The Case of Helene Hegemann: Queerness, Failure, and the German Girl

Abstract

Helene Hegemann’s 2010 novel Axolotl Roadkill, whose author was seventeen at the time of publication, provoked an instructive controversy. The debates the novel triggered tell us a great deal about contemporary German literary and cultural ideals, especially as far as girls and young women are concerned. Hegemann’s work in fact “queers” such ideals, evoking though its sixteen-year-old heroine Mifti a traumatized yet defiantly perverse subject. The novel’s content, however, has been overshadowed by media discussions of its author, a contested and provocative figure who herself challenges established models of femininity. In this article, I consequently begin by discussing the reception of Hegemann, concentrating on the questions of age, gender, and Germanness. I go on to examine Axolotl Roadkill, asking how the novel itself conceives of subjectivity, generationality, and nationality. In addition, I discuss the novel as a queer text. I suggest that Mifti – and the novel itself – illustrate what Judith Halberstam terms “the queer art of failure.”Mifti and Hegemann are triumphant failures as German girls. They thus ask us to consider critically what passes for normality and success in our times. Hegemann’s youth unsurprisingly attracted comment in media coverage of the author, but other factors contributed to the furore surrounding the publication of her novel. The autobiographical status of her work was the subject of speculation, with the prominence of the author’s father, the dramatist Carl Hegemann, serving only to add piquancy (see Marz). But Hegemann attracted even greater attention when it was revealed that her novel quotes passages from a blog by a writer known as Airen (now published as a book, see Airen), a revelation that led to a flurry of articles in the press about plagiarism and the internet, authorship and intertextuality, and to either condemnation or defence. Hegemann’s lack of repentance in the face of the revelation drew criticism. Some commentators, however, have situated the writer in a tradition of “borrowing” that goes back to Thomas Mann and Shakespeare (Graf).1 There is an interesting contradiction here: on the one hand, Hegemann’s work has widely been viewed as autobiographical; on the other, it has been seen as an example of derivativeness or even theft. This contradictoriness points to the unresolved status of literature in