SOURCE: Robinson, David W. “Hein's Historians: Fictions of Social Memory.” In Deconstructing East Germany: Christoph Hein's Literature of Dissent, edited by James Hardin, pp. 125–80. Columbia, South Carolina: Camden House, 1999.

IDEOLOGY AND HISTORY

While all of Christoph Hein's work reveals a fascination with the impact of history on individual experience, several of his most ambitious texts deal explicitly with history as an intellectual discipline and space for social engagement. The early story “Einladung zum Lever Bourgeois” (1980)¹ and the novels Horns Ende (1985) and Der Tangospieler (1989; translated into English as The Tango Player, 1992) explore the significance of history as material fact and social memory through fictive portrayals of historians: Racine is court historian to Louis XIV, Horn (along with Bürgermeister Kruschkatz and, in a different sense, Dr. Spodeck) is a professional historian whose career has been diverted by political circumstance, and Hans-Peter Dallow is a once and future professor of history at Karl Marx University in Leipzig. The narratives themselves and Hein's published essays and interviews leave little doubt that the professional activity (or inactivity) of these writers of history may be understood in relation to Hein's own sense of responsibility as a writer of fiction, of histoire or Geschichte in all senses. As Hein frequently stresses, history is anything but the dusting-off of neglected tomes:

History interests us for the sake of the present. Historical contemplation is always a naming [Benennen] of the immediate time and place. The judgments of history are never free from current interests and they exert an influence on contemporary society.

(“Die fünfte Grundrechenart” 61)²

Accordingly, the approaches taken by Hein's professional historians to their subject matter provide a scale of values and methods suited for judging the engagement of ordinary people with the social realities confronting them. Though historians bear a special social responsibility, their pursuit of truth amid rampant falsehood epitomizes a practical and moral necessity shared by every member of society.

In keeping with the non-partisan stance Hein advocates, a chronicle consists not of ready-made generalizations but of hard, individual facts and experiences, the traces of the real that make possible the construction as well as the deconstruction of ideological fiction. Yet this implies that objectivity with respect to the facts must coexist with intense subjectivity, since all chronicles of any value amount to personal reports, eyewitness accounts of events experienced by a real human observer. The writing of history therefore has a dual character: it is both social chronicle and autobiography. Hein regards all art, including his own, as “social autobiography”:

My subject matter is located in my eyes and ears, it sits under my skin, because it very much gets under my skin. As always it is the beam in my own eye, the stake in my own flesh. Literature in the future will also speak of what concerns individuals, of what affects them. It will be autobiography, not private, yet nonetheless personal, not representative, yet nonetheless social autobiography. Reports by individuals about these individuals in the world, a world which I assimilate according to my understanding, abilities, and attitudes—the world which I am.

(“Öffentlich arbeiten” 34)

While history is the ultimate subject matter of art (a point on which Hein and his Party-line critics would have agreed), history itself is to be understood as personal experience, as social autobiography rather than the unfolding of impersonal laws. Hein's books on history address simultaneously questions of historical reality, ideological distortion, personal/political responsibility, and the nature of art, but Hein sees himself principally as a chronicler (or historian) of the real, the mundane, the ordinary. Art and history describe relations of individuals to these social and political conditions. Thus in Horns Ende, a succession of “historians” (amateur or professional, it makes no difference) chronicle a relatively insignificant moment in the history of a relatively insignificant town, each from his or her idiosyncratic point of view. To attempt a more general history, Hein seems to suggest, would involve falsifications of reality more insidious than anything these individuals can be accused of. The novel is constructed according to principles already worked out in the early collection of short stories, combining the representative banality of the “Berliner Stadtansichten” with the self-conscious reflection (and first-person viewpoint) of “Einladung zum Lever Bourgeois.” Yet these limitations of ordinariness do not prevent the narrated facts from having political meaning. Speculating as to how much we can really know about history, Hein remarked in 1982 that “Every event manifests itself to us merely as the tip of an iceberg: a self-concealing network of causes and interests hides behind the face of the obvious facts” (“Gespräch” 128). The chronicler, unlike the ideologue, presents facts, opinions, and even falsifications of fact to the reader without overtly or covertly dictating the appropriate conclusions to be drawn from them.

The question arises as to what may be the ultimate purpose of these exercises in “social autobiography.” Hein has above all characterized his art as Lebenshilfe, an aid to living, meaning that it helps people to assimilate confusing or painful experiences and respond to them productively. Hein's subversion of East German cultural orthodoxy consists in the production of texts that portray individuals in the toils of historical, social, and political events much larger than they—subversion, because to respond to political events productively is to respond politically. Taking seriously the Marxist goal of building political consciousness among the masses, Hein relies on the notion of chronicling as a way of counteracting the government's pervasive Bevormündung (tutelage, patronage) of its citizens. The reader is required, perhaps for the first time, to bring an independent evaluation to bear on the facts of recent, even contemporary history, without any obvious ideological meddling on the part of the author or the state. (Clearly, the didactic import of this procedure discloses Hein's kinship with his Socialist Realist colleagues—he, too, has an ax to grind after all. Yet a genuine difference can be seen in the kind of effect desired: Hein enjoys watching the Rorschach-like effect of his shrewd narrative strategies on readers, remarking blandly that criticism tends to reveal more about critics than authors [“Wir werden es lernen müssen” 53–54].) Hein believes adamantly that political change can only come about when individuals take responsibility for their actions, or better, when they conceive of themselves as capable of acting. In bringing about this kind of political self-awareness, “Literatur ist machtlos, aber sie ist nicht ohnmächtig” [Literature lacks power, but it isn't powerless: “Worüber man nicht reden kann” 49]; that is, literature cannot claim to exert direct political power—Creon need not listen—but it can alter the way people think about historical facts and the facts of their lives. Thus the real efficacy of chronicling lies not so much in the unearthing of new facts, but in naming things known but never articulated, in dragging formerly inert realities onto the field of political action. Not the facts chronicled, but the chronicle itself achieves this:

It hasn't been the reported event, the specified state of affairs, but the report itself, the chronicle, the description that caused a sensation, created excitement, and led to action being taken. Not the condition of our beautiful and terrible world, but the report about that condition constitutes a happening. Still more: The condition, the state of affairs, the incident may be generally known and seemingly tolerated, while the naming of it, the simple literary or non-literary description, in which nothing is said that wasn't already known, leads to an uproar of joy or horror and to effective action.

(“Worüber man nicht reden kann” 47–48)

The power of historical writing seems to derive from its capacity to inspire personal recognition and acknowledgment of a reported state of affairs, not from its proximity to timeless, abstract truth. The concrete experience of socialist countries over seventy years was that abstract, “scientific” accounts of history amounted to what Hein calls “die fünfte Grundrechenart”—the fifth basic arithmetical operation—a calculation whose desired outcome is preordained, with the data selected or manipulated so as to yield it (“Die fünfte Grundrechenart” 60). For Hein, history cannot be described by formulas, but is particular and subjective, in other words, literary.

The key concept in Hein's view of the social functions of literature and historical chronicling is Öffentlichtkeit, “publicness,” or, to borrow Gorbachev's related and contemporary concept of glasnost, “openness.” Hein repeatedly cites the GDR's lack of Öffentlichkeit as the most glaring and dangerous failure of East German culture, and hints at an even broader, political significance:

Openness [Öffentlichkeit] is not a means by which culture is propagated, rather it is culture's precondition. This does not mean “limited openness” (a self-contradictory notion), nor does it mean “openness for an elite.”

Selected culture is the opposite of culture. When disagreements are lacking, or take place only behind closed doors, when conclusions are reached in isolation from society, then not only this aspect of culture but culture as a whole withers, and becomes impoverished.

Culture is more comprehensive than that which appears useful, or comfortable, or agreeable, and it dies with each restriction. For culture is not just the admired and successful work of the individual, but the total spiritual work of the whole people, including the work of specialists, of artists. Only insofar as this total work is carried out openly do we have culture.

(“Öffentlich arbeiten” 36)

When applied to the writing of history, Hein's conception of Öffentlichkeit underscores the importance of allowing disparate voices and viewpoints to flourish and compete, this being the only way to compensate for the essential fragmentation, distortion, and outright lying that all discourse exhibits. Though no friend of what capitalist ideologues call the “free market,” Hein fiercely champions a free market of ideas, whether in history or art; not surprisingly, this position culminates in Hein's denunciation of the GDR's practice of literary censorship in his essay “Die Zensur.” Yet Hein's artistic practice itself provides the strongest protest against intellectual conformity, nowhere more so than in these meditations on history. The monologic narratives Der fremde Freund, “Einladung zum Lever Bourgeois,” and Der Tangospieler ultimately prove to be depictions of intellectual and spiritual bankruptcy, while the polyphony of Horns Ende enacts a genuinely dialectical discourse, pitting contradictory worldviews against one another without hiding the extremity of the contradictions. Nothing less can save historical discourse from dogmatic Marxism's shockingly undialectical special pleading and self-justification.³

RACINE'S PUBLIC AND PRIVATE HISTORIES

Hein's characterization of the French playwright and courtier Racine, the focus of the short story “Einladung zum Lever Bourgeois,” assembles many of the traits of other characters inhabiting the later, more ambitious narratives. The story, which describes Racine's morning routine on an ordinary day, is set in early 1699, shortly before the 59-year-old writer's death due to a liver ailment, possibly cancer. Sitting in agony atop a chamber pot, unable to void his excrement, Racine thinks about his roles as court historiographer, reigning playwright, husband, lover, and superannuated Versailles functionary, dwelling unhappily on the conflicts between official duty and private desire, on the need to suppress historical truth out of political expediency, and on the personal price he has paid for his enviable status at the court of Louis XIV. In his willing repression of his past experiences, his renunciation of personal desire, and his capacity to rationalize his self-destructive actions, Hein's Racine anticipates Claudia in Der fremde Freund; in his remarks about the nature of history and its writing, he points the way toward Horn, Kruschkatz, and Spodeck in Horns Ende. The story's straight-forward linkage of public expediency to personal devastation marks it as an early effort to capture in narrative form the conflicts Hein had expressed dramatically in Schlötel and especially in Cromwell. Its discovery of history per se as a central theme had momentous importance for Hein's subsequent work.

The contradictory and tendentious record of Racine's life provided Hein with a great deal of freedom in constructing a complex character and inferring motivations for his sometimes enigmatic actions.⁴ Among the most puzzling of these was Racine's sudden renunciation of stage writing in 1677—soon after the production of Phèdre, and at the height of his 13-year dramatic career. After a life of mild libertinage (two of his leading actresses became mistresses), he reconciled himself with his Jansenist upbringing and married a wealthy, respectable wife, and soon after, with Boileau, was appointed royal historiographer, which, according to Saintsbury, in practice amounted to being named the king's “chief flatterer”: “Very little came of this historiography. The joint incumbents of the office made some campaigns with the king, sketched plans of histories, and left a certain number of materials and memoirs; but they executed no substantive work” (Saintsbury 207). In contrast to Racine's biographer Mary Duclaux, for instance, Hein has no interest in explaining away the royal historian's inactivity (Duclaux 144), nor does he follow the tradition, founded by son Louis Racine and copied by subsequent hagiographers (for instance, Duclaux 129), of ascribing the playwright's transformation primarily to religious motives. Instead, Hein's story proposes that the common root of these perplexing facts lay in the failure of Racine's relationship with his second mistress, the actress Marie de Champmeslé, whom Hein elevates on rather thin biographical warrant to the central passion of Racine's life. (Brereton, by contrast, dismisses her as “an episode, though a long and important one, in his life … [which] left him somewhat bitterly inclined towards her” [154].) Hein explains Racine's behavior as play-wright and historian as a complex response to the contradictions between those public and private roles.

Hein's Racine is trapped between the pressure of state power and his altogether stifled desire for a fulfilling private existence, which here amounts to a desire for love and free expression. At the time of the story, he has been a successful courtier for twenty years, yet he remains preoccupied with the personal price paid for this position of prestige and power.⁵ His reminiscences, like Claudia's, circle around their main point before revealing it; thus the first memory to surface while Racine sits on his chamber pot is of the campaign in Holland 20 years earlier, when the newly appointed court historian had accompanied Louis XIV into the field as a chronicler of the war. He remembers his experiences in the village of Neerwinden as the last time he was fully in possession of his health, and the implication is clear that the atrocities he witnessed there—and helped to hush up—had something to do with his physical deterioration. Racine's physician has informed him that “Letzte Gewiβheit über Ihren Zustand, Verehrter, … werden auβer Gott wir alle erst nach der letzten Eröffnung unseres geschätzten Hofhistoriographen haben” [Final certainty as to your condition, Excellency, will be granted to any apart from God only after the esteemed court historian's final disclosure: (Nachtfahrt und früher Morgen, hereafter cited as NUFM) 121]—a macabre pun on the senses of Eröffnung as “disclosure” or “revelation” (such as a court historian might be expected to deliver) and “autopsy” (Leichenöffnung). Hein transforms the illness into a metaphor: Racine's internal disorder is a physical analog to his undisclosed knowledge of a specific historical fact, the brutality at Neerwinden. Hein portrays the younger Racine as an innocent, exposed for the first time to the realities of warfare and, more broadly, to absolutist power. As an old man, he still vividly recalls the savagery of the crime and its handling by the military authorities:

Das Verfahren gegen die drei Offiziere. Eine holländische Bäuerin war vergewaltigt worden, man fand sie dann zusammen mit ihrem Kind in der Stallung tot auf. Die Untersuchung wurde eingestellt, um höhere Interessen nicht zu inkommodieren. Alltag der Armee. Der Bauer, der die drei Offiziere angezeigt hatte, ein Nachbar jener Frau, verübte später—wie der französische Kommandant im Dorf bekanntgeben lieβ—Selbstmord. Schuldig des Diebstahls von Militäreigentum. Bemerkenswert daran, daβ er sich in seiner Scheune mehr als zwanzigmal eine Forke in den Körper gestoβen haben muβte, so daβ sein Leib in zwei Teile zerriβ.

(NUFM 122)

[The proceeding against the three officers. A Dutch peasant woman had been raped; she and her child were found in the stable dead. The investigation was arranged so as to avoid inconveniencing higher interests. Standard operating procedure in the army. According to a statement issued by the French commandant of the village, the farmer who implicated the three officers, a neighbor of the woman, later committed suicide. Guilty of stealing military property. The remarkable thing was that he must have stabbed himself more than twenty times with a pitchfork, so that his body lay torn in two in his barn.]

Confronted with this compound atrocity, Racine did nothing and remained silent, not, he says, because of any lack of courage, but because of “Lebenserfahrung” [life experience: NUFM 123]. He claims to have no feelings of guilt mixed with his prudence, “weder damals noch heute” [neither then nor now: 123], yet his account of Neerwinden, filled with windy rationalizations, is a document in guilt. Racine casts himself as “ein kleiner Geschichtsschreiber, gegen die allmächtige, allgegenwärtige Armee” [a puny historian, against the omnipotent, omnipresent army: 123], before admitting that as one close to the king, he might have exerted influence. Then he tries vainly to play the cynic:

Aber wozu. Was dann. Sollte er in die Scheune gehen, um dann Mord, Mord zu schreien? Die reinen Helden in der Literatur. Auf der Bühne ist es angebracht. Helden. Tat und Tod. Er ist kein Schauspieler.

(NUFM 123)

[But for what. What then. Should he have gone into the barn and screamed Murder, Murder? Perfect literary heroism. Suited for the stage. Heroes. Deeds and death. He is not an actor.]

Such words from the former playwright have a desperately false ring (lying to himself here, he is surely an actor in spite of himself), and they point to the nature of what he has truly done in renouncing the stage: as later becomes clear, he has set aside any hope of a life undistorted by fealty to the state. That his post as historian supposedly obliges him to report the truth before bending to the interests of the state appears to him nothing but a cruel joke, since to tell the truth in this case would constitute “Staatsverleumdung” [defamation of the state: 123]—one of several instances in this story of crimes and state institutions as typical of the GDR as of France under Louis XIV.

The climax of Racine's guilty remembrance is a succinct statement of political pragmatism in the face of absolute power—a cynical position that Racine himself cannot espouse with any conviction. The resulting muddle of self-exculpation and Realpolitik clearly anticipates the confused half-truths Claudia will use in Der fremde Freund to numb herself to her misery:

Nur Idioten und Kinder verwundern sich über die Welt. Die Bestialität der Polizei, der Armee ist abscheulich, ekelhaft, aber untauglich für Meditation. Allenfalls für ein Gespräch mit gleichermaβen Enttäuschten: eine Andeutung, eine ironische Bermerkung, ein verzweifeltes Lachen, Charakter en passant, man weiβ. Vielleicht ist die Fähigkeit, ein Verbrechen verschweigen zu können, die Bedingung der menschlichen Rasse, in Gesellschaft zu leben. Das “höhere Interesse” eines Staates anzuerkennen, ist bestialisch, möglicherweise aber die Voraussetzung seiner weiteren Existenz. Der des Staates, des Individuums ohnehin. Und der verdiente Staatsbürger ist zu ehren um seiner schweigenden Mitwisserschaft willen. Da ist es süβ, für das Vaterland zu sterben, um ihm nicht anderweitig dienen zu müssen.

Die Scheunentor zu öffnen, um nie wieder schlafen zu können, um sich vor sich selbst zu ekeln, auszuspeien? Nein, es widerspricht der Vernunft, Kenntnisse zu erlangen, zu erzwingen, die uns unerträglich sind.

(NUFM 123–4)

[Only idiots and children are astonished by the world. The brutality of the police, of the army is abominable, sickening, but unsuited for meditation. Perhaps at most discussion with people equally disillusioned: an insinuation, an ironic remark, a despairing laugh, moral character en passant—one knows. The ability to say nothing about a crime may be a condition for the survival of the human race, for life in society. To acknowledge the “higher interest” of the state is brutal, yet perhaps the precondition for continued existence. Of the state, certainly of the individual. And the loyal citizen is to be honored for his connivance. How sweet it is to die for the Fatherland, and thus escape serving it further.

To open the barn door, and then never again to sleep, to be sickened by oneself, to vomit? No, it goes against reason to obtain, to extort knowledge that would be unbearable.]

This passage is a mother lode of ideas and themes that dominate Hein's later work. There is the thinly-veiled criticism of the GDR's organs of repression, the police and army (the security police are mentioned elsewhere in this story and also in the first story of the collection, “Die russischen Briefe des Jägers Johann Seifert”); the clear allusion to that infamous silence of average German citizens who claimed afterward to know nothing of atrocities committed under their noses by the Nazi regime (the best example will be the story of the Gohl family in Horns Ende); the ironic espousal of a theory of adaptive repression in the face of political and personal unpleasantness (Claudia being the prime, but not sole, example—Kruschkatz, too, finds himself unable to sleep once he forgets to forget); the depiction of a deadly nihilism that relegates political idealism to “idiots and children” (Marlene Gohl and Thomas of Horns Ende inevitably come to mind, and also the hapless idealists of Passage, while the best portrait of a nihilist is Dallow in Der Tangospieler, who perfects the attitude that had been a mere pose for the protagonists of Die wahre Geschichte des Ah Q). In general, Racine is an early version of the recurring character who, under pressure from a crushing social reality, unwittingly loses control of his or her private life; the more vehemently these characters claim to evade or subvert their totalitarian milieus, the more inevitable their transformation into simulacra of the power structures that dominate them.⁶ Hein's frequent use of history as a theme provides one way of manifesting the general phenomenon of individuals' social determination; as Hein has said, history (that abstraction of the social universe) is always personal: “One wishes to know one's fathers in order to know oneself” (“Anmerkungen zu Cromwell” 173).

Although Racine derides those who would lose sleep and make themselves ill by opening the “barn door” to the horrors around them, he is himself a victim of such a self-induced illness. The horrors from which he has averted his eyes are no less real to him for all his claims to the contrary. Hein leaves little doubt that Racine's terminal illness is an inward consequence of his outward actions, the effect, as it were, of a poison he has secretly consumed:

Racine is presented as the type of the political conformist who frantically shuts his eyes to the cruelty and morbidity of the Sun King's absolutist regime. Yet the repressed awareness of the real situation finds an outlet in horrible physical torments. Illness is a synonym here for the rape of one's own spirit. Hein wishes to say that uncompromising conformity of intellectuals to the prevailing power means absolute destruction of the personality.

(Krumrey 143)

Racine, perched on his chamber pot, recalls the Neerwinden episode while pondering how long it was since he was last healthy. The recollection ends with another evocation of physical illness caused by repressed feelings:

Die Übelkeit kam erst, als sein Blick auf eine Mistforke fiel, die an die Stallung seiner Gastgeber gelehnt war. Drei schmutzbedeckte eiserne Zinken, fuβlang, vierkantig, spitz auslaufend. Wieviel ist zwanzig mal drei. Er erbrach grünlichen Magensaft.

(NUFM 124)

[The nausea first came over him when his gaze fell on the dungfork leaning against his host's stable wall. Three foot-long iron prongs, filth-incrusted, square-angled, tapering to points. How much is twenty times three. He vomited green bile.]

Now, twenty years after the thought of the farmer's death made him vomit, Racine describes himself as “ein Kloβ von Erinnerungen und Schmerzen” [A clump of memories and pain: NUFM 124]. He likens his stomach to a battlefield, like the Dutch ones he remembers: “Der Schauplatz der Schlacht. Schlachtplatz. Letztes Heldentum im Rückzug auf den Wanst. Verinnerlichter Lebenskampf” [The scene of battle. Battlefield. Retreat to the belly the supreme sacrifice. Internalized struggle for life: 126], a battlefield, moreover, without possibility of escape: “Flucht ist hier nicht einmal eine Denkmöglichkeit. Die Feindlichen sind miteinander verwachsen” [Escape is out of the question. The enemies have become one another: 128]. The internal and external, public and private have been entirely conflated. Racine has become the product of his society and of his accommodations with it, from which he is now dying.⁷

However, the root of Racine's illness consists of more than complicity in the cover-up of a specific war crime; there is also the whole complex of values and possibilities that was rejected when he decided to remain silent, to give up his artistic career, and to renounce a mistress. In his imagery and language, Hein conflates these values as aspects of an ambiguous hope whose loss is fatal. As Hein notes elsewhere, “There are hopes … to which there is no human alternative” (“Maelzel's Chess Player” 193). As the story draws to a close, the outline of this central tragedy emerges:

Trotz der Krankheit fühlt er sich kräftig. So kräftig und unbeugsam wie in jenem Jahr, als er Catherine heiratete, die er nicht liebte, und Marie verlieβ, deren Atem er noch heute zu verspüren meint. Er verlieβ sie an dem Tag, an dem er beschlossen hatte, eine Arbeit zu beenden, weil er nicht weiter imstande war, länger zu warten. Zu hoffen. Er schloβ sie ab wie einen Brief, an dem man lange geschrieben und so viele neue Blätter hinzugefügt und so oft die einzelnen Worte und Buchstaben verbessert, ausgewechselt und nachgezogen hatte, bis man unversehens, aber nicht unerwartet erfuhr, daβ es keinen Adressaten mehr gibt, keinen. Nicht für seinen Brief. Damals meinte er, mit Masken zu sprechen, mit freundlichen Masken, hinter deren Augenhöhlen der Wind des Vergessens längst seine gründliche Säuberung vollzogen hatte. Die Tränen, die er über die Masken laufen sah und die überdeutlich Spuren in der Schminke hinterlieβen, gaben ihm keine Antwort. Sie waren die Hinterlassenschaft eines versickerten Lebens, nur für wenige Momente noch sichtbar.

Er flieht blindlings. Was hat er schon einzutauschen! Am gleichen Tag, an dem er die für ihn lange unerklärliche Herkunft der Tränen begriff und er seine Zwiesprache mit den ausgestorbenen Augenhöhlen abbrach, verabschiedete er sich von Marie de Champmeslé und heiratet wenige Monate später Catherine, die er kaum kennt und nie geliebt hat.

(NUFM 128–9)

[Despite his illness he feels strong. As strong and unbending as in the year when he married Catherine, whom he did not love, and left Marie, whose breath it seemed he could sense even today. He left her on the day he decided to finish an undertaking, because he was no longer capable of waiting. Of hoping. He closed it like a letter which one had long been writing, adding so many new pages and so often improving, rearranging, and revising words and spellings, before noticing unexpectedly, but without surprise, that there was no longer anyone to send it to, nobody. Not for his letter. He thought at the time that he was speaking to masks, friendly masks, behind the eyeholes of which a wind of forgetting had long since completed a thorough cleansing. The tears (which he saw run down the masks and leave exaggerated trails in the makeup) gave him no answer. They were the remnant of a life which had trickled away, still visible for a few moments.

He flees blindly. What does he have to lose! On the same day that he understood the cause of the tears, which had so long perplexed him, and broke off his dialogue with the extinguished eyeholes, he took his leave of Marie de Champmeslé, and marries Catherine a few months later, whom he hardly knows and has never loved.]

The characterization of his relationship with Marie de Champmeslé as a letter, along with the statement that his rupture with her coincided with a decision “to finish an undertaking,” allude to a relationship which, according to some of Racine's biographers, was terminated by de Champmeslé, not by Racine (Duclaux 124; Brereton takes an opposing view [154]). Hein disregards this item of indeed dubious information and integrates the break-up with the turning point in Racine's career. Hein's Racine despairs, it would seem, of holding de Champmeslé's love, of ever finding a real woman beneath the actress's personas, the “friendly masks” to which he has been addressing himself. When he decides that the woman he had loved is no longer behind the mask, that he has been erased from her affections “thoroughly” by the “wind of forgetting,” he gives up not only hope of de Champmeslé's love, but hope of any kind. In place of hope, he accepts security, respectability, and incidentally the death of his artistic and (as has become evident) moral imagination. Racine's disillusionment at Neerwinden was merely an epilogue to the deliberate self-disillusioning he had already imposed on himself out of impatience, timidity, and despair:

Marie hat er verlassen, um sich loszureiβen von dem, was er, er wuβte es damals bereits, bald schmerzlich vermissen würde. So war er rücksichtslos gegen sich und andere geworden, nur, um nicht zu zögern. Um nicht an seiner für ihn ungeheuren und entsetzlichen Entscheidung zu zweifeln.

(NUFM 129)

[He left Marie in order to tear himself away from what he already knew he would soon painfully miss. He had been ruthless with himself and with others only to keep from hesitating. To keep from wavering in a decision that was monstrous and catastrophic for him.]

Racine's fatal decision will be the same one arrived at by Claudia, who is willing to sacrifice everything hopeful and hence unpredictable in her life to an unsuccessful attempt to avoid pain, and by Dr. Spodeck, who exaggerates his youthful experience of paternal despotism into a sterile destiny of lovelessness; its precise opposite would be worked out in the leap of faith taken by Hirschburg and the other refugees at the conclusion of Passage. Racine is an early example of an individual who surrenders unconditionally to state power; as a lapsed playwright and failed historiographer, he points toward Hein's subsequent meditations on the social functions of history and art.⁸

THEORIES OF HISTORY IN HORNS ENDE

Hein's most ambitious prose work, the novel Horns Ende, centers on two deaths in a small Fast German resort town, Bad Guldenberg. One, the murder of Gudrun Gohl, takes place in 1943, when she substitutes herself for her mentally retarded daughter Marlene, whom Nazi officials have assigned to a “special home” ([Horns Ende, hereafter cited as HE] 156) as part of their eugenics program to eliminate inferior individuals. News of her murder (officially, she died of pneumonia) soon follows. The other death is the suicide of Herr Horn in the summer of 1957. Horn, a historian and a Communist, had been unjustly purged from the Party years before; his refusal to forget the wrong done to him exposes him to further political attacks. Accused finally of being a Western spy, he hangs himself. No connection between these two deaths is ever explicitly drawn; instead, the narrators provide mostly factual accounts of the town's history since before the Nazi period, and of their own experiences up to 1957 (and beyond, in the case of Kruschkatz, the Bürgermeister of Bad Guldenberg at the time of Horn's death, who provides a postscript to the major events from his vantage point in a retirement home in the early 1980s). Structured as a cycle of subjective reports by various narrators, the novel is punctuated by surreal passages in which the voice or ghost of Horn interrogates Thomas, the youngest narrator (now a man in middle-age), enjoining him to overcome his reluctance to remember the circumstances of Horn's death. Thus Thomas, and by extension all of the narrators, are engaged in a struggle with their own memories, fervently wishing to forget the past but prevented from doing so by a moral imperative, the repetitions of Horn's (and Hein's) exhortation “Erinnere Dich” [Remember!: HE 5], a command aimed at people like Claudia in Der fremde Freund who have learned to keep their mouths shut and their memories short. Under this compulsion, the narrators detach themselves from the general amnesia of Bad Guldenberg, whose tranquillity comes to look less benign, more a “repression of the collective historical memory” (Schachtsiek-Freitag 540).

In the 1986 interview with Krzysztof Jachimczak (the February 1988 publication of which in Sinn und Form was one of the few and meager examples of East German Öffentlichkeit enjoyed by Hein's novel), Hein identifies the major themes of Horns Ende as history, conceptions of history, and the writing of history (“Wir werden es lernen müssen” 62). As an East German writer confronting these themes, Hein feels he must compensate for the years of official distortion about recent German history. The notion of a “Year Zero” from the ashes of which a new, uncontaminated East Germany arose has to be debunked:

There was caesura and continuity. The accusation that I put too little emphasis on the caesura and see nothing but continuities can only stem from the fact that until now the caesura has been overemphasized, this Year Zero. Germany's treatment of history entered a very strange phase after 1945. In West Germany, the Nazi Period began to be repressed immediately, even as early as the Nuremberg war crime trials; the decisive factor here was the onset of the Cold War between the two Blocs. In the GDR, it was opposition: the antifascist tradition was celebrated, which was understandable and morally quite correct; but the GDR couldn't just proclaim opposition, either. Because the GDR wasn't born out of the antifascist resistance alone—it was born out of the collapse of the Third Reich, out of the Red Army's victory over Hitler, out of a war that the Germans lost. It is simply a falsification and distortion of history to lay claim to the oppositional stance, as though Hitler had been a usurper and not a legitimate head of state elected by the German people, or as though the whole populace, or the part of it now living in the GDR, had all been active in the resistance.

(“Wir werden es lernen müssen” 60–61)

Hein's remedy to the unbalanced and all-too-convenient view of history promulgated by the Party is to restore fictively the corrective influence of dialogue—between, for example, Thomas and dead Herr Horn, or of the author or narrator with himself, or between the different historical periods represented in the novel (“Wir werden es lernen müssen” 59).

Hein's starting point in the novel is therefore this simple moral imperative, that individuals face up to the reality of their past deeds rather than covering them up and, so to speak, re-writing history:

I can't show the GDR springing out of a Year Zero simply because the foregoing history is unpleasant. It's unpleasant to me, even me, but I have to acknowledge it, I have to endure it. And the GDR will have to endure it, too. …

(“Wir werden es lernen müssen” 62)

In 1957 or 1980, in Bad Guldenberg or any other German town, East or West, this primarily means acknowledging complicity in the crimes of the Hitler era and admitting that no radical discontinuity insulates the totalitarian past from the putatively democratic, anti-fascist present. What remains to be carried out in the novel is the detailed exploration of how to remember, which is the problem also of how to represent history. The historian-narrators of Horns Ende—what Phillip McKnight calls the “triptych” of “philosophers of history” (“Ein Mosaik” 415, 418), Dr. Spodeck the physician, Bürgermeister Kruschkatz, and Herr Horn, to which I would add a fourth, the apothecary's son Thomas—tell their stories and the story of the town for different reasons and with different emphases. While weaving these fragmentary narratives together so as to maintain suspense and uncertainty, Hein also allows them to comment on one another, to come into conflict, and to illustrate opposing ways of coping with past and present life in Bad Guldenberg. In this way, the novel's diverse viewpoints and voices substitute for an Öffentlichkeit that never otherwise existed in the GDR, sustained by Hein's unswerving protest against socialist piety and complacency. Believing that reality is full of contradictions, not just tidy scientific laws, Hein allows the contradictions within his novel free play. Accordingly, none of the narrators speaks unequivocally as the author's mouthpiece: “Beliefs [Sätze] of my own occur in each of the characters” (“Wir werden es lernen müssen” 62). Hein's personal views are distributed across a variety of characters whom the reader may judge very differently. This deliberate dispersal of authority within the novel further illustrates Hein's anti-authoritarian model of historical truth: no one person, dogma, party, nation, or bloc has a monopoly on truth. In fact, all “truths” contain distortions, falsehoods, and it is only the differential relations among these competing untruths that allow us to approach the real.⁹

SPODECK

Unequaled in Hein's writing for his self-corroding cynicism, Dr. Spodeck gets the first and last word in the novel, setting the tone even if not representing a privileged moral position or historiographic methodology. Yet he is also the only practicing historian in the novel, apart from Horn himself. His approach to writing history is akin to his practice of maintaining a private collection of patient case histories dealing with psychological disorders (a youthful interest thwarted by his tyrannical father and by Spodeck's own weakness of will). His history of Bad Guldenberg is a compilation of the human folly he has witnessed there:

Es ist keine Historie der Stadt, die ich schreibe, ich führe keine pathetische Heimatchronik, die den Eitelkeiten obskurer Stadtgröβen schmeicheln will. Was ich auf diesen Blättern notiere, sind lediglich die niederträchtigen Affären und bösartigen Handlungen, durch die sich meine ehrenwerten Mitbürger auszeichneten. Es sind die widerlichen Geschäfte der Einwohner meiner Stadt, die es nie versäumten, ihre eigennützige Boshaftigkeit mit salbungsvollen Reden und achtbaren Motiven zu maskieren. Es ist eine Geschichte der menschlichen Gemeinheit. Ich kann nicht darin lesen, ohne von heftigem Lachen geschüttelt zu werden, von einem Lachen der Menschenverachtung und des Mitleids über einen solchen Aufwand von Energie um ein paar schäbiger Vorteile willen.

(113–14)

[It is not a history of the town that I am writing, no pompous local chronicle designed to flatter the vanity of obscure local eminences. Rather, I am setting down on these pages merely the wretched affairs and vicious deeds in which my worthy fellow citizens distinguished themselves. These are the repellent transactions of the residents of my town, who never fail to mask their self-serving viciousness with unctuous speeches and noble motives. It is a history of human baseness. I cannot read from it without being shaken by fierce laughter, laughter born of contempt for the human race and sympathy at its squandering of such energy in the pursuit of a few shabby advantages.]

The “pompous local chronicle” that Spodeck disdains to write is exactly the kind of sanitized history that Hein sees in the official East German accounts of the Nazi period and Aufbau (the period of the “building of socialism” in the late forties and fifties). Though Spodeck, like Hein, wishes to redress an imbalance in the official history, their reasons for doing so are quite different. The “history of baseness” is really a justification for Spodeck's failed life, a complicated effort (similar to Claudia's in Der fremde Freund) to prove that however degraded he may be, he really had no choice in the matter. At the same time that Spodeck admits to his own failures, he attempts to justify them by pointing out the background against which they occurred. This paradoxical stance (he thinks himself both better and worse than his fellow Guldenbergers) yields the complexity of viewpoint that makes Spodeck such an interesting character, one whose judgments may be narrow or incomplete, but never altogether wrong. Yet his account of GDR history, in its cynical as in its passionate moments, never approaches the merciless detachment Hein so admires. For this very reason he is a useful device for establishing a bleak, pessimistic mood which the novel will ultimately try to temper.

The most striking aspect of Spodeck's account is its alternation of self-loathing with righteous indignation. His cynicism might be expected to nourish resignation, but his actual response to the things he witnesses is outrage. Early in the book, Spodeck explains his decision to stay in his hated Bad Guldenberg and to carry out his hated father's wishes: he refuses to forget the wrongs and humiliations he has witnessed and suffered. His self-accusation and resentment merge imperceptibly with a strain of prophetic indignation, complete with biblical allusions:

Den Auftrag, den mir mein Vater erteilt hat, werde ich ausführen. Ich werde ihn zu Ende bringen, um meiner selbst willen. Um der Demütigungen willen, die mir mein Vater bereitet hat, er soll nicht in Frieden ruhen, und um der Kränkungen willen, die ich von dieser Stadt erfuhr, der Freitische und Mildtätigkeiten, die ich genötigt war, dankend anzunehmen. Damals. Und wenn ich auch dieses verzeihen und vergeben könnte, ich kann es nicht vergessen. Ich kann die Feigheit nicht vergessen, mit der diese Stadt fortwährend neues Unrecht geschehen läβt. Der Tod eines Mannes wie Horn sollte ausreichen, um diese Stadt wie ein biblisches Gomorrha auszutilgen.¹⁰

(7)

[I will carry out the task assigned to me by my father. I will see it through to the end, for my own sake. For the sake of the humiliations prepared for me by my father, whom I will not allow to rest in peace, and for the insults that I endured at the hands of this town, the favors and acts of charity I had to gratefully accept. Back then. And while I might be able to forgive all of this, I can never forget it. I cannot forget the cravenness with which this town incessantly lets new injustices happen. The death of a man like Horn should be sufficient cause to annihilate this town like Gomorrah in the Bible.]

Similarly, Spodeck recounts his impressions of Guldenberg's complicity and opportunism as the Nazis rose and fell:

Ich habe in dieser Stadt gelebt, als die Braunhemden in ihr Hof hielten und umjubelt wurden. Ich habe gesehen, wie sich diese Stadt dem alltäglichen Verbrechen öffnete, bereit und willig, und der Heiβhunger auf Verrat und Bestialität offenbarte den lange brach gelegenen Blutdurst. Die Denunzianten und Mörder kamen nicht von irgendwo, um dieser Stadt das Gesetz ihres Todes und der Verachtung aufzuzwingen, sie hatten mit uns gelebt, waren Bürger dieses verträumten, sanften Provinzfleckens gewesen, sie sind aus unseren Wohnungen hervorgekrochen, unter unserer Haut. … Die herzzerreiβende Komik dieser Tage, die für mich vorauszuahnen war, wollte ich mir nicht entgehen lassen, die vielfältigen Wandlungen, die erwarteten wie die unvorhersehbaren. Es war beklemmend und schaurig, und es war schön. Und die Seiten meiner Geschichte der Gemeinheit füllten sich wie von selbst. Ich hatte in diesen Tagen das deutliche Empfinden, mit feurigen Lettern zu schreiben, wie ein alttestamentarischer Prophet seine Verwünschungen.

(115–16)

[I was living in this town when the Brown Shirts held court and were enthusiastically cheered. I saw how ready and willing this town was to open itself to daily criminality, and how the craving for betrayal and brutality reawakened a long dormant thirst for blood. The denouncers and murderers didn't come from somewhere else, aiming to impose their law of death and contempt on this town; they had lived among us, they were the citizens of this sleepy, peaceful rural village, they had crept out of our own houses, out from under our own skins. … I had no desire to miss the heartrending comedy of those days, of which I already had an inkling—the multifaceted transformations, the expected as well as the unforeseeable. It was uncanny and horrifying, and it was beautiful. And the pages of my history of baseness filled up as though by themselves. I had in those days the distinct sensation of writing with fiery letters, like an Old Testament prophet setting down his curses.]

Yet Spodeck comes to identify himself with Guldenberg's grandest exemplar of commonplace evil: Dr. Konrad Böger, the “Wohltäter von Guldenberg” [benefactor of Guldenberg: HE 80] and developer of its medicinal spas, and in addition the abuser of various women and father of various illegitimate sons, among them Spodeck. After standing by while his mother is humiliated, renouncing his passion for psychology, and accepting his father's “gift” of the practice in Bad Guldenberg for the mandatory twenty-five years, all the while recording the moral degradation of Bad Guldenberg's other inhabitants, he realizes at last that he is in fact his father's son:

Im Grunde bin ich wohl der gleiche eigensüchtige, herablassende Heuchler wie er.

Ich hatte mich an alle Kränkungen gewöhnt, an mein Elend und mein Gejammer wie auch an die mich demütigenden Geschenke, und ich war nicht fähig, ohne sie auszukommen. Und was immer ich mir einredete, ich gehorchte meinem Vater nicht meiner Mutter zuliebe, sondern weil ich sein Sohn war, weil ich Fleisch von seinem Fleisch war.

(80)

[At bottom I am in fact as much a self-seeking, arrogant hypocrite as he.

I became inured to all insults, to my misery and my sniveling, as well as to the humiliating gifts, and I was incapable of getting by without them. And whatever I may have insisted to myself, I obeyed my father not for my mother's sake, but because I was his son, because I was flesh of his flesh.]

Spodeck's belated identification with the corruption of his city (brought to perfection, in his view, by his affair with his ward Christine and his loveless marriage) may or may not be justified, but it certainly does not reduce the bite of his observations about the city's hypocrisy. It is Spodeck, after all, who observes and names the city's bigotry when confronted with the Gypsies (8–9), a matter of central importance for the novel since it connects the genocidal fascist past with the socialist present—then as now, the respectable citizens of Bad Guldenberg are eager to be rid of a nuisance. Such observations as this one remain valid, if one-sided, though in the context of the novel (as in all historiography) even a one-sided view is valuable, so long as it can be answered and disputed. Furthermore, Spodeck's indignant tone is not unfamiliar to readers of Hein's essays, in which Hein often allows himself a polemical and passionate stance that he never allows into his fictional works without elaborate distancing or irony.

There is certainly irony to be had in Spodeck's characterization, as well. Hein uses him startlingly as the spokesman for his personal credo of authorial detachment and social responsibility:

Bis zum Tage meines Todes aber will ich die Geschichte der Gemeinheit mit dem klaren, unbestechlichen Blick der alten Chronisten ohne Haβ und Eifer weiterführen, damit, was ich nicht abwehren konnte, nicht durch mein Schweigen bestärkt wird und ich mitschuldig werde an unser aller Niedertracht.

(117)

[Until the day of my death I will nonetheless persevere in my history of baseness with the clear, incorruptible gaze of the old chroniclers, without passion or prejudice, refusing to strengthen through my silence what I cannot avert, lest I become an accomplice in our general vileness.]

It is patently absurd for Spodeck to say any such thing; he is the novel's most passionate and most prejudiced character. Hein himself acknowledges that he has put his ideas in the mouth of a character who exemplifies their opposite:

These are certainly my ideas [Sätze] that Dr. Spodeck is describing. But what he actually does is another matter entirely. Everything he says about the past has one function: to justify his wasted life, which even he knows to be a failure. For this he needs a chronicle that would be the opposite of what I have in mind. He is not in fact reporting sine ira et studio, but full of passion and full of prejudice [voll Haβ und voll Eifer]. … Spodeck only wants a history of human baseness, a baseness which certainly has existed, but to see nothing else is also a distortion of history [Geschichtsklitterung].

(“Wir werden es lernen müssen” 62–63)

Yet while Spodeck represents a perversion of what a true historian ought to be, he also exemplifies the norm of what real historians actually are—partisan, prejudiced, driven by obsessions that have nothing to do with their discipline. In the context of Hein's novel, Spodeck's cynicism serves the useful purpose of puncturing the dominant dogmas of the GDR, but he arrives at no definitive insights, whatever his pretensions. As evidenced by his paralyzed love affair and his plans to distribute copies of his history to the Bürgermeister, the museum director, and the priest, all of whom can reasonably be expected to burn theirs, his personality is virtually self-negating, a condition he shares with Claudia in Der fremde Freund.

KRUSCHKATZ

The importance that Hein places on ideological or conceptual balance can be clearly seen in his handling of Kruschkatz, the Bürgermeister of Bad Guldenberg and, at first glance, a stereotypical Communist Party apparatchik. Early in the novel we see him spouting socialist platitudes and using his political weight to intimidate Spodeck (HE 35–36); using the language of Stalinist opprobrium, he dismisses Horn as an individualist (59) and humanist (86); he upholds the claims of historical necessity even when innocents must be sacrificed to it (63); and he displays throughout the novel the astute political skills of the successful Party functionary. Yet Hein has other plans for him:

Kruschkatz was for me, during the writing, the most fascinating of the characters. He is a functionary, and before he even opens his mouth, he is already condemned by almost all of the other characters: the reader has a picture of a repulsive, corpulent, sweating, unpleasant, opportunistic functionary. And then I devote all my power and love to this figure, working against the prejudice, to make a human being out of him.

(“Wir werden es lernen müssen” 63)

So Kruschkatz is given a beautiful and beloved wife whom he tragically loses, and a foil in the hateful figure of Bachofen, his deputy; he shows compassion for an old comrade ruined by intrigues; he attempts in good faith to appease Horn, though in vain; and he turns out to be fated to spend the remainder of his active life in a town he detests. Most significantly, he displays the most sensitive, intelligent, and reasonable mind of any of the other narrators. Though not without his obsessions, he apparently provides a trustworthy account of the events in Bad Guldenberg, emerging eventually as “the one man in this novel who acts with any self-awareness” (McKnight, “Ein Mosaik” 422). As a historian both in training and, reluctantly, in fact, his methodological convictions bear close scrutiny. Unsurprisingly, they turn out to be utterly paradoxical. Just as Spodeck, the ultimate partisan, can voice Hein's opinions while demonstrating wholly opposite behavior, so Kruschkatz, the Party hack, exhibits an ambivalent relation to the Party dogma he occasionally mouths. His interest as a character ultimately rests on the contradiction between dogma and disillusionment that Horn's death brings into sharp focus.¹¹

Kruschkatz's ideas about history emerge in a seemingly haphazard way; as with Dallow in Der Tangospieler, the fact that he is a trained historian emerges only after the narrative is well under way. Kruschkatz must have the fact pried out of him by Spodeck:

“Sie sind, wie ich hörte, auch Historiker?”

“Ich wars, Doktor. Ich habe nicht den Kopf für die trockenen Wissenschaften. Ich bin ein praktischer Mensch.”

(HE 168)

[“I understand that you, too, are a historian.”

“I used to be, Doctor. I lack the temperament for dry scholarship. I am a practical man.”]

History as an abstract, scholarly, theoretical concern versus practical politics: the distinction is false from the outset, and Kruschkatz's reliance on it stems from his unswerving commitment to a program of action that no longer commands his unquestioning faith. (This contradiction results in part from the novel's dual chronology, as the bitter, haunted 73-year-old narrator, confined to a retirement home circa 1980, remembers his actions in the 1950s and sees them to have been futile.) Kruschkatz begins narrating under an undisclosed compulsion that eventually appears to be a constitutional inability to forget—the opposite case to Claudia's refined amnesia in Der fremde Freund, where repression of memories is hailed as a prerequisite for survival—and indeed Kruschkatz wishes for death to come and relieve him of this burden (223–4). His narrative opens rather strangely for a Marxist-materialist-atheist:

Es ist unsinnig und unwürdig, nach so vielen Jahren ausgerechnet über diesen Mann Horn zu sprechen. Es ist gotteslästerlich. Ich kann es nicht besser bezeichnen als mit diesem altväterlichen Wort.

(HE 20)

[It is absurd and disgraceful to speak after so many years of this man Horn, of all people. It is blasphemous. I cannot find a better description for it than this archaic word.]

Kruschkatz's frequent use of religious expressions and imagery hints at his loss of a different kind of faith—in history as the manifestation of rational laws, and by extension in the Party's mastery of historical change. Kruschkatz says he is confident every detail of Horn's life and death could be reconstructed, “Möglicherweise so vollständig, daβ die dazugehörenden nichtssagenden Einzelheiten wie abgelegte Büroordner, verstaubt und vergilbt, unsere Träume aufblähen und unser Gedächtnis quälen” [Probably with such precision that the associated insignificant details (like discarded office files, dusty and yellowed) would bloat our dreams and torment our memory: 20], but he fears that such an exercise would open an abyss of historical meaninglessness:

Ich bezweifle also nicht den äuβeren Erfolg, das nahezu vollständige Verzeichnis der Fakten. Vielmehr stelle ich das ganze Unternehmen in Frage. Die Entdeckung, daβ es mehrere, zum Teil einander widersprechende Wahrheiten gibt, als endliches Ergebnis solcher Mühe wäre ein niederschmetternder Witz. Noch mehr aber beunruhigt mich der Gedanke, daβ die so gefundene Wahrheit beziehungsweise die verschiedenen, schlüssig, vollständig und widerspruchsfrei hergestellten Bilder keinen Adressaten haben. Das ist vorbei.

(HE 20)

[I also have no doubt of outward success, the nearly complete cataloging of facts. Rather, it is the whole project that I am calling into question. The discovery that several mutually contradictory truths would be the final result of such exertions would be a devastating joke. Even more unsettling is the thought that the truth thus uncovered, or rather the variously, conclusively, comprehensively, and self-consistently manufactured pictures, would find no audience. That time is past.]

If alternative versions of historical reality are equally valid, Kruschkatz reasons, then they are equally meaningless and equally incommunicable. Something about Horn's story has evidently deprived Kruschkatz of any confidence in his grasp of history, with the result that he abandons the notion altogether:

Ich bin heute dreiundsiebzig Jahre alt, und wenn ich die Erfahrungen meines Lebens für eine daran uninteressierte Nachwelt in einem Satz formulieren müβte, würde ich sagen: Es gibt keine Geschichte. Geschichte ist hilfreiche Metaphysik, um mit der eigenen Sterblichkeit auszukommen, der schöne Schleier um den leeren Schädel des Todes. Es gibt keine Geschichte, denn soviel wir auch an Bausteinchen um eine vergangene Zeit ansammeln, wir ordnen und beleben diese kleinen Tonscherben und schwärzlichen Fotos allein mit unserem Atem, verfälschen sie durch die Unvernunft unserer dünnen Köpfe und miβverstehen daher gründlich. Der Mensch schuf sich die Götter, um mit der Unerträglichkeit des Todes leben zu können, und er schuf sich die Fiktion der Geschichte, um dem Verlust der Zeit einen Sinn zu geben, der ihm das Sinnlose verstehbar und erträglich macht. Hinter uns die Geschichte und vor uns Gott, das ist das Korsett, das uns den aufrechten Gang erlaubt. Und ich glaube, das Röcheln der Sterbenden ist die aufdämmernde Erkenntnis der Wirklichkeit. Die Toten brauchen kein Korsett.

Ich will mich mit diesen Bemerkungen meinen Erinnerungen nicht entziehen. Ich schicke sie voraus, weil ich meinen Erinnerungen miβtraue, weil ich allen Erinnerungen miβtraue.

(HE 20–21)

[Today I turn 73, and if I had to formulate my life experience into one sentence for the benefit of a completely uninterested world, I would say: History does not exist. History is a kind of useful metaphysics good for helping one to cope with mortality, a beautiful veil wrapped around the empty skull of death. History does not exist, because whenever we collect the minute building blocks of a past age, we arrange and animate these little fragments and dim photographs solely with our own breath, falsifying them through our dim-witted irrationality, and thereby totally failing to understand them. Man created the gods in order to live with the unbearable fact of death, and he created the fiction of history to give vanished time a meaning, making it possible to bear and comprehend meaninglessness. Behind us history and before us God: that is the corset that enables us to walk erect. And I believe that the rattle of the dying is the dawning awareness of reality. The dead need no corsets.

I am not trying to evade my memories by making these remarks; I offer them as a preface because, distrusting all memories, I distrust my own.]

Kruschkatz turns out to be a disappointed metaphysician: without the comfort of Marxist historical teleology, history ceases to have any meaning for him, reverting to a random assemblage of facts organized by externally imposed, falsifying illusions. His predicament is that of the pious atheist, who must consciously reject what he subconsciously cannot live without. Thus it is important to note that disappointment over this falsification of dogmatic, teleological Marxism is only one of many possible reactions: it is specific to Kruschkatz, and certainly cannot to be generalized as a view shared by Hein, who disagrees with Kruschkatz's distaste for the present-day influence on what passes for history. (History is always a matter of present concerns, not past ones.) Despite his self-proclaimed practicality, Kruschkatz remains a metaphysician and an ideologue; Hein is the practical one, interested in bringing about changes in the here and now through the exercise of social autobiography. History as Hegel envisioned it may be an illusion, but history may still be understood as an active force in contemporary human affairs. Thus Kruschkatz is an unhappy nihilist, not a relativist. His detestation of a history that consists largely of distortions and fantasies by present-day, living people actually mirrors Horn's view, as expressed to Spodeck near the end of the novel; the two historians simply apply different value judgments to the same, commonly acknowledged situation. Horn accepts the inevitable fictionality of history and remains a historian, while Kruschkatz confuses fiction with reality and becomes a functionary (McKnight, “Ein Mosaik” 420–421).¹²

Kruschkatz's subsequent account of his second meeting with Horn betrays a more confused, and (as yet) less disillusioned attitude toward history, since most of the disillusionment emerges from thirty years of hindsight. In light of Hein's interview remarks, the earlier viewpoint is, like the later one, most likely neither wholly right nor wholly wrong. Kruschkatz's feelings toward Horn are complex and contradictory, as were Spodeck's. Like Spodeck, the Bürgermeister regards Horn as a coward, and for a similar reason: Horn's inability or unwillingness to adjust to reality in order to survive. Kruschkatz and Spodeck, experts at bending with prevailing winds, admire in Horn the same character traits that they disdain. The Bürgermeister elaborates:

Horn war für diesen Tod bestimmt wie ein Ochse für den Schlachthof. Er war nicht lebenstüchtig. Er war für ein Leben unter Menschen nicht geeignet. Ich sage dies ohne jede Wertung oder Verachtung, ich habe ihn immer geschätzt. Und ich meine, es ist kein allzu hoher menschlicher Wert, auf dieser Erde lebenstüchtig zu sein. Es gab prächtige Menschen, die es nie waren. Aber da wir nun einmal genötigt sind, in menschlicher Gemeinschaft zu leben, ist ein gewisses Maβ an Bereitschaft für dieses Leben, ob zu loben oder nicht, erforderlich und somit eine Tugend.

(HE 61)

[Horn was predestined for this death like an ox for the slaughter-house. He was not competent at living. He was unsuited for a life among human beings. I say this without judgment or contempt, I always had a high opinion of him. And I think that competence at living on this earth is no very high human value. There have been splendid people who were never so gifted. But since we are, after all, required to live in human communities, a certain measure of readiness for this life is mandatory and to that extent a virtue, like it or not.]

Kruschkatz reveals the beginnings of his distrust of memory and rigid preference for ideological formulas when he criticizes Horn as one who never forgets: “Und nun stand er wieder vor mir, und ich erkannte an seinen kalten und reglosen Augen, daβ er nichts vergessen hatte. Nichts vergessen und nichts hinzugelernt” [And now he stood again before me, and I knew from his cold and motionless eyes that he had forgotten nothing. Forgotten nothing and learned nothing: 26]. Learning, it would seem, involves more amnesia than anamnesis; what Horn actually has not learned to accept is his proper social role according to the Party's collectivist ethic.

Er wollte Leipzig nicht vergessen, und verstehen konnte er es nicht.

Ihm war dort Unrecht geschehen, gewiβ, und an diesem Unrecht hatte ich meinen Anteil, ich habe es nie bestritten. Aber es gibt eine höhere Moral, vor der sich Recht und Unrecht die Waage halten oder gemeinsam zu fragwürdigen Werten schrumpfen. Es war ihm ein geschichtlich notwendiges Unrecht angetan worden im Namen eines höheren Rechts, im Namen der Geschichte. Ich war nur das ausführende Organ, die kleine Stimme dieses ehernen Gesetzes. Ich hoffte, ihm dies begreiflich machen zu können. Ich hoffte es, nicht weil ich mich entschuldigen, sondern weil ich ihm helfen wollte. Aber Horn fühlte sich noch immer ungerecht behandelt. Er sah nur, daβ ich ihm seine wissenschaftliche Karriere ruiniert hatte, und war nicht fähig oder willens, aus dem Winkel seiner gekränkten Ehre hervorzukommen. Er hatte sich in seinem Selbstmitleid eingerichtet und zog es vor, einsam zu bleiben, wenn er nur im Recht war.

(HE 59)

[He would not forget Leipzig; he was incapable of understanding it.

He had indeed been the victim of an injustice there, and I had played my part in this injustice, I have never denied it. But there is a higher morality, in respect to which justice and injustice balance one another, or dwindle equally into questionable values. A historically necessary injustice was done to him in the name of a higher law, in the name of history. I was only the executive organ, the tiny voice of this iron law. I hoped that I could make this clear to him, not in order to excuse myself, but because I wanted to help him. But Horn still felt himself unjustly used. He only saw that I had ruined his scholarly career, and wasn't able or willing to look beyond his wounded honor. He had settled into self-pity and preferred to remain alone as long as he was in the right.]

In all of this defensive self-justification reappears the familiar effort of a Hein character to rationalize his way out of responsibility. The effect is intensified by comparing this passage, together with the later one insisting (with the Nazis, as McKnight points out [“Ein Mosaik” 423]) that historical progress demands a “Blutzoll” [payment in blood: HE 63] from the innocent, with the Bürgermeister's earlier declaration that history, in the sense of rational laws unfolding through time, does not exist. The wording of the Bürgermeister's defense carries an insidious subtext—“I was only the executive organ” sounds suspiciously like “I was only following orders,” the excuse preferred by war criminals everywhere, and similar to the one that will recur in Der Tangospieler as a rationale, once again, for irresponsibility. More directly related to theoretical questions about history is the observation that Horn would rather isolate himself and cling to the truth than acknowledge the “historical necessity” of the injustice done to him. From this it is possible to begin appreciating why so many of the novel's characters brand Horn a coward. The overriding theme of Der fremde Freund, namely, the possibility and necessity of political engagement in modern, urban, alienating society, might also be applied to Horn: to the extent that he sacrifices social ties on the altar of an absolute, he emulates not just Claudia (who has different reasons for isolating herself) but also Kruschkatz, his fellow ideologist. In spite of his disquisition on the fictions of history with Spodeck, Horn is as willing as Kruschkatz to subordinate the personal to the ideological, even if his ideology now is different (so will be Kruschkatz's in the end). On the other hand, when Kruschkatz pictures Horn as the bearer “mit nervös zitternden Händen die wehleidige Flagge eines fruchtlosen, erschöpften Humanismus” [with nervously trembling hands, of the melancholy banner of a fruitless, exhausted humanism: HE 86], his doctrinaire condemnation also happens to identify what Hein sees as the essence of historical writing or chronicling. Horn is criticized for indulging in a personal viewpoint, for keeping his observations on a human scale rather than appealing to theory, and this is precisely what Hein has recommended as an antidote to ideological conformism. Of course, such an orientation with respect to history also allows for distortions of an idiosyncratic but no less partisan kind—witness Dr. Spodeck—so Kruschkatz's objection may not be wholly off the mark in Horn's case.

HORN

For a central figure, Horn's appearances and statements in Horns Ende are remarkably sparse. The definitive ones are in the chapter prefaces, where Horn's ghostly voice browbeats the fully-grown Thomas into remembering the events of summer 1957. Thus the defining word for Horn is “Remember!” He stands for an uncompromising acknowledgment of historical fact: on this depends everything that may accurately be called history, and not ideology or polemic, written with “passion and prejudice.” (In fact, the motif “Remember!” comes close to being an unequivocal moral imperative valid for all of Hein's writing.) Yet the forces of forgetting with which Horn struggles go deeper than mere partisanship—they are the rooted in the instinct of self-preservation that causes Claudia, for example, to censor her memories in order not to go mad. Horn's significance for the narrators, as for all the citizens of Bad Guldenberg, is that he disturbs the convenient, comfortable, falsified view of history that normal, sane individuals like to paint for themselves. Claudia likewise describes herself as “eine nette, sehr normale Frau” [a nice, very normal woman: [Der fremde Freund, hereafter cited as DFF] 162; [The Distant Lover, hereafter cited as TDL] 136] immediately after she has been physically abused. The veiling of real history, barbaric and shabby, enables its endless repetition. Horn insists that, in a strict sense, historic events lack a real existence apart from living people's memory, which means that reflecting on society is a social act, a social memory, not limited exclusively to personal recollections, but an integral part of communal self-awareness: “Ich lebe nur in deinem Gedächtnis, Junge. Streng dich an. Bitte” [I live only in your memory, boy. Try. Please: HE 51].

As the representative of uncompromising memory, even Horn's physical appearance is suggestive of his burden and duty. Gertrude Fischlinger recalls his appearance when he first inquired with her about a room: “Er hatte eine merkwürdige graue Haut und breite, fast schwarze Augenringe. Ich dachte damals, daβ er wohl lange krank gewesen sein müβte. Gelbsucht oder Tbc, vermutete ich” [He had weirdly gray skin and large, almost black circles around his eyes. I thought back then that he must have been ill for a long time. Jaundice or TB, I supposed: 17]. Horn's only disease, of course, has been his inability or unwillingness to forget what happened to him in Leipzig. Yet this is sufficiently fatal, and the black rings under his eyes may be understood as a telling symptom of sleeplessness, for as Kruschkatz explains, “es sind zwei sich ausschlieβende Dinge: gut zu schlafen und sich gut zu erinnern” [those are two mutually exclusive things: to sleep well and to remember well: 20]. No wonder Kruschkatz ends his own narrative wishing for death, the “sanftere[r] süβe[r] Bruder” [gentle sweet brother: 224] of sleep, since his sleep is disturbed by “die Erinnerungen …, die sich Nacht für Nacht auf meine Brust hocken” [memories … that weigh down on my breast night after night: 223].

Horn is thus largely a symbolic figure, representative of a truly materialist, yet radically individual perception of history. This is the stuff of chronicling, Hein's avowed mode of narrative writing, so Horn's theoretical statements deserve special scrutiny when they do occur. Horn is also interesting, as noted above, for the condemnation that the other characters heap upon him. To one degree or another, and for varying reasons, all of the other narrators defend the utility of forgetting, or at least of distrusting memory, of subordinating it to some higher good, whether an ideology of social progress (Kruschkatz), the instinct of self-preservation (Spodeck), or the claims of the living as opposed to the claims of the dead (Thomas). Horn may also be viewed as an example of another recurring character type in Hein's writing: he is like Schlötel, the fanatical proponent of truth whose existence in a corrupt world drives him to madness and suicide, or Hubert K. in “Der neuere (glücklichere) Kohlhaas,” whose adherence to a legal principle ruins his life, or Frankfurther, in Passage, who escapes capture by the Nazis by poisoning himself, and whose only concern in extremis is that his scientific treatise be preserved and published. In each of these cases, Hein raises the question of public versus private prerogatives, of abstract ideology versus concrete relations among people, of the fate of the intellectual amid the vicissitudes of history, and of the possibility of meaningful action in a historical context.

Like Kruschkatz, Horn speaks somewhat inconsistently about the nature of history, and should not be taken over-simply as a mouthpiece for Hein, although he certainly is this to a degree. As Kruschkatz understands him, he is simply someone who refuses to forget or forsake his personal viewpoint respecting history, who refuses to accept the ideological view that even the Bürgermeister loses faith in. At first, then, Horn's view of history seems to be almost naively positivistic, distinguishing simplistically between truth and falsehood. He explains the responsibilities of a historian to Thomas when the boy visits the museum:

“Es ist nur ein kleines Museum, das wir haben, und doch schreiben auch wir die Geschichte. Wir sind es, die dafür einzustehen haben, ob die Wahrheit oder die Lüge berichtet wird. Verstehst du das, Thomas?”

“Natürlich.”

“Nein, das verstehst du nicht. Die Wahrheit oder die Lüge, das ist eine entsetzliche Verantwortung. Wer das wirklich begriffen hätte, würde keinen Schlaf mehr finden.”

(HE 58)

[“It's only a little museum that we have here, and yet we, too, are writing history. We are the ones responsible for telling truth or lies. Do you understand that, Thomas?”

“Of course.”

“No, you don't understand. Truth or lies, that's a terrible responsibility. Anyone who really comprehended that would never be able to sleep again.”]

What is this “terrible responsibility” to which Horn alludes? That sleep and historical awareness cannot coexist implies that sleep here may be taken as a metaphorical description of the common state of unconsciousness cultivated by the citizens of Bad Guldenberg, among others. The reason emerges now for the sleeplessness caused by memory—it is a consequence of an awakened conscience, or rather, of a consciousness confronted with its responsibility for creating and preserving historical meaning. If history exists only as an extension of contemporary needs and conditions, with living persons absolutely accountable for both the past and for the present, history ceases to be a discrete academic discipline and becomes instead the constitutive basis of society (as opposed to barbarity or anarchy).

The novel's culminating statement concerning the activity of history-making occurs in Horn's lengthy conversation with Spodeck about a new technique for the reconstitution of cinematic images. Spodeck believes that this has undermined a hitherto unimpeachable source of historical accuracy, the photograph:

Da haben ein paar Filmtechniker ein Verfahren ausgeklügelt, das es ihnen ermöglicht, dem Film jeden Wert eines Dokuments zu nehmen. Das ursprüngliche Bild wird auf einen in der Mitte gebrochenen Spiegel geworfen und erneut aufgenommen. Und je nachdem, in welchem Winkel die Spiegel zueinander stehen, kann man nun Teile des Bildes verschwinden lassen oder neue, nicht dazugehörige Bilder einspiegeln. Man kann somit nach Gutdünken Filmdokumente verändern und Miβliebiges gegen Beliebiges austauschen. Dem Betrachter bietet sich stets ein unverletzt scheinendes, originales Bild. Ihre Wissenschaft, Herr Horn, die Geschichtsschreibung, hat wieder einen Kronzeugen verloren. Ihnen stehen neue Fälschungen ins Haus.

(HE 197)

[It seems that a couple of film technicians have figured out a process that robs film of any documentary value. The original image is projected onto a broken mirror, and then photographed again. According to where the image falls, on which adjacent sections of the mirror, parts of it can now be made to disappear or new, unrelated images can be combined with it. The film maker can now alter film documents as he likes, replacing disagreeable things with agreeable ones. All the viewer ever sees is a seamless, apparently original picture. Your discipline of history, Herr Horn, has a lost another of its chief witnesses. You face new falsifications.]

Horn, on the other hand, has trouble understanding Spodeck's point, because for him, history is not a matter of simply collecting accurate facts or documents, but of reconstructing truth from a welter of inaccuracies and half-truths, of interpreting the distortions of truth in light of the present day:

Sie sehen zu schwarz, Dr. Spodeck. Was Sie als Fälschung bezeichnen, ist unser täglich Brot. Was ist denn Geschichte anderes als ein Teig von Überliefertem, von willkürlich oder absichtsvoll Erhaltenem, aus dem sich nachfolgende Generationen ein Bild nach ihrem Bilde kneten. Die Fälschungen und unsere Irrtümer sind der Kitt dieser Bilder, sie machen sie haltbar und griffig. Sie sind es, die unsere Weisheiten so einleuchtend machen.

(HE 197)

[Your view is too bleak, Dr. Spodeck. What you call falsification is our daily bread. What else is history but a dough of hand-me-downs, of accidentally or deliberately preserved odds and ends, which succeeding generations will knead into an image of themselves. The falsifications and our errors are the binding material in these images, they make them durable and fit for use. This is why our sagacities appear so self-evident.]

Spodeck finds this Althusser-like position cynical, but it is merely realistic, Horn insists, the product of professional experience. As it turns out, Spodeck is merely trying to justify his own cynicism: he explains that he is actually pleased by the new technical advance in filmmaking, because it abolishes a false model for the operation of human memory, an ideal of verisimilitude, making it easier now to distrust or dismiss memories that are painful or unpleasant. Memories, Spodeck insists, record not the events, but the consciousness of the events, reflected and distorted by the biological equivalent of the filmmaker's broken mirrors. The lesson to be learned from this, he says, is that we should distrust our memories when they make life impossible, as has happened, he implies, in Horn's case. Horn refuses to be drawn over the brink of cynical but pragmatic skepticism:

“Bedeutet das, Doktor, Sie raten mir, ohne Gedächtnis zu leben?”

“Nein, das wäre unsinnig, weil es uns nicht möglich ist. Ich rate Ihnen nur, Ihren Erinnerungen zu miβtrauen. Wenn Ihr Gedächtnis Sie zum Leben unfähig macht, ist es vernünftiger, Sie bezweifeln einige gespeicherte Bilder in Ihrem Kopf und nicht das Leben. Es ist vernünftiger, denn, wie ich hoffe bewiesen zu haben, wir haben keine Gewiβheit darüber, daβ diese Erinnerungen uns nicht gründlich täuschen.”

“Vielleicht haben Sie recht, aber wir werden mit unserem Gedächtnis leben müssen. Welch ein entsetzlicher Gedanke, ohne Gedächtnis leben zu wollen. Wir würden ohne Erfahrungen leben müssen, ohne Wissen und ohne Werte. Löschen Sie das Gedächtnis eines Menschen, und Sie löschen die Menschheit.”¹³

(HE 198–9)

[“Does this mean, Doctor, that you are advising me to live without memory?”

“No, that would be absurd, because it isn't possible. I am just advising you not to trust your memory. If your memory renders life impossible, it is more reasonable to doubt a few stored images in your head than to doubt life. It is more reasonable because, as I hope I have shown, we have no guarantee that our memory isn't fundamentally misleading us.”

“Maybe you are right, but we must live with our memory. What a dreadful thought, to want to live without memory. We would have to live without prior experience, without knowledge, and without values. Take away memory from a human being and you take away his humanity.”]

Spodeck's advice may have practical validity, but as Claudia's case proves, forgetting is not necessarily the most desirable condition of life, and as a strategy for survival it can backfire. Horn seems to be saying that the accuracy of one's memory may be flawed, but in order to remain human, one must operate under the assumption that, by and large, it is accurate. This is similar to his view about historical writing: one does not simply give up in the face of unverifiability, but makes instead the best case possible for what the facts may have been. We are caught in a paradox of not having access to the truth, yet always needing to assert something as truth, lest we become total cynics like Spodeck and, lacking any firm conviction, fall absolutely under the sway of historical forces.¹⁴

Hein's meditation on film as a flawed analog of history-writing recalls his subsequent essay “Maelzel's Chess Player Goes to Hollywood,” a reply to Walter Benjamin's famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In his essay, Hein elaborates a view of art and history that echoes aspects of both Spodeck's and Horn's historical views. Benjamin had argued that mass reproducibility of art works would abolish their mystified “cultic value” and reveal their articulation with politics:

But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—politics.

(226)

Having lost the “semblance of its autonomy” (228), art will call forth a new and critical attitude on the part of the public. In the case of film, the technically determined art par excellence, the viewer will become attentive to the technique rather than the presence of the actor, which remains so central to a stage production. “The audience's identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera. Consequently the audience takes the position of the camera; its approach is that of testing” (230–31). Benjamin sees in this new attentiveness to technical distortions of reality a revolution in perception similar to the discovery of the unconscious mind (239), so that art works now are viewed politically, as “evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance” (228).

Hein, on the other hand, argues that Benjamin's political optimism caused him to overlook the effect of the marketplace on art: in capitalism, mass-produced art is always mass-marketed art, whose primary virtue is a calculable, guaranteed return on investment. This explains the formulaic, even algorithmic construction of most of what appears in movie houses and on television (“Maelzel's Chess Player” 179–80). The public, in its turn, learns to enjoy the predictability of such art:

The mechanism has become visible to the audience. And this in no way impedes the consumption of these products, but has become a factor of their appeal. The audience is safe in the knowledge that nothing will frighten, confuse, or disturb it. Situations and plot developments, along with the construction of the characters, create in the audience a continual déjà vu experience.

(181)

Instead of building historical consciousness, as Benjamin had hoped, mass-produced art tends to enmesh consciousness in a cycle of repetitive illusion. Hein argues that the “cultic value,” Benjamin's “aura,” returns in a new form: as the cult of celebrity and glamour surrounding entertainment figures. Insidiously, the emphasis on personality obscures the fact that the art industry is a machine driven not by individual human beings, but by market forces:

The function of the human being is to provide the products of the machine with what the public traditionally regards as the sine qua non of art, namely, the aura of creativity and genius. He is there to give the machine product a human stamp, without which even the most one dimensional piece of artistic trash remains unacceptable to consumers. And the more plainly the machine dominates and its products betray an automatic, mass-produced quality, the more urgent the role played by the designated human. He must turn his person into a Potemkin village. …

(186–7)

Art finally becomes nothing but an extension of the omnipresent market, or, in bureaucratic socialism, the omnipresent state. And yet, at the end of his essay, Hein endorses Benjamin's optimistic vision of the future:

I nonetheless share Benjamin's hopes. These are hopes that run counter to experience, hopes for history that run counter to history. Because these are hopes to which there is no human alternative.

(193)

Hein's argument here is characteristic: in the face of all historical entrapment and governmental oppression, people remain obligated to act as though they were autonomous. The Marxist critique of humanism, of which Hein largely approves, does not for him imply a lessening of individual human responsibility for imagining freedom, consciousness, and truth; indeed, these illusory and paradoxical values remain the very conditions of the “human.”

Hein's essay clarifies certain issues that occupy the narrators of Horns Ende. Horn, responding to Spodeck's pragmatic advice to forget memories that make it impossible to live, offers a definition of “human” quite similar to the one implied in the essay. Horn replies that to live without knowledge or values means to cease to be human, an argument whose gravity is increased by Horn's impending death as a casualty of the contradiction between memory and present political reality. Benjamin's and Hein's shared “hopes” reappear as the insistence on “knowledge” and “values” that Horn upholds. Whereas Spodeck's “history of baseness” selectively depicts a Bad Guldenberg motivated solely by greed, hypocrisy, and love of power (reproducing on a grand scale the private experience of its author), Horn acknowledges the inevitability of factual distortion without using it to justify the skepticism or, ultimately, nihilism represented by Spodeck. Uncertain though the ultimate truth of fragmentary, historical “facts” may be, “people would always repeat the same mistakes if the potsherds were ignored. For this reason he tries to turn up and preserve as many sherds as possible” (McKnight, “Ein Mosaik” 421). Historical facts are always already distorted, selected, edited by a self-serving hand, but this merely means that history is a matter of interpretive rather than positive knowledge. By designing Horns Ende as a collection of subjective accounts, Hein points the way toward such an understanding of history, and no reader at this point in the book can escape noticing how well Spodeck's own writings bear out Horn's statements: it is precisely the distortions and exaggerations in the “history of baseness” that lead a careful reader to understand both Spodeck himself and the town he partially represents.¹⁵ We never see, however, the other, different history that Horn might have written: it is up to posterity—Thomas—to reconstruct it, and to find the meaning of Horn's death.

THOMAS

Thomas, the son of the respectable, stereotypically bourgeois pharmacist of Bad Guldenberg, acts as a counterbalance to the gloom of the Spodeck and Kruschkatz narratives. Thomas certainly takes himself as seriously as either of the other two narrators, but since his tragedies are mostly the standard ones for a child his age, he provokes as much amusement as sympathy. He manages almost incidentally to provide all of the key information about Horn's death, narrating it in Hein's flat, chronicling style, with little commentary. He qualifies as a theorist of history as well, partly by example (he wishes to forget everything about Bad Guldenberg as quickly as possible) and partly from his statements concerning Horn. Although Thomas seems to be the spokesman for a viewpoint opposite Hein's—he feels oppressed by history and tells his story only under extreme duress, confronted as a grown man by Horn's ghost—he exemplifies the least corrupted mode of narration in the novel (except perhaps for Gertrude Fischlinger, whom McKnight identifies as the novel's closest approximation to Hein's ideal historiographer, recounting the facts “without passion or prejudice”). For all his antipathy toward the town and its past, and his own past, Thomas displays a redeeming vigor that challenges the conformity and amnesia which, paradoxically, even he shares. Although no ideal figure of historical and political enlightenment, Thomas points toward a future somewhat brighter than that of mid-twentieth-century Bad Guldenberg, once, that is, he is prodded into remembering by the ghostly exhortations of Horn, which ensure that Hein's stubborn hope for human betterment will at least have a hearing in this somber novel.

Haunted by the ghost of memory, Thomas at one point tries to revolt:

—Sie langweilen mich. Mich langweilen die Toten. Sie wollen nur Ihre Wahrheit sehen. Sie haben wenig begriffen. Sie sind ungerecht zu den Lebenden. Es ist alles schwer genug, und Sie können nur klagen.

—Vielleicht, Junge, vielleicht hast du recht. Aber ich bin tot. Vergiβ das nicht.

—Auch ein Toter wiegt nicht mehr als die Wahrheit.

—Ich bin tot.

—Der Tod ist kein Beweis.

—Ach, was du verstehst! Denk nicht nach. Erinnere dich.

(186)

—You bore me. The dead bore me. All they care about is their reality. They haven't understood much. They do an injustice to the living. Everything is hard enough, and all you can do is complain.

—Maybe so, boy, maybe you're right. But I am dead. Don't forget that.

—Not even a dead person counts more than the truth

—I am dead.

—Being dead doesn't prove anything.

—Oh, what do you know! Don't try to think. Just remember.

Horn's ghost comes close to acknowledging that the living, too, have their claims, so the conflict between the two voices ends ambiguously. Thomas, who echoes Kruschkatz's remark that Horn “hatte … nichts hinzugelernt” [never learned: 59] from his experiences, expresses a similar revulsion for what Horn represents when he recounts his first impressions of the museum, which looms over Bad Guldenberg like some ruined temple to Mnemosyne. The trip to the museum with his father comes to symbolize the whole experience of life in Bad Guldenberg, which to Thomas seems less like a place of forgetting than a place of suffocating remembrance, of traditions, conventions, and taboos that crowd out any possibility of freedom or pleasure. The museum, full of dead, stuffed animals and lifeless scenes, reflects the lifelessness of the town below. Thomas is especially perturbed by the stuffed animals with their insistent gaze:

Ich erinnere mich an die gelblichen Glasaugen. In einer nachgebildeten Heidelandschaft standen ausgestopfte Füchse und Dachse. Sie liefen, sprangen oder saβen in der immer gleichen Haltung, in einer angestrengten Bewegung, zu der sie für alle Ewigkeit verurteilt waren. Die eingesetzten Glasaugen waren alle von gleicher Farbe und Gröβe, der Iris war bernsteinhell. Die Glasaugen quollen hinter den Lidern hervor. Wohin ich auch ging, sie verfolgten mich, starrten mich nach. Diese von jedem Leben entleerten Augen zwangen mich, sie unablässig anzusehen.

(HE 54)

[I remember the yellow glass eyes. In a reproduction of a heath there were stuffed foxes and badgers. They ran or jumped or crouched in one unvarying position, in the middle of a strained movement to which they were condemned for all eternity. The inserted glass eyes were all of one color and size, the iris bright like amber. The glass eyes bulged forward under their lids. They pursued me wherever I went, staring at me. I was forced to look incessantly at these eyes that were drained of all life.]

The dead animals demand Thomas's attention the same way that dead Herr Horn demands to be remembered. In both cases, Thomas senses that something hideous is being forced on him: death, or in the case of the chapter prologues, a past better left forgotten lest it overwhelm the present. Thomas later makes explicit the connections between Horn and his taxidermic kingdom (the eyes again), not to mention the oppressiveness of Guldenberg and the respectable life he is forced to lead. And like the other narrators, he diagnoses Horn's moral failure:

Herr Horn war mir unangenehm. Seine kühlen grauen Augen ängstigten mich. Er war wohl so alt wie mein Vater, dreiundvierzig Jahre, aber er wirkte viel älter, zerbrechlicher. Heute würde ich sagen, daβ er verzagt und mutlos war, daβ er seinem Leben nie die Kränkungen verzieh, die es ihm bereitete. Aber damals spürte ich nur die abwehrende Einsamkeit eines vergrämten Mannes. Schon als ich ihn das erstemal sah, an jenem Sonntag, an dem ich mit Vater und Bruder ins Heimatmuseum ging, empfand ich die alles zurückweisende Verschlossenheit dieses Mannes.

(HE 190)

[I found Herr Horn unpleasant. His cool gray eyes frightened me. He was the same age as my father, 43, but he seemed much older, more fragile. Today I would say that he was utterly demoralized, that he never forgave his life for the injuries it had done him. But at the time I sensed only the defensive loneliness of a careworn man. From the very first time I saw him, on that Sunday when I went with my father and brother to the regional museum, I could feel how withdrawn and bitter he was.]

This critical assessment of Horn is more suggestive than Spodeck's or Kruschkatz's, and it suggests links to concerns that appear frequently in Hein's work. The embittered historian has erred in withdrawing from society so completely, by remaining inflexibly willful at the expense of all else. Thus he resembles characters like Hubert K. or Schlötel, who sacrifice everything, including their connection with society and even their humanity, for an ideal. Though admirable to a degree, such uncompromising behavior is also anarchistically anti-social.¹⁶ Thomas, himself naively prejudiced in favor of life and freedom regardless of the cost to memory, accurately perceives that Horn's motivations are principally negative: resentment, hatred, pride; they coincide in part with the passion for truth that Horn so eloquently describes, but he is also self-serving.¹⁷ Both aspects of Horn's character must be kept in view before the nature of his tragedy can be understood.

In the flesh as in the ghost prologues, Horn acknowledges the taint of death that Thomas notices in the museum and wonders why he would willingly come there: “Warum willst du dich in einem Museum verkriechen, Junge? Was hast du mit den Toten zu schaffen?” [Why do you want bury yourself in a museum, boy? What business do you have with the dead?: 57]; and presumably the curator includes himself among these dead. In short, viewed from Thomas's standpoint, Horn belongs in the signifier chain Museum—History—Memory—Death—Truth—Enclosure. Thomas himself, longing to escape from Bad Guldenberg and forget about it, alternatively represents Forgetting—Life—Escape. Hein grants a partial validity to each viewpoint, and to the mutual distaste that Horn and Thomas must feel toward each other. The paradoxes in their characterizations and the contradictory symbolic matrices they inhabit forestall easy judgment by the reader, forcing instead an acceptance of the incommensurability of truths and viewpoints that so scandalizes Kruschkatz. McKnight notes as well the agreement between the boy and the Bürgermeister, both of whom wish to forget the past in order to live in the present. Kruschkatz was surely right, for example, to try to transcend the past enmity between Guldenberg and the Gypsies:

Whose enemies are the gypsies, really? What have the Guldenbergers actually learned? Yet Kruschkatz is morally salvageable precisely by virtue of his desire to let go of the old stories that Horn and Gohl refuse to forget. What good is an antagonism carved in stone, eternal bitterness, eternal wallowing in the past? It is necessary to free oneself from the past and move forward. Such paradoxes remained unresolved, an open question, almost a vicious circle. …

(“Ein Mosaik” 423–424)

Thomas emerges as the most contradictory figure of all, drawn unknowingly into the world of the historical museum which is Bad Guldenberg, and which contains not just recent acquisitions like Horn, but also older specimens like Herr Gohl, whose ghastly tragedy during the Nazi years makes him into a living monument to the past barbarity of his fellow citizens (one of whom had denounced him in writing to the Nazis, leading to his wife's murder in the stead of her retarded daughter [HE 156]). Even before Thomas is put to work helping Gohl paint the trompe l'oeil backdrops to the museum's exhibits, he has acquainted himself with Gohl's peculiar friends and fellow sufferers under the Nazis: the Gypsies, whom the Guldenbergers feel freer to abhor openly than they do Gohl. The pharmacist, for example, comments on the mysterious relationship between Gohl and the Gypsy king with smug condescension and unconscious irony: “Warum er ausgerechnet zu Gohl ging, wuβte keiner. Vater sagt nur, da hätten sich die Richtigen gefunden” [Why he visited Gohl of all people nobody knew. Father merely said that they made a proper pair: 10]. Such attitudes support McKnight's view that the solidarity between the Gohl family and the Gypsies functions as the novel's “measure of humanity,” which is destroyed (not for the first time) by the rape of Marlene. In spite of his avowed objectivity, Hein does provide certain “evaluative criteria” for his readers, as McKnight notes: “Bachofen's treason. Irene's death and unhappiness. Gertrude Fischlinger's sorrow. And, above all, the tragic fate of the Gohl family” (“Ein Mosaik” 418). Thomas, working for the Gypsies, working for Gohl, and listening to doomed Herr Horn describe the heavy responsibility for discovering truth, is one Guldenberger whose aversion to the past does not altogether blind him to its legacy and his own responsibility. He perhaps approximates the best that can be hoped for from Germany's first guiltless, postwar generation. Like Kruschkatz, Thomas gains in humanity by his contact with the Gypsies (McKnight, “Ein Mosaik” 425); it remains to be seen whether he can surpass the Bürgermeister in facing the responsibility bequeathed by Horn.

UNEARTHING ANECDOTES: DER TANGOSPIELER'S FLIGHT FROM HISTORY

Hein's books preceding Der Tangospieler examine history in its social, individual, and professional aspects; Der Tangospieler, while continuing in this vein, also satirizes conditions of life in the pre-Wende GDR by casting a special type of historian as Everyman. (The book, published in early 1989, was also the first—and last—critical treatment of the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia to appear inside the GDR.)¹⁸ In his other fiction, Hein generally refrains from the sort of direct, biting social commentary so evident in his plays, but in Der Tangospieler the social criticism is scathing. The book is less a meditation on history or a study of a historically defined character than a travesty of the old Socialist Realist convention of the New Man, that hoped-for product of life in a society where “the fulfillment of the individual is the precondition for the fulfillment of all” (Marx 53). If a society reveals something of its essence through the sorts of people who prosper in it, then the GDR of this book is a land of opportunism, cynicism, intellectual stagnation, and Orwellian historical revisionism. Yet Dallow, much like Claudia, in Der fremde Freund, is a normal person reacting in a reasonable way to the pressures and expectations of his society. His unselfconscious accommodation to his world points to the true delineations of power within it, giving the lie to public propaganda and private rationalization. Unlike Claudia, whose “I'm fine” becomes ever harder to believe, Dallow's ultimate apotheosis can hardly be denied, and therein lies the shock of the book: the perfect fit between his society's unstated rules and his self-serving disinterest in all things political or historical (a type of disinterest not limited to the East, of course). The most dreadful thing about Dallow is that he is not a monster—he is quite ordinary in ways that would have been apparent to any citizen of the GDR. This ordinariness, painstakingly detailed, is what enables Hein to maintain his vaunted stance of objective chronicling; the satiric sting at the end, despite its exaggerated neatness, relies on a long string of plausibilities.

The narrative itself may be briefly summarized as follows. After serving nineteen months for unintentionally ridiculing Party chief Walter Ulbricht (by playing the piano accompaniment to a student cabaret's satirical tango), Dallow is released from prison. He tries without success to reintegrate himself into society—his old academic institute turns him down, and he finds that no one will hire a politically compromised former university professor for menial jobs. Plagued by memories he wishes to forget (or, later, by resentments he will not let go of) and plagued by a pair of Stasi agents who try to enlist his services, he dissipates himself with drink and women before deciding to seek a job as waiter. A friend finds him a job on the Baltic coast at a summer resort, and he happily adjusts to a life without ambition and with plenty of young, nubile women. With the August 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, circumstances at his institute change after his successor Roessler commits a political error: he tells a full classroom that the reports of Warsaw Pact tanks in Prague are Western propaganda, the proof being that the GDR's sense of historical responsibility would prevent it from ever again invading a neighbor country. As a result, Dallow is invited to return to his old job. The book foregrounds two related metaphors: the paralysis Dallow suffers in his right hand in moments of stress, and the act of playing the piano. At the end, once Dallow has been reinstated, his paralysis departs, apparently for good, and he resumes playing. And in a scene reminiscent of the tank episode Claudia remembered in Der fremde Freund, Dallow is vouch-safed a vision of brutal political power and his relation to it.

One essential premise of the book may seem implausible—that Dallow, a Leipzig history professor, could have absolutely no interest in the historical events taking place in 1968 in the East Bloc. Yet Dallow is a not-unfamiliar type of academic. His scholarly work concerns an area of research approved by the Party and of no real importance to anyone else, nor of interest even to Dallow. He describes it to his girlfriend Elke:

Sehr beeindruckend ist meine Wissenschaft nicht. Ich hatte mich mit Neuerer Geschichte zu befassen und unentwegt danach zu forschen, wie die illegalen sozialdemokratischen Zeitungen vor einhundert Jahren konspirativ gedruckt und über den Bodensee gerudert wurden. Und wie die tapferen Arbeiter und Handwerker der Prager Neustadt sich mit Besenstielen und Sandeimern des Bombardements von Windischgrätz erwehrten. Wenn von einer Wissenschaft nur noch Anekdoten übrigbleiben, wird es ermüdend.

([Der Tangospieler, hereafter cited as DT] 99)

[My scientific accomplishments are not very impressive. I was supposed to work in modern history, to burn the midnight oil discovering how illegal social-democratic parties managed secretly to print newspapers and row them across Lake Constance a hundred years ago. And how the brave workers and artisans of Prague defended themselves against Windischgrätz's cannons with broomsticks and buckets of sand. But it's tiresome when science has nothing more to do than unearth anecdotes.]

([The Tango Player, hereafter cited as TTP] 104)

Sarcasm is evident in this parody of public discourse in the GDR: the workers are always “brave” and the research that glorifies them continues endlessly. Dallow more than anyone is aware that his scholarly work is nothing but rote Soβe (the red sauce that went with everything)—it was doubtless settled upon as a field promising sure advancement through the academic ranks. If Dallow's specialty has any relevance to the contemporary world (as it may well), Dallow has not troubled himself to discover it; all that matters is political correctness. Since he lacks any interest in the political events pressing around him, the term “Neuere Geschichte” seems ludicrously inappropriate as a description of what Dallow does, namely, accumulating dead facts and keeping them that way. As in the case of Kruschkatz in Horns Ende, and for similar reasons, Hein delays as long as possible the revelation that we are dealing with a professional historian, but as a comparison to any of the narrators in the earlier novel shows, Dallow is really the precise opposite of a historian, and equally a perfect servant of the state and his own interests. If to seek out historical truth inevitably means to deconstruct whatever partisan version of history the state may have decided to project, then the political meaning of “disinterest” in history becomes readily apparent.

Dallow's anti-historical attitude emerges first from his initial determination to forget his own most dramatic experience with state power: the nineteen months in jail for a trivial and unintentional political offense. He insists to his friend Harry that the time in jail was meaningless, wasted, and best forgotten:

“Und wie war es?” fragte der Kellner zögernd. Es schien, als suche er dabei nach Worten.

“Das ist alles schon vergessen,” sagte Dallow und lächelte den Kellner an, “verlorene Zeit, nicht der Mühe wert, sich daran zu erinnern.”

(DT 16)

[“And how was it?” asked the waiter after a moment's hesitation, during which he seemed to be searching for the right words.

“I've already put it out of my mind,” said Dallow and smiled at the waiter. “Lost time, not worth the trouble trying to remember.”]

(TTP 15)

He tells his parents the same thing: “Vergeβt einfach alles … ich selbst kann mich an diese Zeit kaum noch erinnern” [Just forget the whole thing … I barely remember it myself: 75; 78] and finds that he has been avoiding friends and family because

Man würde ihm Mitgefühl bekunden wollen, und eben das zwänge ihn, jene Zeit, die er gründlich und rasch vergessen wollte, sich immer wieder ins Gedächtnis zu rufen, sich vor Augen zu führen, um sie zu beschreiben und schlieβlich auszumalen, wilder, farbiger und fürchterlicher, als sie tatsächlich gewesen war.

(DT 58)

[People wanted to show their sympathy, and yet that was precisely what kept sending him back to prison, back to the time he wanted to forget quickly and completely. But they kept forcing him to recollect it, to behold it, in order to describe and ultimately color events so that his life in prison seemed wilder, more picturesque and more frightening than it had really been.]

(TTP 61)

His desire to forget the past is connected with a sense that the time in prison was meaningless, irrelevant to the rest of his life, and therefore irredeemably wasted. He accurately perceives that his friends expect from him not merely an account of the jail time, but an evaluation of it, and consequently an indication of his own future plans. Finding no meaning in it, he can form no plans. To now spend additional time thinking about something as pointless as his lost nineteen months looks like a further waste of time, an extension of his punishment; therefore, forgetting looks to him like freedom:

Er wollte die Zeit aus seinem Gedächtnis löschen, um sich von ihr zu befreien. Die Inhaftierung hatte er nie als Strafe empfinden können, sondern allein als eine Kränkung und einen nicht wiedergutzumachenden Verlust von Zeit. Aber er hatte die beiden Jahre hinter sich gebracht, ohne verrückt zu werden, und er wollte künftig keine Minute mit einem nutzlosen Grübeln über die Haft und die unwürdigen Umstände, unter denen er im Gefängnis zu leben gezwungen war, verlieren.

(DT 21)

[He wanted to erase this time from his memory so he could free himself from it. He had never been able to view his imprisonment as a punishment, only as an annoyance, an irreplaceable loss of time. But he had managed to get through the two years without losing his mind, and from now on he refused to waste a single minute on senseless brooding over his imprisonment and the degrading conditions he had had to endure.]

(TTP 20)

With the memory of Horns Ende freshly in mind, the reader of Der Tangospieler may be tempted to read Dallow's desire to forget as self-evidently misguided, as a rejection of historical reality and of responsibility similar to Thomas's complaints against the relentless voice of memory. Yet Thomas did have a valid point when he argued for the claims of the living, and he was not altogether wrong in trying to rid himself once and for all of ideological abstractions like “history.” Dallow's case is even more enigmatic, because nothing intrinsic to the narrative directly contradicts his view, while the denouement even vindicates forgetting the past as quickly and as thoroughly as possible really was the best strategy for survival in the GDR in 1968. Adding to the difficulty of assessing Dallow is his abrupt decision to begin remembering after all. Specifically, he nurses a grudge against the prosecutor, judge, and defense lawyer who collaborated in jailing him. As might be expected, the desire to remember involves a new understanding and evaluation of the events.

The alleged meaninglessness of Dallow's time in jail turns out to be a starting point, not a conclusion. His belief that he had been imprisoned entirely by mistake succinctly expresses an ahistorical sensibility—events simply follow one another, or happen side by side without implying relations or patterns. This is the significance of Dallow's pseudo-philosophical description of existence as “ein Lichtspiel, ein Phänomen der Optik wie das Kino. Und was sind Lichtspiele und Wasserspiele, ein Zeitvertreib aus Nichts” [a light show, an optical phenomenon like the cinema. Or water dancing in a fountain. And what are light shows and electric fountains? Sheer follies, time-killers, made of nothing: 90; 95]; his jail term, likewise, as he tells his father, “ist auch nur eine Gelegenheit, um die Zeit totzuschlagen” [just another place to kill time: 67; 70]. His imprisonment, because it lacks necessary logical connections with anything else in his life, can only be regarded as absurd, a joke:

Er war nicht ins Gefängnis gekommen, weil er kriminell, aufsässig oder mutig gewesen war; einer Dummheit wegen hatte man ihn verurteilt und in eine Zelle gesperrt, auch wenn das Urteil etwas anderes sagte und der Richter von etwas anderem überzeugt war. Das Gefängnis blieb ein Unfall innerhalb einer gleichmäβig dahinrinnenden Existenz. Nichts als ein Irrtum. Ein Versehen beider Seiten. Keine Veränderungen. Es gab nur eine Unterbrechung, von der er, nachdem sie nun einmal passiert war, gehofft hatte, sie würde noch eine letzte, wichtige Weichenstellung erlauben. Aber, und das ahnte er jetzt, er verstand nicht, die Chance zu nutzen, es war umsonst, es blieb ein bedauernswerter, nichtssagender Unfall.¹⁹

(DT 110)

[He hadn't landed in prison for being criminal, rebellious, or courageous; he had been convicted and jailed on account of a stupid trifle, even if the sentence said otherwise and the judge was convinced he was right. Prison remained an accident in the steady trickle of his existence. Just an error, nothing more. A mistake on both sides. Nothing new. It had only been an interruption, and now that it had happened he hoped it would lead to one more final, important change of course. But he realized he didn't know how to take advantage of this opportunity, all attempts were useless, the event remained a regrettable and insignificant accident.]

(TTP 115)

Dallow denies the reality of his crime as it was understood by the judge—as a political act in violation of specific laws—but his claim of innocence (that he had never read the text accompanying the tango, etc.), though technically true, fails to satisfy either the judge (73–4; 76–77) or the reader. If nothing else, Dallow is surely guilty of a sort of criminal negligence with respect to politics. His remarkable stupidity recalls the deluded explanation Hauptmann Hirschburg, in Passage, gives for his persecution by the Nazi authorities: not that he has Jewish ancestry, but merely because of an “unglückselige[s] Miβverständnis” [unfortunate misunderstanding: Passage 29]. Before the play ends, however, Hirschburg sees his error and shoulders his historical burden by leading the fifteen elderly Jews through the Pyrenees. Dallow comes more gradually to an understanding that his conviction was more than an accident or error, as he looks at the aimlessness and isolation of his life as an ex-convict:

Das Gefängnis, sagte er sich, war wohl doch mehr als nur ein Unfall in meinem Leben.

… Ihm war bewuβt, daβ ihn, tief versteckt und uneingestanden, Heimweh quälte, ein Heimweh nach der Zelle. Er vermiβte jene sonderbare Geborgenheit, die vollständige, alles umfassende Vorsorge, das ausnahmslos geregelte Leben. In der Zelle hatte er nichts entscheiden müssen.

(DT 114)

[Prison must have been more than an accident in my life, he told himself.

… He realized he was homesick, deeply homesick in a way he would not admit, homesick for his cell. He missed that strange security, the comprehensive care, he missed the total regulation of his life. In his cell he never had to make a single decision.]

(TTP 119–120)

This homesickness suggests even more than Dallow recognizes. His longing for confinement amounts to nostalgia for the lost security of his prior, conformist life. However inadvertent, his political infraction had been the act of a free man, and the state exacted its price for such freedom by treating him as a dissident. Dallow's plan of action once he realizes his homesickness for the cell is to look for work, that is, to rejoin the society from which he had been excluded; it is by no means a repudiation of his more profound longing for unfreedom.

Thus the meaning that Dallow extracts from his jail term is only partly valid. He thinks, correctly, that the smooth progress of his life has been disrupted and that he has lost sight of the future, but he never becomes conscious of the deeper relation between the conditions of life inside and outside of the cell. Having discovered significance in his past, he has a reason to remember, though in a limited way: he becomes like Horn, clinging to a conviction of personal injury at the hands of unscrupulous individuals—in Horn's case, his comrades, while in Dallow's, the judge, prosecutor, and lawyer. Both men suffered expulsion from a community, and both refuse to accept the ideological rationale for their suffering, insisting instead on complete exoneration. The difference between the two men, and the two books, is that Der Tangospieler is a satire: Dallow seeks to establish that he was truly, perfectly innocent of political motives, that he was a good, obedient, disengaged citizen despite appearances, and that he should never have been punished for the crime of independent thought. This is how his determination to remember the wrongs done to him should be read—in light of Horn's relatively (though not absolutely) selfless pursuit of truth in the face of ideological fantasy. Hein puts into Dallow's mouth a virtual parody of Horn's refusal, according to Kruschkatz, to forget or to learn anything from his fall:

“Kannst du nicht vergessen?” fragte Elke unvermittelt.

Dallow brauchte einen Moment, um zu begreifen, wovon sie sprach. “Ich will es nicht. … Ich will nichts vergessen, und ich will nichts verzeihen.”

(DT 181–2)

[“Can't you forget? asked Elke abruptly.

Dallow needed a moment to understand what she was getting at. “I don't want to. … I don't want to forget anything, and I don't want to forgive anything, either.”]

(TTP 191–192)

Dallow's primary argument for his innocence resonates with various associations he doesn't intend. Beginning with the prison official who processes his release, Dallow tells anyone who asks that he is a piano player by trade (6; 4). Close to a dozen times, he recites the same explanation for his misfortune and guiltlessness: “Ich war nur der Pianist” [I was only the piano player: 136, 142; 144, 150], “Ich war nur der Tangospieler” [I was only the tango player: three times 136–143; 144–151]), “Ich bin nur ein Kellner. … Und früher war ich ein Tangospieler” [I'm just a waiter … and once I was a tango player: 199; 213]. As he tries to explain at his trial, Dallow means by this that he had nothing to do with the words his piano playing accompanied, and that his role in the affair was incidental as well as accidental. Yet with so many repetitions, it is hard not to begin hearing “I was just the piano player” as “I was only following orders,” in others words as a disingenuous profession of non-involvement and guiltlessness. This standard defense of concentration camp guards and other war criminals cannot be taken at face value; the implication seems to be that in some sense, he is indeed guilty of something, though Hein does not explicitly state what.

To grasp the nature of Dallow's actions, it is necessary to look at how piano-playing and paralysis operate in the book as metaphors. Dallow suffers from recurring paralysis in his right hand; meanwhile, he refuses to play the piano (or is incapable of it) until the final pages of the book. The paralysis strikes him whenever he is confronted directly by state power, as at the beginning while being discharged from prison, or during his dealings with the Stasi-men Müller and Schulze, or at the conclusion when he imagines being crushed by an armored vehicle. Twice he attempts to play the piano: unsuccessfully, after deciding that he must find a job and stop his aimless drifting, and successfully, at the conclusion, once he has his old job back. Paralysis is a clear enough symbol of helplessness in the face of superior power, but its significance for Dallow's politically-colored musicianship is subtler. He is quite right to regard his playing at the student cabaret as a minor, subordinate aspect of the whole production, and indeed the role of musical accompanist may be equated with Dallow's former (and future) role in his society: as a minor collaborator in his government's comprehensive program of ideological indoctrination, as a fully subservient “intellectual” committed to nothing except following the rules set by the state (whatever they may be—why bother reading the words before playing along?), in return for which he is guaranteed a comfortable life as an academic. In Hein's fictive universe, moreover, Dallow represents the worst possible subspecies of compromised intellectual: a compromised hack historian, someone who perverts the essential cultural work of history-writing into partisan drivel, while obscuring other, real historical truths.

When Dallow sits down to the piano in the final scene, after Warsaw Pact troops have invaded Czechoslovakia and Dallow has been restored to his former position at the university, he again plays an accompaniment:

Dallow … schaltete den Fernseher an und ging ins Bad, um sich lange zu duschen. Dann setzte er sich mit einer Flasche Vodka an das Klavier. Er hatte den Ton des Fernsehers abgedreht und sah auf die sich bewegenden Bilder. Er spielte laut und wild die kleinen, ihm geläufigen Klavierstücke von Chopin und sah dem stummen Film seines Fernsehgerätes zu, der Soldaten zeigte, die von der Bevölkerung begrüβt und offenbar von Armeegenerälen besucht wurden. Frauen mit kleinen Kindern auf dem Arm warfen Blumen zu den auf ihren Panzern sitzenden Soldaten, andere Bilder zeigten Prager Bürger in freundschaftlichen Gespräch mit den Soldaten. Dallow trank in kurzer Zeit die Flasche aus, stellte den Fernseher ab und ging ins Schlaffzimmer. Bevor er sich auszog, prüfte er die Klingel des Weckers und stellte ihn dann. Er wollte am nächsten Morgen pünktlich im Institut sein.

(DT 205–206)

[Dallow … turned on the television, and went to the bathroom to take a long shower. Then he opened a bottle of vodka and sat down at the piano. He had turned down the volume on the television and was watching the pictures. He played the little Chopin he knew by heart, loudly and uncontrolled, as the silent film played on. It showed soldiers being greeted by the local population and reviewed by high-ranking generals. Women with small children were tossing flowers to the troops sitting on their tanks; in another scene citizens of Prague were making friendly conversation with the soldiers. Dallow soon finished the bottle, turned off the television, and went into the bedroom. Before he undressed he checked to make sure his alarm clock was working and then set it. He wanted to be at the Institute on time the next morning.]

(TTP 219–220)

The fabricated history spewing out of the television finds in Dallow an able accompanist. Dutifully playing along, he prepares to go to work the next morning as a historian of forgetting. As in his performance with the student cabaret, Dallow ignores what is actually being said: the television sound is turned off, and Dallow is free to claim complete indifference to the contents of the broadcast, which Hein describes in a deadpan socialist-optimistic manner. In this parody of political disinterest, the uninvolved individual is really an active supporter of the prevailing powers, playing along, avoiding trouble, just following orders. Herr Dozent Dr. Dallow's utter disinterest in his chosen field of modern history presents a somewhat extreme example of how separated theory and practice can become in a repressive state, but the portrayal is not totally incredible. As someone who has learned to ignore, for personal advantage, even the most glaring contradictions in his life and society, Dallow is a travesty of the “really existing” Socialist New Man.

Hein thus leaves no doubt that Dallow should be understood as the opposite of a true historian. Though living in 1968 in the GDR, he lacks any interest in the social upheavals taking place in Czechoslovakia and Poland. Hein's flat, impersonal, yet highly concrete, almost Kleist-like narrative style allows him to draw his protagonist against a background of incidental news reports, overheard conversations, and other references to the political events that barely graze Dallow's consciousness. Thus newspapers, for example, play a large role in the book as a gauge of Dallow's interest in the world around him and a demonstration of his aversion to thinking about it. After his release, when he finds a number of old newspapers in his mailbox, he merely reflects that the news stories they contain must have been much less important than they pretended to be at the time (10; 9). Later he tries with little success (having paid no attention to such matters before) to decipher a newspaper's evasive reports about the socialist reform movements:

Er las zwei kurze Artikel über Warschau und Prag, denen er nicht mehr entnehmen konnte, als daβ die Zeitungsredaktion mit groβer Anteilnahme und tiefer Sorge nicht näher benannte Vorgänge in diesen Städten beobachtete.

(DT 106)

[He read two short articles about Warsaw and Prague, from which he could only gather that the newspaper's editors were following certain events in these cities with great interest and deep concern, though what these events were remained unclear.]

(TTP 111)

At this point he makes plans to subscribe to a newspaper, not in order to follow the news more closely, but to help kill time:

In der Zelle waren es seine angenehmsten Stunden gewesen, die er mit dem Lesen der Zeitung verbracht hatte. Er hoffte, daβ ihm die Tageszeitung auch jetzt, auβerhalb der Gefängnismauern eine vergleichbare, interresselose Beschäftigung verschaffen könnte. Er hoffte, mit ihr die viele freie Zeit totzuschlagen.

(DT 106)

[In his cell he had spent his most pleasant hours that way. Now, on the outside, he hoped the newspaper would provide him with a similarly mindless activity. He hoped it would help him kill some of his abundant free time.]

(TTP 111–112)

The notion that newspapers could serve the same purpose in or out of jail underscores the lack of any real difference between these two conditions for Dallow. Read psychologically, Dallow's desire to resume “killing time” is a sign of his latent yearning for the security of the prison cell; read as political allegory, it is a sign of his imprisonment within a totalitarian society whose most successful citizens are those who acquiesce fully in their own subjugation. The manner in which Dallow reads, with “teilnahmloser Aufmerksamkeit” [indifferent, detached attention: 105; 111], can be understood equally well as a description of his relation to society. As in Horn's single-minded commitment to the reality of the wrong done him, “indifferent, detached attention” is another botched approximation of what Hein sees as the ideal historiographic attitude, writing without “passion and prejudice.” His distance from the ideal, however, is instructive: the chronicler remains dispassionate in order to make facts available for the construction of truth, whereas Dallow has no more complex motivations than self-interest and boredom. His attentiveness to events is wholly sterile, leading to no synthesis in his life or professional work, and his claim to political neutrality looks plausible only until his de facto involvement in history restores him unexpectedly to his university job. It is hard to escape the conclusion that this is a moment he has been waiting for, and in fact he is being rewarded for waiting rather than acting, for letting events control him rather than actively participating, which would mean overcoming his social alienation.

Dallow's bizarre detachment from the convulsions within the socialist world emerges most clearly from his encounters with people who exhibit a degree of political engagement. While he simply ignores the barrage of political commentary over Western radio (172; 181, and elsewhere) he displays condescension or puzzlement when confronted with other people's interest. Waiting for Harry at the bar on the first night after his release, Dallow sneers at the “junge, unreife Gesichter” [young, immature faces: 15; 14] of the students he hears discussing politics. (Evidently, a more mature attitude toward politics—such as Dallow's—would preclude having actual convictions, let alone loud public discussion of them.) Dallow's dismissal of student enthusiasm is redressed later, when the news of the invasion of Czechoslovakia brings Dallow's current bed partner to tears. She is horrified by Dallow's lack of concern:

“Ich kann nicht verstehen, daβ dich so etwas kalt läβt,” sagte das Mädchen entsetzt.

“Ich bin nur ein Kellner,” gab Dallow zu bedenken.

Das Mädchen protestierte. “Du bist ein lebendiger Mensch, du bist …”

Dallow unterbrach sie und wandte freundlich ein: “Und früher war ich ein Tangospieler. Aber das ist lange her.”

(DT 199)

[“I can't understand how you can be so indifferent,” she said, somewhat horrified.

“I'm just a waiter,” Dallow answered her.

The girl protested. “You're a living human being, you're a …”

Dallow interrupted, objecting in a friendly voice, “Yes, and once I was a tango player. But that was a long time ago.”]

(TTP 213)

Dallow's standard demurral, “I was just the tango player,” looks the more cynical for its juxtaposition with the student's unaffected grief over the crushing of the Prague Spring. Not even Müller and Schulze, the Stasi-men, can fathom Dallow's disengagement, especially in view of his profession and specialty. They are disappointed when they try to enlist Dallow as an ally in the current difficult political situation:

[Schulze speaking.] “Sie sind Historiker. Sie kennen die tschechische und slowakische Geschichte. Sie sind für uns von Interesse, gerade in dieser Zeit.”

Dallow unterbrach ihn: “Ich beschäftigte mich mit dem 19. Jahrhundert. Die Gegenwart hat mich nie interessiert. Und Politiker fanden meine Aufmerksamkeit erst, wenn sie vermodert waren. Sie sind dann wesentlich aufrichtiger.”

Schulze lächelte.

“Geben Sie sich keine Mühe,” sagte Dallow grob, “was da in Prag passiert, kümmert mich so viel.” Er schnipste mit den Fingern. “Und auβerdem arbeite ich nicht mehr als Historiker. Schon lange nicht mehr. Zuletzt war ich Tangospieler. …”

(DT 151)

[“You're a historian, with a specialty in Czech and Slovak history. We're very interested in that, especially right now.”

Dallow interrupted him. “My specialty is the nineteenth century. Current events have never interested me. And politicians only attract my attention once they've started to moulder in the grave. They're a lot more honest then.”

Schulze smiled.

“Don't trouble yourselves,” said Dallow curtly. “What's going on in Prague concerns me this much.” He snapped his fingers. “And anyway, I'm not a historian anymore. I haven't been for a long time. My last job was as a tango player. …]

(TTP 159–160)

The secret policemen leave immediately and promise not to return after Dallow assures them that he cares nothing for politics. This suggests that although the regime may genuinely have hoped to win Dallow over as an active co-worker, an equally acceptable outcome is for him to withdraw completely from political life. Hein virtually acknowledges the exaggeration of his protagonist's withdrawal by placing him among a group of more realistically drawn characters at a birthday party, some of whom try to involve him in a conversation about Czech politics. As so often in the book, Dallow responds with a seemingly ingenuous disinterest that bespeaks more satire than plausibility:

Einer der Männer erkundigte sich nach Dallows Ansichten und fragte, ob er Dubcek Chancen einräume, politisch zu überleben.

“Ich habe keine Ahnung,” antwortete ihm Dallow, “und es interessiert mich auch nicht.”

Er sagte es freundlich und betont liebenswürdig, aber das Gespräch verstummte, und alle sahen zu ihm.

“Das kann nicht Ihr Ernst sein,” sagte der Mann, der ihn angesprochen hatte. “In diesem Fall wären Sie der einzige Mensch in diesem Land, den die Ereignisse in Prag nicht beschäftigen. So oder so ist doch da jeder engagiert.”

Dallow zuckte bedauernd mit den Schultern und erwiderte nichts.

“Aber Sie sind doch Historiker,” sagte ein Mädchen, “das hat Elke mir erzählt. Ich dachte, gerade Sie müβte das dort interessieren.”

Dallow lächelte sie freundlich an und korrigierte höflich: “Ich bin Pianist.” Und erläuternd fügte er hinzu: “Tangospieler.”

(DT 158–9)

[One of the men wanted to know what Dallow thought and asked whether he thought Dubcek had any chances of surviving politically.

“I have no idea,” Dallow answered. “I'm really not interested.”

He said it in a friendly manner, but it stopped the conversation and everyone looked his way.

“You can't really mean that,” said the man who had put the question to him. “In that case you must be the only one in the whole country who isn't totally preoccupied with what's happening in Prague. One way or another we're all involved.”

Dallow shrugged his shoulders to indicate his regret but did not respond.

“But you're a historian,” said one woman, “Elke told me. I would think you'd be more interested than anybody.”

Dallow gave her a friendly smile and corrected her politely: “I'm a piano player.” And then he added, by way of explanation, “A tango player.”]

(TTP 167–168)

As justification for his uncommunicativeness, Dallow finally announces that he spent two years in prison. The man questioning him replies “Ja, und?” [Well, so what?: 160; 170], a laconic critique of the martyrstance Dallow shares with Horn. In spite of their personal suffering, they face the same choices and responsibilities as all their fellow citizens; history has not halted for them or granted them a special dispensation.

As grim and absurd as his past experience may be, Dallow still must find a way to survive in society, either submitting uncritically to political power or finding some more or less critical relation to it (escape being virtually impossible, except perhaps in death). His choice is mirrored in the seaside Windflüchter, the deformed trees that survive by bowing and twisting before the wind. His admiration for the stubborn persistence of these trees, which have found a way “mit ihrer Bedrückung zu leben” [to live with their oppression: 192; 205], mirrors his desire to accommodate himself unquestioningly to the powers that be. Dallow even accepts this flight from history consciously: the Windflüchter symbolize for him the simple route out of his personal “Labyrinth” (192; 205–206). During his drive back to Leipzig and to his old job, he encounters a concrete manifestation of his historical circumstances and the choices open to him: a column of military vehicles returning from Czechoslovakia. In a scene reminiscent of the tank episode in Der fremde Freund, Dallow has a waking dream of being crushed by an armored vehicle:

Ein Schützenpanzerfahrzeug blieb zehn Meter vor ihm stehen, er sah das blasse, übernächtigte Gesicht des jungen Soldaten. Halbe Kinder, dachte Dallow. Er starrte den Soldaten an, der offenbar Mühe hatte, die Augen offenzuhalten. Er stellte sich vor, der Junge würde die Gewalt über den Panzerwagen verlieren. Er sah, wie der Eisenkoloβ plötzlich aus der Reihe brach und sich mit schlingernden Bewegungen auf ihn zu bewegte. Die riesigen Reifen rollten langsam heran und drückten die Fensterscheiben des kleinen Autos ein. Das Panzerfahrzeug schob Dallow in seinem Wagen vor sich her, stieβ ihn in den Straβengraben und überrollte ihn schlieβlich. Er sah sich selbst zu, wie er in seinem sich überschlagenden Wagen ruhig sitzen blieb, die verkrampfte, schmerzende Hand um den Lenker gekrallt, bis er, noch immer lächelnd, in dem Auto zerquetscht wurde. Dallow träumte mit offenen Augen, während die Armeefahrzeuge bereits wieder weiterfuhren. Er stellte sich die Szene so lebhaft vor, daβ er schwitzte. Er bemerkte das Zittern seiner rechten Hand und nahm sie vom Steuer, aber schon nach einigen Sekunden lieβ das Zittern nach, der befürchtete Krampf blieb aus.

“Das hätte es sein können,” sagte Dallow laut zu sich und massierte die Hand, “vielleicht wars meine letzte Chance.”

(DT 204–5)

[A light attack tank stopped thirty feet away from him; he could see the young soldier's face, made pale by lack of sleep. They're practically children, thought Dallow. He stared at the soldier, who seemed to have trouble keeping his eyes open. He imagined the boy losing control of the tank, he pictured the iron colossus suddenly breaking away and swerving right in his direction. The giant treads slowly rolled onto his little car, shattering the windows. The tank shoved the car forward, plowing it into a ditch, and then rolled on over. He saw his car caving in while he quietly sat inside, his hand cramped with pain, clawing the steering wheel until he was finally crushed, still smiling.

Dallow sat dreaming with open eyes as the army vehicles continued on their way. He had imagined the scene so vividly that he broke out in a sweat. He noticed that his right hand was shaking and he took it off the steering wheel, but it only took a few seconds before the shaking subsided; the cramp he so feared never came.

“That could have been it,” Dallow said to himself aloud and rubbed his hand, “maybe it was my last chance.”]

(TTP 218–219)

Like Claudia's remembered tank, this errant “light attack tank” stands unambiguously for socialism's “final argument”—brute force. It has just returned from Prague, where individuals had dared exercise autonomy, and having put a stop to that, it now threatens Dallow, confronting him with a clear illustration of the absolute state power he has been rather foolishly toying with. Dallow may debate with himself whether or not to seek work, whether or not to forget the wrong done him, but his body knows the truth: the paralyzed right hand is the physical counterpart to his loss of autonomy, which, as always in Hein, is both state- and self-imposed. The “last chance” that Dallow almost passes up is the chance to bend in the appropriate direction before the prevailing political wind. Such an accommodation to power is no guarantee of personal security (after all, a tank rolls over whatever is in its path, arbitrarily), but it is nonetheless safer than rebellion (as Horn's fate proved). Such a precarious pragmatism proves far more reliable than the rigid, ideologically guided rationalism of Roessler, Dallow's successor and rival at the institute. Thinking himself safe from a fall because of his faithfulness to the Party line, Roessler misunderstands the essence of his society: it is founded on force, which is irrational, not on ideology, which serves only to rationalize brutality. Roessler may be a better historian than Dallow (he remembers the socialist regime's public statements and points to Germany's experience as an aggressor in the Second World War as evidence that the GDR would never invade its neighbor), but he fails miserably as an opportunist. Greed, fear, and the hunger for power, not ideology, are the operative historical forces in Hein's GDR; with belief in the officially promulgated ideology in fact a pitfall to which intellectuals are prone, the truly prudent intellectual learns to emulate rationality without either believing in it or acting upon it.

When Dallow overcomes his paralysis and sits down to play the piano once again, his autonomy, his physical freedom to act, is really a mockery of freedom. He is once again, and now for the first time consciously, “just the tango player,” accommodating himself to history and its political vicissitudes. Physically he escaped being crushed by the tank, but spiritually he dreamed the plain truth. With his reinstatement and his new attitude, he can count on living happily ever after, a good citizen of the GDR. Of course, good citizenship means complete, agile obeisance to authority, and the utter renunciation of a personal viewpoint. Dallow, always detached, always apolitical, has had the potential all along, like Claudia, to be an ideal citizen. But where Claudia is almost purely reactive to her society, virtually its logical consequence, Dallow is the more ominous representative of perverted intellect in the active service of power. He is a historian of forgetting, the faithful lackey of power, whatever power. Even Dallow's resentful memory of the wrong done him reveals an attitude surprisingly close to the desires of the government: if he gets his job back, everything is forgiven and forgotten; no broader social questions need be raised. Thus the regime functions on a wholly corrupt basis, ruling by bribes and terror, and so requiring individuals to accept willingly the bribes and endure the terror as the price of possible success. The individual who plays along best with this game of self-interest prospers; one who resists it on principle gets nowhere, or ends up like Horn.

Hein's narratives about history, historians, and historiography portray individuals forced to act against a historical background they would, in most cases, prefer not to acknowledge, and it is precisely this yearning to disengage from society, politics, and history that guarantees the recurrence of history as a nightmare of repression and war. To assist the powers that be in tailoring history for political ends is the greatest and most nearly suicidal crime that intellectuals can commit. Hein's writings, along with those of such diverse authors as Christa Wolf, Heiner Müller, and Günter de Bruyn, played an inestimable role during the waning years of the GDR in creating the Öffentlichkeit, the atmosphere of dialogue and multiple viewpoints, that would have fateful political consequences in the fall of 1989. As the messy, confusing, and disillusioning job of rebuilding Eastern Europe proceeds, and the political exigencies (and score-settling) of unified Germany generate new distortions of that country's catastrophic recent history, it should not be forgotten that the artists and intellectuals of East Germany were among those who sparked and led the revolution that ended Communism in Europe. Hein's parables of corrupt socialist intellectuals surely deserve credit for keeping alive the possibility of an alternative. His determination to chronicle rather than spin ideological fantasies remains instructive for intellectuals of the post-socialist world, the chronicle of which must also one day be written.

Notes

1. In the epigraph to his story, Hein notes: “Zum Lever, der Zeremonie des königlichen Aufstehens, geladen zu sein, galt als besondere Gunst am französischen Hof” [To be invited to the Rising, the ceremony of the royal getting-out-of-bed, was a mark of special favor at the French Court: NUFM 118]. The “Lever Bourgeois” to which the reader is invited is presumably another matter.

2. See also “Anmerkungen zu Cromwell,” 173–74.

3. “In schools and universities, and in our daily newspapers, history has been and still is conveyed to us in just one way: Everything that happened in the past was a necessary, purposeful expression of the historical world-spirit, leading ultimately to this state [that is, the GDR], to this society, to us. We are the victors of history, we heard through long years of schooling. The associated thrill of victory and joy was counteracted not solely by a number of unpleasant everyday realities; what truly astonishes is the lack of dialectical thinking in this account of history that claims to invoke dialectic” (Hein, “Die fünfte Grundrechenart” 62).

4. A principle source of biographical information on Racine is his son, Louis, who was a young boy at the time of his father's death, and “whose laudable aim” in his Mémoires “was to whitewash his father” (Brereton 154) by emphasizing his virtues.

5. Hein even exaggerates the gulf between the two phases in Racine's life by avoiding mention of the two late plays, Esther and Athalie, which were commissioned in the late 1680s by the king's morganatic wife, Madame de Maintenon, for her girls' school. Saintsbury notes that this late productivity was the result of a “conjunction of the two reigning passions of the latter part of [Racine's] life—devoutness and obsequiousness to the court” (208).

6. Meanwhile, doctrinaire Marxist criticism of “Einladung zum Lever Bourgeois” accused Hein of identifying with Racine by himself relying on “an insinuation, an ironic remark, a despairing laugh” to make his points. Krumrey scolds him disingenuously for employing this “exceedingly deformed type of communication” (145) instead of expressing himself directly (and thereby precluding publication in the GDR altogether, one imagines).

7. Fischer even sees the anti-government pamphlet Racine allegedly wrote toward the end of his life (and which Hein includes in his story) as a symptom of the courtier's spiritual illness: “Racine's revolutionary act is that of a sick and bitter old man who at the end of his life is seeking to find some value in it after the many political and personal sacrifices he has made …” (“Einladung” 128).

8. Hein acknowledges similarities between Racine's situation and his own: Racine “is dependent on patrons, and in order to do the work that is really important to him, he has to accept some unbearable things. Restrictions that conflict with his planned life and work. This surely applies to us in our time as well. If I am to accomplish certain important things—important to me, but larger than me as well—then I have to accept certain things that are unbearable, or let's say, not accept, but endure them” (“Wir werden es lernen müssen” 58). This succinct description of the position of the artist in an oppressive state applies even better to Hein than to his version of Racine, whose work actually seems to dry up as a consequence of his accommodations with power. Hein, however, successfully took on the task of the chronicler once circumstances temporarily forced him to abandon the stage.

9. Cf. Sevin, who ties the narrative complexity and ambiguity of Horns Ende directly to the level of historical consciousness possessed (or lacked) by East Germans in the 1980s. The task of the reader, when confronted with the fragmentary picture of Guldenberger crimes such as the murder of Frau Gohl, the denunciation of Herr Horn, and the persecution of the Gypsies, is to investigate in him- or herself continuities with the German past (203). However, I would resist Sevin's near-dismissal of Kruschkatz's historical relativism, which, though entangled with the Bürgermeister's destructive opportunism, I think is not wholly discredited by events in the novel. As will become clear from the explication below of Horn's and Spodeck's views about history, Hein does not oppose relativism to absolute truth. Though no relativist in a moral sense, Hein seems to propose an understanding of history that emphatically renounces any appeal to absolute reality. “History” is always something more relevant to the present than the past; consequently its “truth” is a political construct, a space for the working of Öffentlichkeit.

10. Yet Spodeck's admiration for Horn exists side by side with the conviction that he died a coward, in disgrace (HE 193). Kruschkatz and Thomas also label Horn a coward, a fact discussed below.

11. Perhaps deadline pressures account for the far simpler view of the reviewer at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, who describes Kruschkatz as one who “always represents as political necessity that which furthers his career” (Wittstock).

12. McKnight similarly describes Kruschkatz as a would-be materialist who cannot escape some taint of idealism, as opposed to Spodeck, a pure idealist who thinks (falsely) that he can detach himself from society, that is, the material world (“Ein Mosaik” 421).

13. Hein fully endorses this declaration by Horn (“‘Wir werden es lernen müssen’” 65–6).

14. Claas notes that the mirror metaphor in Spodeck's remarks recalls Thomas's attempts to see past his own gazing eye into the infinite series of images produced by a pair of mirrors: “‘It didn't work. I always ended up looking myself in the eye.’ Only the perspective of the viewer, leading back to the viewer, can be seen on the direct path of the reflection.” Analogously, Spodeck believes that the partial view afforded us of history always will be taken falsely as the whole truth, the holes filled in according to individual predilection. “The perspective puzzle occupying the half-grown Thomas turns up again in this conversation as a problem of historical truth” (17).

15. This view of history as an interpretive activity may indicate how Hein understands the assumption by Benjamin that the photographs occupy a special status as “pieces of evidence about the historical process”: Benjamin is not naively assuming that photography objectively records historic fact, rather he senses the importance of the illusion of objectivity it offers, and perceives in the habits of moviegoers a critical consciousness capable of resolving that illusion into technique, and thence into historical process, that is, class struggle. For Benjamin, photography is merely the most shameless attempt to date to present a historically conditioned worldview as “objective” and “natural.” The question remains, as Hein shows in his essay, of whether or not a new critical consciousness necessarily accompanies the new technical medium.

16. Münz harshly condemns Schlötel for this anarchistic stance (300–301), but in that play as well as in Horns Ende, Hein seems to take a more complex view of his idealist-anarchists. Their status as victims is real, regardless of the degree to which it is self-victimization. Indeed, as the discussion of Der fremde Freund showed, characters' motivations are sometimes inseparable from the historical and social realities that shape them.

17. Löffler warns his East German readers (and more importantly, his ideologically-minded colleagues) against misunderstanding Horn as a model for Thomas or anyone else:

    The task of remembering Horn, used as a way into the process of remembering generally, inclines the reader to directly and constantly infer a connection between Horn and the biography of the narrator. The danger lies in mistaking Horn, who is seen only through the eyes of others, for a moral and political standard by which these others can be judged. He is no such standard. His retreat into truth as an abstraction not only renders him incapable of resisting the political intrigues against him, it also renders him incapable of forming human bonds. As if the character who disappoints both Thomas and Gertrude could be taken for a role model. Of course, the radical consequences of his life do compel the others to look more sharply at themselves—but not to measure themselves against him!

    (1486)

    Horn is, of course, a more complex and contradictory character than Löffler indicates; he is indeed partly a model. Löffler, however, probably wants to mollify the hostile authorities who had largely succeeded in keeping mention of Horns Ende out of the East German press.

18. Darnton gives an interesting description of the behind-the-scenes maneuvering that led to the book's publication (213).

19. It is interesting to note how Milan Kundera handles such a confrontation with the meaninglessness of imprisonment. In The Joke, the protagonist suffers through a similar incident and similar imprisonment, except that for Kundera, the joke really is meaningless, really is a joke, and the attempt to get revenge boomerangs into a joke on the perpetrator. In Hein, the joke is that there is no rationality to this society (including at the end, when a rational man loses and Dallow wins). Only the reader becomes aware of the joke, which is what makes this book a satire while Kundera's is a farce. Yet both writers are talking about the same thing—the impossibility of being rational, of making sense, of living in a meaningful way in a society based on arbitrary power. Even a joke needs a reference point of rationality to be effective.