Space Untitled: Past Present in Ulrike Kolb’sFrühstück Mit Max

Abstract

Ulrike Kolb’s novel Fruhstuck mit Max (published in 2000) has been celebrated as a subtle though subjective analysis of the ideology of the “WG” generation of the late 1960s and the 1970s. Certainly, the heady days of the student revolution provide the common frame of reference for the dual narrators as they recall their shared past during a chance meeting some 25 years later in a New York cafe. It would be wrong, however, to overstate the retrospective character of this novel. The meeting between the two is not merely an opportunity to exchange memories of a fraught but formative period in their past: through their joint act of remembering, which forms a major theme of the novel, the narrators open up the way for a tentative coming-to-terms with the confused emotions that have preoccupied them for long periods of their lives, and which live on in the present. Ultimately, the bond between Nelly and Max remains in a no-man’s land of barely articulable emotions – a space untitled.