The Wounded Self: Writing Illness in Twenty-First-Century German Literature by Nina Schmidt

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Reviewed by: The Wounded Self: Writing Illness in Twenty-First-Century German Literature by Nina Schmidt Franziska Gygax (bio) The Wounded Self: Writing Illness in Twenty-First-Century German Literature Nina Schmidt Camden House, 2018, xii + 235 pages. ISBN 9781640140165, $75.00 hardback. At the beginning of her comprehensive and excellently argued study of autobiographical representations of illness in contemporary German literature, Nina Schmidt refers to Virginia Woolf's On Being Ill and her canonical statement that illness has not acquired the crucial status of a serious literary topic that it deserves. To serve as a striking example of this inadequate judgment and of the necessary theorization of and explanation for the contrary, Schmidt takes as one of her primary texts Christoph Schlingensief's cancer diary So schön wie hier kanns im Himmel gar nicht sein! Tagebuch einer Krebserkrankung (It can't possibly be as beautiful in heaven as it is here! A diary of cancer, 2009), and the ensuing attack in the feuilleton that illness narratives are not real literature. Furthermore, the fact that numerous illness narratives have been published in the past twenty years (not only in the German-speaking world) and that they have received both public and scholarly attention demonstrates the need for further recognition and serious literary criticism, which has actually already been the case in the Anglophone world for quite some time. Besides Schlingensief's cancer diary, Schmidt focuses on Charlotte Roche's 2011 Schossgebete (published in English as Wrecked, 2013), Kathrin Schmidt's Du stirbst nicht (You aren't dying, 2009), Verena Stefan's Fremdschläfer (Alien sleeper, 2007), and Wolfgang Herrndorf's Arbeit und Struktur (Work and structure, 2010–2013), and she convincingly explains her selection by the different range of genres and narrative forms of these texts. These specific narrative forms and aesthetic strategies are the main objectives of her study, and they bring to light the crucial themes of illness, disability, and dying as they appear as lived experiences. In her introduction, Schmidt points out the difficulty of differentiating between illness and disability. She relies on insights from the field of disability [End Page 508] studies, and elucidates how readers often adopt a discriminatory attitude toward narrative on disability (and illness), considering it as deviating from the norm, which seems to be "ablebodiedness." Thus, Schmidt's approach is very much grounded in challenging normative values inadequately based on binary thinking, such as healthy vs. ill and disabled, external vs. internal, or heterosexual vs. homosexual/lesbian in Stefan's Fremdschläfer, and "Selbstbild" (self-image) vs. "Fremdbild" (externally determined image) in Kathrin Schmidt's Du stirbst nicht (71). Additionally, she emphasizes her goal of highlighting the intricate relationship between the autobiographical and the (auto)fictional, a highly contested, but necessary contemporary debate, to which she contributes with a meticulous discussion of her exemplary texts. Her decision not to proceed chronologically in her analysis of the four texts is clear because of her focus on exploring and theorizing "the relation of the portrayal of illness to the author's own life experience" (33). Thus, her first chapter addresses the boundaries between fact and fiction in Roche's trauma narrative Schossgebete, and she speaks convincingly of an "aesthetics of disgust" (vividly represented in bodily descriptions) that Roche employs to deal with the protagonist's traumatic experiences (34). Schmidt's careful close reading and insightful references to Roche's own life experiences make evident the thin line between the protagonist's and the author's personal experiences. According to Schmidt, this autofictional form lends itself best to the retelling of traumatic experience by the vulnerable subject (author/protagonist). Here one could critically add that clearly identifiable autobiographies enable and empower their authors to narrate their traumata. Analyzing the "autobiographical novel" Du stirbst nicht (66), Nina Schmidt returns to the concept of the stare from disability studies to develop her argument of the successful restoration of the protagonist's self-image (after a brain hemorrhage): because of her illness experience she has become a "staree" (72), but at the same time she begins to stare (back) and recognizes the illusory notion of normality and ablebodiedness. Nina Schmidt establishes an intriguing connection between the protagonist...