Thomas Hettche Pfaueninsel (2014): powieść historyczna jako współczesna refleksja o Innym

Abstract

The paper deals with Thomas Hettche’s novel Pfaueninsel, which is interpreted as a story about the Other. The category of otherness refers to the main character, Marie Strakon, a dwarf in the service of the King of Prussia in the 19th century, and to the place of action, Peacock Island near Berlin. Hettche’s historiographical metafiction is a fictional biography of a woman whose physical otherness places her in opposition to the orders established by humans: social, cultural, aesthetic, and historical. Peacock Island, in turn, transformed into an artificial paradise, is a heterotopic sphere of otherness contrasting with Berlin, an urban space of civilisation, progress, and the Industrial Revolution. The story of the Peacock Island biotope illustrates the emergence and evolution of ecological consciousness in the 19th century; it constitutes a motif of non-anthropocentric history being “the Other” of the ‘great’ history of humans. The paper shows how different dimensions of otherness are constructed in relation to the main protagonist and to the island space.