Jenny Erpenbeck and the Life of Things

Abstract

This chapter looks at two of Jenny Erpenbeck's recent works, the essay collection Dinge, die verschwinden (2009) and the novel Heimsuchung (2008), and considers the way in which Erpenbeck employs a focus on the things and places of the everyday environment as a way of exploring questions of home, identity and time. It argues that Erpenbeck's attention to the things of the environment, captured in Heimsuchung by the central figure of the house, allows her to present everyday experience as a multiplicity of ?now' moments, which are distinct and yet interlinked, in order to offer a panoramic, but simultaneously intimate view of historical experience.Jenny Erpenbeck (b.1967) began her artistic career as a theatre director. She has written the play Katzen haben sieben Heben (premiered 19 January 2000) and a number of prose texts, which have been translated into many languages. Her debut work, the novella Die Geschichte des alten Kindes, appeared in 1999 to cridcal acclaim and was followed by the short story collection Hand (2001) and the novels Worterbuch (2004) and Heimsuchung (2008). More recendy, a collection of her columns for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung was published under the tide Dinge, die verschwinden (2009). The early pigeonholing of Erpenbeck as part of the ?Frauleinwunder' has since given way to a more nuanced appreciation of the writer.1 She has been referred to more recently as ?die grose Poetin unter den jungeren deutschen Schriftstellern'.2 She has also been awarded a significant number of major prizes, including the Ingeborg Bachmann jury prize (2001) and the Heimito von Doderer Literaturpreis (2008).Erpenbeck's family background is a rich source of inspiration for the writer. She is the granddaughter of Fritz Erpenbeck, formerly ?Chefdramaturg' of the Berliner Volksbuhne and member of the GDR ?Ministerrat', and her grandmother was well-known author Hedda Zinner. Her father is the renowned physicist and writer John Erpenbeck and her mother was the prolific Arabic translator and academic Doris Kilias. Their significance in the cultural life of both the GDR and the FRG, but also their experiences of expulsion and exile, have doubtless been strong influences on Erpenbeck's work, in which experiences of transition, loss, and memory, as well as questions of childhood, have been very prominent.3 In this context, Erpenbeck's work can be seen as an important contribution to current trends in German literature, particularly the increased focus on identities in transition. Novels such as Heimsuchung must also be seen in the wider context of the upsurge in interest in the question of belonging, Heimat and the huge explosion in ?Familien-romane' or ?Generationenromane', which are symptomatic of the increased desire to understand the relationship between private and public memory and to acknowledge both the constructed nature of memories as well as the plural and contested nature of memory culture.4One of Erpenbeck's key contributions, and the focus of interest in this present chapter, is her treatment of the material culture of everyday life. This culture has certainly been a dominant theme in popular discourses surrounding identities in Germany since the fall of the Wall, as the unabated interest in the museum display, collecting and widespread purchasing of original and reproduction East German everyday objects has shown.5 The combined factors of the acceleration of globalised consumer culture, the centrality of consumer culture to the collapse of Eastern European communism in the 1980s and, as Paul Betts has persuasively argued, the cultural importance of (modernist) design culture in the German-speaking world,6 are all key factors underlying these trends, making material culture a potent discourse for the exploration and negotiation of identities in contemporary Germany. This is certainly reflected in recent film and literature, with movies such as Goodbye Lenin! (2003) and Sonnenallee (1999), and texts such as Jana Hensel's Zonenkinder (2002) or Florian Illies's Generation Golf (2000) prominently featuring everyday (consumer) objects in narratives of identity formation. …