project lies the proposition that literary texts issuing from the east German context, even as they demonstrate high levels of rhetorical, discursive, and aesthetic complexity, function at the same time as an invaluable record of lived realities that threaten to vanish from public view in the contemporary media consciousness of the Berlin republic. Presented in straightforward, laudably readable prose, klocke's argument achieves its clarity through a sophisticated historical awareness of the interdependence of author, reader, and text, on the one hand, and a political-ethical commitment to recognizing the complexities of historical subjects, on the other. asserting that literature serves as a unique repository for communal experiences, particularly in contexts where public discourse is constrained, klocke concludes that the alternative memory formations proffered by narrative fiction constitute a vital public service, stepping in where supposed instruments of general education-one thinks here of everything from school textbooks to weekly news magazines-reduce historical events to dots on a linear map charting inevitable progress toward a given end.Without its tightly focused frame, grounded concretely in a relatively small textual corpus, the large claims klocke puts forward might ring hollow. Delving archaeologically into the texts, each new dig brings different surfaces to light, revealing multivalent realities in the process. for example, the common (Western) claim that troubled figures in east German texts necessarily represent a critique, if not a wholesale condemnation, of socialism is soundly refuted in her reading of Wolf 's pivotal 1968 novel, nachdenken uber Christa T., in which the illness of the titular figure is traced to multiple sources, including some that pre-date the founding of the socialist state. the novel is read as a memory text that addresses the protagonist's Nazi childhood and sets that past against the multiple realities of the east German state and a society caught between new political structures, old habits of mind, and extreme pressures from without. Moving deliberately and transparently between metaphorical and literal levels of reading, klocke concludes that Christa t. …