The Topography of Mourning in Barbara Honigmann's Eine Liebe aus Nichts

Abstract

In her 1991 narrative Eine Liebe aus nichts, Barbara Honigmann maps a literary landscape marked by cultural, religious, linguistic, geographic, and temporal borders. Like author, text's first-person narrator is a German Jew who emigrates from (East) Berlin to France, only to reverse her course a few months later to attend her father's funeral in Weimar. In this movement away from and towards home, narrator traverses an affective topography of lost places, people, and pasts along a route that traces parental stories of exile and return. Describing process of writing this text, Honigmann remarks how she approached and distanced herself from her father as she worked through their conflicted relationship: Nach dem Tod meines Vaters habe ich ein Buch geschrieben, uber ihn und uber mich und unsere verfehlte Liebe, seine vielfachen Ehen und die Orte und Stationen seines Lebens. Ich erinnerte mich und phantasierte uber alles, was zwischen uns war, und naherte und entfernte mich von ihm, wie es im Leben nicht moglich gewesen war (Graber 33). This motion towards and away from lost object characterizes literary acts of mourning. Writing a parent's death in literary form, Nancy K. Miller states, displays both steps toward separation and tortuous paths of reconnection, after fact. Grieving and release (7). Reading Eine Liebe aus nichts as a work of mourning draws attention to myriad ways that loss – of father, of community, of Heimat – structures narrative.' Both mourning and exile are forms of loss typified by movement and displacement. In his classic essay Mourning and Melancholia, Sigmund Freud points to this similarity, describing mourning as the reaction to loss of a loved person, or to loss of some abstraction which has taken place of one, such as one's country, liberty, an ideal, and so on (243). Freud illuminates basic psychodynamic process of mourning, long and painful memory work involved in coming to terms with loss. Through a process of activating and working through individual memories, emotional energy gradually becomes