Irmtraud Morgner: Adventures in Knowledge, 1959–1974

Abstract

Reviewed by Keith Bullivant The University of Florida Irmtraud Morgner: Adventures in Knowledge, 1959–1974. By Geoffrey Plow. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006. 281 pages. $54.95. The initially striking point about this book is that it was written by an English schoolmaster, taking time off from his onerous duties teaching German, French, and English, duties that have nevertheless somehow allowed him to publish important peer-reviewed articles on Thomas Bernhard, Brecht, Dürrenmatt, Frisch, and modern German film. It is, as always, written in the most delightful, elegant British English. This study of Irmtraud Morgner, derived from a Ph.D. thesis submitted to the University of Lancaster, sets out to "liberate" her from the "critical straitjacket" that consists in viewing her career as moving from the position of a once committed socialist realist, through a falling-out with the SED in the 1960s, the time of the notorious 11. Plenum des ZK der SED, to a writer whose work then "cocked a snook" at the censorship machinery of the GDR (10). Plow's thesis is that she was a highly individualistic author from the very beginning, one who saw "ideology and democracy as humanized, intimate and personal categories—light years from the conception of the average socialist demagogue" (10). His major focus throughout his analysis of the key works of Morgner—Die wundersamen Reisen ... (1972), "Das Signal steht auf Fahrt" (1959), Das Haus am Rand der Stadt (1962), "Notturno" (1964), Hochzeit in Konstantinopel (1968), and Leben und Abenteuer der Trobadora Beatriz ... (1974)—is on her trust in "the individual's capacity to give meaning to life without recourse to pregiven ideological structures" (11). This she does by providing the individual reader the personal space, via a "Gerüst, darin der Leser seine Erfahrungen, Kenntnisse, Phantasie spielen lässt zum Zwecke poetischer Wahrheitsfindung" (13). In examining the course of Morgner's literary career, Plow engages in appropriate and helpful dialogue with Geoffrey Westgate's Strategies under Surveillance: Reading Irmtraud Morgner as a GDR Writer (2002), and Alison Lewis's Subverting Patriarchy: Feminism and Fantasy in the Works of Irmtraud Morgner (1995), the two standard works on reading Morgner as socialist realist and feminist writer, respectively. His study benefits greatly from his privileged access to the writer's Nachlass, held in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach; his reading of Morgner's diaries and letters of the 1960s, in particular, illuminate in hitherto unknown ways the individual path she charted during the troublesome 1960s. Plow proceeds to guide the reader through the major works, showing how she was at all times "keen to involve the reader in personal, intimate, confidence-inspiring dialogue." He persuasively identifies a crucial turning point in Hochzeit in Konstantinopel, where the "application of irony as a source of collusion between writer and reader" leads to the exposure of "the ignorance of scientifically well-versed characters in the text." In her masterpiece, Trobadora Beatriz, she goes even further, freeing the individual reader to determine for his or her self "which path to take through a textual labyrinth." The work is her "apogee of confidence in the reader, of ironic play as productive force" (33). The body of this book fully makes Plow's claim that it is nothing but arid to see Morgner as "merely" a socialist realist, a feminist, or a moralist. But the final step in his argument goes significantly beyond this. Confrontation with Morgner's finest work constitutes the "apotheosis of independent reading," Plow tells us, asserting that it invites the reader to create his or her own structure, past and, yes, even "your own [End Page 162] miracle" (203). There thus comes a point where Morgner is magically transmogrified for her readers; her work, for us mundane scholars seemingly rooted so firmly in the spiritual confines of the long-departed GDR, is now, we are told, above all "deeply pertinent to our twenty-first-century preoccupations" (11). Plow ultimately demands of us a leap of faith. Well, I tried and did leap, gentle reader, but like Gandalf...