SOURCE: Jackman, Graham. “The Fear of Allegory: Benjaminian Elements in Christoph Hein's The Distant Lover.” New German Critique 66, no. 66 (fall 1995): 164–92.

[In the following excerpt, Jackman explores the influence of German art theorist Walter Benjamin on the structure of allegory in Hein's The Distant Lover.]

Christoph Hein's knowledge of and interest in the work of Walter Benjamin is unmistakable. Almost all his major essays contain explicit references to Benjamin, to whom he referred in 1983 as “probably the most important and exemplary German art theorist of our century.”¹ It is thus hardly surprising that critical studies of Hein's dramatic and narrative work have found evidence of Benjamin's influence.²

The Distant Lover³ receives relatively little attention in Zekert's dissertation on Hein and Benjamin, nor has Benjamin figured prominently in the critical work on The Distant Lover.⁴ Discussion of this text has focused mainly on psychological and social aspects, most notably in the essays by David Roberts, Slibar and Volk, and Dwars.⁵ The aim of this essay is to investigate links between Hein's Novelle and Benjamin's conception of allegorical art as expounded in The Origin of German Tragic Drama and developed in his later writings on Baudelaire, and thus also to shed light on some thematic and formal aspects of The Distant Lover, especially within the cultural and political context of the GDR.⁶ …

How does Benjamin's conception of allegory relate to The Distant Lover? The latter is, on the face of it, an essentially realist text, a first-person narrative set in a precisely described setting with a coherent, continuous temporal structure. Benjamin's remarks on the historical occurrences of allegory do not preclude the notion of a late twentieth-century form of allegory, even under socialism, if that age provides a similar experience of a devalued reality. My argument is, first, that the text includes echoes of and allusions to themes, motifs, and ideas from Benjamin's writings on allegory and, secondly, that Benjamin's concept of allegory, in both early and later versions, provides a useful conceptual tool for understanding important aspects of the work's form and thematic content.⁷ The text, I shall argue, betrays allegorical tendencies along Benjaminian lines, but its narrator Claudia either is unaware of or resists these, preferring to cling to the appearance of realism, just as she denies her melancholia and protests, against the evidence offered by her own narrative, that “I'm fine” (DL 178). That the lady doth protest too much is obvious to any reader and the causes of her condition have been extensively discussed by critics; however, the reasons for her resistance to full self-knowledge and its implications for the work's form have been less fully explored. Benjamin's conception of allegory seems to me to offer a helpful way of approaching these questions.

Most critics of The Distant Lover have seen Claudia as an example of “alienation” [Entfremdung] in modern, technological society. It would be no less appropriate, however, to use instead Benjamin's term “melancholy”; in his terms she might be thought of as a potential allegorist, for Hein's portrayal of her corresponds closely to Benjamin's analysis of post-renaissance mourning in which the allegorising disposition was rooted. Though she is scientifically educated and a member of the GDR's elite, Claudia's attitude to her profession is akin to that invoked in Dürer's Melencolia I.⁸ Like Dürer's figure, she is a contemplator [Grüblerin not very helpfully translated as “introvert” in DL] and a “scholar” (OGT 140), familiar with Freudian and other forms of psychoanalysis. But if she occasionally buys a book on recent research, she also states, “I usually don't have the energy to read it” (DL 140).

Her apathetic personal relationships—with Henry, her parents, and her colleagues—are well summed up in Benjamin's words: “deadening of the emotions … distance between the self and the surrounding world … depersonalization” (OGT 140). Significantly, when Benjamin refers to acedia, he relates it to just that infidelity—“unfaithfulness” (OGT 156)—which afflicts also every other marital or sexual relationship within Hein's text: those of her sister, her colleague Anne (DL 10–11), her friends Charlotte and Michael Kramer (DL Chap. 4), the dentist Fred and his wife Maria (DL Chap. 6), as well as in several other brief cameos (DL 62–63, 162).

Another of Benjamin's phrases in the same passage seems especially apposite: “alienation from the body” (more explicitly rendered in the German: “Entfremdung vom eigenen Körper”—from one's own body [OGT 140).⁹ Such a sensation occurs in Hein's picture of Claudia undergoing the indignities of her abortion: “I've gone under, deep below my consciousness, below my self. … I'm afraid of … having to accept this body as my own” (DL 90, italics mine—GMJ). The entire process is one form of the sexual violence which recurs in the text: “of seeing my legs forcibly spread apart, strapped down. … Between my legs their voices, the gentle clinking of instruments …” Like Cronos, “the mournful, dethroned and dishonored god” (OGT 150),¹⁰ Claudia feels herself violated by her abortions, through which the children she might have born are “devoured” and as a result of which she is left at the end, like Cronos, facing “eternal sterility” (OGT 150).¹¹ Such a condition, which pervades the portrayal of sexual and emotional life throughout the work, is precisely that devaluation of the physical world which Benjamin sees as the precondition for allegory.

Finally, Benjamin's description of the melancholic's experience of time—“The image of the moving hand is … essential to the representation of the non-qualitative, repeatable time of the mathematical sciences” (OGT 96–99)¹²—is echoed in Claudia's portrayal of her alienated sense of existence: the coming of summer time is “an intrusion on time, an interruption of its regular, unwavering course. My life … runs along with the stupidity of a plumb bob, with the unchanging movement of a pendulum. … A movement that leads nowhere, holds no surprises, no deviations … and no irregularities …” (DL 167).¹³

In addition to these similarities between Benjamin's picture of melancholy and Hein's portrayal of Claudia, three specific features of The Distant Lover suggest a link with The Origin of German Tragic Drama and Benjamin's later theory of allegory. The first is Hein's use of the ruin-motif. For Benjamin the ruin is the representation of “natural history”—“in this guise history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay,” a vision which, he says, found expression in the “baroque cult of ruins” (OGT 178).¹⁴ In a crucial passage in the fifth chapter of The Distant Lover, Claudia photographs a ruined mill. It is set amid natural surroundings; but as with the baroque dramatists—for whom nature appeared “not … in bud and bloom, but in the over-ripeness and decay of her creations. In nature they saw eternal transience” (OGT 179)—so too here the scene is characterized by the “transience” of natural and man-made things alike:

… fragments of walls and rotting beams … pipes and pieces of iron hidden among the stinging nettles. … Odds and ends were lying around on top—an old radio, rusty garden tools. … Also earth, wisps of straw, and in the groove of an iron girder, a puddle of water with an oily violet film … the skinny birch … its twisted crown bent toward the outside, toward the open field, longing for the forest … a baby carriage without wheels … the dark willows on the riverbank that were probably already dead.

(DL 55–56)

This particular photographic expedition is no exception; Claudia's favorite subjects are “landscapes—trees, paths, rocks, tumble down houses, lifeless wood” (DL 86), an echo of Benjamin's quotation from Harsdörffer: “lifeless objects, forests, trees, stones” (OGT 186). The combination of ruin and nature occurs also in the dreamlike opening sequence; the landscape here is depicted in a way which corresponds closely to the scene in chapter five, and in the middle of it is “a bridge … a ruin” (DL 2). This one, however, is no scene of picturesque decay: “Then it ends, splintered, jagged, thrusting into the air, a severed torso” (DL 2)—the word reminds one of Benjamin's emphasis in his final section on the dismembered corpse as baroque emblem par excellence.¹⁵

Claudia's predilection, then, is for “the simple givens of nature [and this for her means a dying nature] and anything nature has reclaimed” (DL 87; italics mine—GMJ). In the world which Hein describes, history is reverting to natural history. Circularity within nature appears to triumph over progress, turning that too into what Hein calls an “an evolutionary cycle” (DL 137–38). His depictions of the environment repeatedly suggest this. Thus the natural scene at the seaside, where Claudia takes her holiday, is no better than the woodland scene of chapter five: the beach is cold, uninviting, “dirty and neglected” (DL 71). In the town, meanwhile, the proud achievements of scientific humanism are threatened by the recurrent invasion of the cockroaches (DL 145).

Hein's text reflects Benjamin's notion that “rational” modern man is threatened by such a fall, a “reversion to a bare state of creation” (OGT 81).¹⁶The Distant Lover provides ample evidence of a similar vision. As if to point to the parallel, the scene at the mill in chapter five leads into Hein's version of the Fall, the virtual rape of Claudia by Harry, complete with serpent. Disturbed sexual relations and even violence are one sign of this fall in The Distant Lover; they figure also in several other of Hein's works. Claudia's acquaintance Fred sees man as a “a set of well functioning genitalia” and talks of “a journey into the human interior, or a visit to the wild beast, the swine within” (DL 69). A passage at the end of chapter six clearly marks this sense of the rational world succumbing to primeval, natural forces; Claudia and Henry sit in the car while it rains outside: “Two survivors at the bottom of the sea. The music on the radio hardly got through to us. Last signals from a distant civilization that the flood might already have washed away” (DL 79–80).

In consequence, the world depicted in the novelle, like the one invoked by Benjamin in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, is under the sign of death. Quite apart from the death of Henry, the occasion for the narrative, and that of Frau Rupprecht with her emblematic “birds of death” (DL 149), the work is dominated by the evidence of aging and the approach of death: “The bones begin to dissolve, the joints degenerate into dust” (DL 137). Claudia's profession of medicine cannot hold up, but only “cover up,” the “evolutionary cycle, back to the amphibians,” despite “cars and escalators, pacemakers and respirators, gold teeth, plastic prostheses, stainless steel plates …” (DL 137–38). Even Benjamin's allegorical symbol of the death's head is not lacking: “… ‘I think I'm losing weight. … My bones are starting to show. Doesn't this look like a skull?,’ says Maria” (DL 74).

The second feature, owing more to later than to earlier Benjamin, is the motif of Claudia's photography. We have already observed that her preferred subjects (which of course become objects!) correspond to the melancholy view of history and nature. Just before the end of the narrative Claudia describes them as: “Trees, landscapes, grasses, wagon roads, dead, decaying wood … soulless images of nature that I created” (DL 177—Hein's phrase, “soulless images of nature” is reminiscent of Benjamin's “soulless world”). She then describes them in a way which corresponds with Benjamin's notion of allegory and with his view of photography as an essentially allegorical process: “‘They're fragments that don't capture anything [die nichts begriffen haben—that have understood nothing]. They lack a horizon, they can't wilt or decay, and thus they also lack hope” (DL 178). They are, in other words, ripped out of their organic context and thus robbed of life, just as Benjamin argues. The ruins which she photographs, themselves already potentially allegorical figures, effectively become second-order allegories—allegory within allegory.

Claudia says that the sense of power and control is an essential aspect of her hobby; developing her films is “a germination that I bring about, control, that I can interrupt. Conception. A chemistry of budding life, in which I'm involved. It was different with my children” (DL 88). Her power here contrasts explicitly with her powerlessness both during her abortions and in the conception of her children: “I felt used by him. … I wasn't consulted, I didn't count. … I was just an object” (DL 88–89). However, we also note her self-delusion; photographs are dead, not living, and cannot, as she admits at the end, replace children.

It is clear that Claudia does not understand, or desire to understand, the significance of her photography: “I don't really know what the point of the whole thing is. I don't ask myself questions like that” (DL 87). Its power as allegory is sensed by her, but feared rather than understood: “Recently I've begun to fear for my photographs.” (Hein actually writes “mich vor meinen Fotos zu fürchten”—“to be afraid of my photographs.”) Dead, yet permanent, as allegories are, they fill the flat: “Soulless images of nature that I created, now threatening to drown me” (DL 177–78).¹⁷

The other clearly allegorical feature, in Benjamin's terms, relates to Claudia's narrative practice. Her account begins with a dreamlike introductory passage, which is set off from the remaining narrative, unexplained yet seeming to offer some way of understanding what follows. Claudia has thus introduced into her account precisely that inner, structural division that Benjamin saw in baroque drama between action and “interlude.” Implicitly, we are confronted with a separation between physical nature (the realist narrative) and significance (the dreamlike introduction).

The detail of the introduction confirms the allegorical effect. The description of landscape and bridge has been wrenched from its context within the narrative proper; parts at least are found in two different passages: chapter five (DL 59) and chapter seven, in which virtually the entire scene, referring explicitly back to chapter five but including the ruined bridge, occurs in Claudia's “dream” during her abortion (DL 91). I have already suggested that the incomplete bridge as ruin should be related to the ruin in chapter five and to Benjamin's reference to “the baroque cult of the ruin.” Here again we encounter what I have termed a second-order allegory.

Characteristically, Claudia is unable to interpret the vision; it is “an image which is unattainable and ultimately incomprehensible to me. Nevertheless present and reassuring amid all that is nameless and inexplicable, of which I am also a part. Finally the desires passes. It's over. Over-real reality, with its everyday, ready-made images, gaudy, loud and forgettable, obtrudes itself. It's better like that” (DL 4; my translation—GMJ). This abandoning of the allegorical effort reads like an further echo of Benjamin:

It is true that the overbearing ostentation, with which the banal object seems to arise from the depths of allegory is soon replaced by its disconsolate everyday countenance; it is true that the profound fascination of the sick man for the isolated and insignificant is succeeded by that disappointed abandonment of the exhausted emblem …

(OGT 185; my italics—GMJ)

The remainder of the text is the outcome of this “abandonment”: a sequence of “everyday, ready-made images,” in which, to use Benjamin's phrase, “feeling revives the empty world in the form of a mask” (OGT 139). For Claudia's narrative has this mask-like quality. Even at first reading one is struck by its almost mechanical, linear structure; a facade of normality is maintained, yet beneath the surface we note its arbitrariness. Individual episodes are characterized by breaks of tone and mood which belie the appearance of harmonious totality.¹⁸ Repeatedly, the text is marked by abrupt changes of tone and mood and by juxtapositions of unrelated or contradictory material. Benjaminian fragmentation marks the narrator's experience of the world but is denied by the “appearance” [Schein] of the narrative order. The potentially allegorical features under discussion here therefore remain unrecognized by her. Just as the GDR's official historical optimism precludes the acknowledgement of melancholy, so too the formal imperatives of Socialist Realism internalized by Claudia permit the allegorist's vision to find expression only in this mask-like form. What Claudia offers us is well summed up by Benjamin's phrase for Baudelaire's writing: “petrified unrest.”

The action of the novelle confirms the parallel and illustrates Benjamin's comments about emplotment in the tragic drama, which arise from its conception of history as characterized at once by decay and the absence of progress. It is marked by the eternal recurrence of the natural cycle. The narrative ends where it begins and is divided into twelve chapters which precisely indicate the changing seasons and the flow of time, covering just one year, as did the relationship with Henry. The death which is the occasion for the narration of Claudia's story is mere chance, arising from a foolish quarrel about nothing and a random blow on the head. It occurs within the narrative with an arbitrariness which suggests the dominance of what Benjamin called “fate” or “fatality” (OGT 129–30).

This structure is indicative of the absence of strong psychological causation. The action begins with a chance meeting, proceeds through mere successiveness, emphasized by the careful chronology, and ends with an absurd, random death. Nothing has changed; apart from a perfunctory announcement on the notice board and a new tenant in Harry's apartment, life in the block of flats continues as before. Benjamin quotes a remark that pre-Shakespearian drama had “‘no proper end, the stream continues in its course’ … its conclusion does not mark the end of an epoch …” (OGT 135); the same is true here too—except, of course, that death is that much nearer. The closing thirteenth chapter, for all its desperate assertions that “I'm fine,” holds no prospect of an ending that would provide meaning but only “menopause … a new car, a first-class institution [die beste aller möglichen Heilanstalten]” (DL 175, 179).

Hein might also have noted Benjamin's comments on the “fatal stage property” as an alternative form of causation and as the embodiment of “fate” in the “tragedy of fate” (OGT 132). Such a role is played in The Distant Lover by Henry's hat. It first takes on emblematic status in relation to Henry's approach to life and his taste for risk-taking and fast driving, and thus acts as a “sign of the approach of death” (OGT 132). It then becomes the immediate cause of his death when youths first make fun of it and then seize it (DL 170). This corresponds to Benjamin's notion of the assumption of power by the “apparently dead objects,” at the prompting of “the passionate stirrings of creaturely life” within Henry (OGT 132).¹⁹

Other features of Claudia's account confirm her as allegorist in Benjamin's sense, albeit an involuntary one. Her narrative style betrays a tendency towards disintegration into a simple sequence of nouns or noun phrases (that is, the collapse of “harmonious totality”), especially when her sense of estrangement, tedium, or distaste is strongest; this can be seen in her account of the funeral (DL 15–16) and her wedding (DL 85). The text also reveals a tendency, noted by several critics, to treat objects allegorically; Dwars, for example, has spoken of an “allegorical compression” in chapter nine.²⁰ In fact, Claudia refers to many objects in a way that makes them something like the “emblems” Benjamin discusses. The block of flats, the lift, the garbage chute into which the dead birds are cast (DL 148), and Henry's car as well as his hat might all be said to enjoy this emblematic status within the text. As Benjamin says, despite the “abandonment” of the initial allegorical emblem of the bridge, “the amorphous details which can only be understood allegorically keep coming up” (OGT 185)—and not only in Claudia's photography.

At times, however, Claudia's capacity for allegorization becomes overt. It is seen on the one hand in the destructive vision which breaks up the constructed reality around her, as in her account of the funeral, which strips the ceremony of its aura to reveal its facticity: “The difficult rites of death. An arrangement: he deliberated, selected … then the rustle of a needle on a record groove, a regular recurrent surge and ebb. … Prescribed songs, prescribed gestures …” (DL 14–15). The same critical function is also seen in her analysis of public language (DL 26), which relates closely to Benjamin's.²¹ At other moments the positive, meaning-giving aspect of allegory is seen, for example, in her reading of the noise of the lift as “the promise of a change long wished for, the sort of hope that fosters patience” (DL 6), or when she sees a woman with a butterfly in her hair and comments: “hope [Versprechen: also “promise”] glittering in her unhappiness, this laughing, laughable butterfly sparkling on her puffy face” (DL 63). The association with “promise” in both passages reflects an inner need imposed upon a single detail ripped from its context.²²

Claudia's tendency to do this is particularly focused on the human body, again in keeping with Benjamin's comments on its allegorical potential. She recalls how, even at the age of sixteen, she began to categorize people by their earlobes and finger nails: “And with the self-righteousness and arrogance of that age, I made firm resolutions, irrevocable decisions, and so ordered my little world” (DL 67). This propensity is seen repeatedly: “His face was irregular, as if it were put together out of two different halves” (DL 22); the woman in the dress shop is reduced to “mouth … lips … hands … breast … neck” (DL 45). It may, of course, be a doctor's habit—it is shared by dentist Fred (DL 67). Is it mere coincidence that Hein reminds us as early as page ten of “the Hippocratic Oath”? As a doctor Claudia sees everywhere—in herself, in others, and in the natural and man-made environment—what Benjamin calls the “facies hippocratica [the face of one near to death] of history” (OGT 166), the effects of time and aging. Like Baudelaire, but in a more literal sense, Claudia sees the corpse not only from without but from within, mentally dissecting the living body to reveal the heart and discussing its allegorical potential:

A slight tear in our tender skin lets the blood gush out. At the sight of an open, beating heart, most people get sick to their stomachs. … Yet this little bundle of flesh and blood has such an important place in our consciousness that it serves as a symbol of our most beautiful feelings. Of course, that's when it's discreetly hidden beneath a more human-seeming surface, covered over with smooth layers of fat and a soft epidermis.

In Benjamin's conception, the separation of mind from body is the starting point for allegory; thus he presents Descartes's dualism as baroque (OGT 217). Towards her patients Claudia embodies this objectivizing knowledge which Benjamin's final chapter sees as central to allegory. Quick to employ modern, Freudian-style theories of repression (DL 98), she is the modern counterpart of Benjamin's “prince,” sovereign through her knowledge, or of his allegorist, “the name-giver … god-like and saintly” (OGT 224). Yet her knowledge is in vain because it is not permitted to operate in her own case; there she prefers repression. She lacks what Benjamin calls, in a reference to Hamlet, “the clear light of self-awareness,” for the lack of which the German tragic drama “remained astonishingly obscure to itself” (OGT 158).

The result is a still more complete division between the body, that is, her instinctual needs and desires, and her mental rationalizations of her situation, which is the central feature of her narrative on the psychological plane. Slibar and Volk have pointed out how her supposedly objective judgements of others in fact reflect her own problems.²³ They also note the ways in which her body involuntarily betrays this repression: “Only the body sends out signals from this territory which has been destroyed by civilization. These are last traces of rebellion against a self-destructive mode of life, against the internalization of a control from without. … Man's physical nature is reduced to the status of object.”²⁴

How, in the light of Benjamin's theory, are Claudia's allegorizing tendencies to be understood? We can best approach this question through his account of Baudelairian allegory. It is helpful here to turn to chapter nine, where Claudia returns to her home town G., implicitly in quest of the source of her problems. Her memories focus especially on her friendship with Katharina, the last occasion on which she experienced an untroubled wholeness of intellect and emotion, for which the forty-year-old Claudia still longs: “The longing for Katharina, for a child's love, for the kind of friendship that only children are capable of.” (DL 176)

What destroys this friendship is in part sexual jealousy (DL 126). Already, external forces are at work alienating the subjective self from the body in its sexual aspects. With the imaginary rape by Herr Gerschke (DL 119–20), sex comes to be associated with violence and with exploitation, which reduces the other to object, and this view obtains throughout the entire text; Claudia's view of her marriage to Hinner merely makes explicit what is equally true of Fred, Anne, Irene, and the casually overheard conversations on the subject (DL 62 and 162): “‘… he was deciding for me, for my body, for my future. A monstrous intervention that would determine my entire life, an intervention in my freedom” (DL 89). Relations between man and woman are seen by Claudia as being based ultimately on the male sense of natural domination; when Henry slaps her face for grabbing the steering wheel it is “an act of divine pedagogy” (DL 135); according to Fred, Maria sees him as “‘the monster, the patriarchal tyrant. Constantly forcing his will and his penis on her’” (DL 68). The violence is thus not merely physical; it involves the imposition of ideas, and opinions, and meanings, along the lines of Lacan's phallogocentrism.

Sexual relations are also characterized by their instability; Claudia appears to encounter only loveless marriages, ending in infidelity or divorce, and casual relations like hers with Henry. Here too and also in parent-child relationships and in friendships, it is a world of “accidental bonds” (DL 33) which she presents: “‘I had acquaintances, good acquaintances; I saw them occasionally, and I enjoyed their company. But in reality they were interchangeable …’” (DL 70)—this in contrast to the true friendship she once enjoyed with Katharina.

These two aspects, casual, interchangeable relations and the violent imposition of a subject's will on an “object,” mean that such relationships, looked at from one point of view, may themselves be read as an analogy (or even an allegory) of the allegorical process itself, whose structure they reflect. We recall Benjamin's comparison of “Bedeutung” with a “stern sultan in the harem of objects … It is indeed characteristic of the sadist that he humiliates his object …” (OGT 184), with the object “exposed to the allegorist, it is unconditionally in his power” (OGT 183–84); he also emphasizes the interchangeability of meanings “Any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else” (OGT 175).

If, however, these relations reflect the structure of allegory, this is because they are themselves the product of an allegorizing process—and the allegorizing power is not located simply in sexuality viewed in the light of Lacanian psychology (it may be part of Claudia's powerlessness against the allegorizing system whose object she becomes that she recognizes it only in male dominance). For her search in chapter nine leads back not only to her first awareness of sexuality but also to the institution school and particularly to the events of 1953. It is the prurient pleasure taken by a later gymnastics teacher in watching the most well developed girls performing on the horizontal bar (DL 135–36) which first shows her the body and sex as instruments for domination and exploitation. It is the sadistic Herr Ebert, for whom girls are “Rotten Cherries” and boys “Flabby Squirts” (DL 115), who first “names” her, leaving her “debilitated for good” (DL 116); Benjamin's comments apply fully to her: “The mournful has the feeling that it is known comprehensively by the unknowable. To be named … perhaps always brings with it a presentiment of mourning” (OGT 224–25), although she claims at the outset that she is part of “the nameless and inexplicable” (DL 4).

The school, the embodiment of state authority, functions like an allegorist, assigning meanings arbitrarily and by force. The pupils are “at the mercy of the overweening authority of our teachers” (DL 122); the school participates in the campaign against the youth group to which Katharina belongs “The teacher pointed out that joining the youth group [i.e. the FDJ] was a vote for peace … refusal to join the youth organization was tantamount to warmongering” (DL 127–28, my italics—GMJ).²⁵ Significantly, Claudia refers to “omnipotent teachers” (DL 121—Henry's “divine pedagogy” is anticipated here) in relation to the teacher of GDR-style history, Herr Gerschke. The link between sexual repression, school and state power is symbolized by the tank which appears in G. in June 1953, representative of the Stalinist authority which later determines the “meaning” of beloved uncle Gerhard.²⁶ As Sigrid Weigel writes, the field of allegory is a struggle of “systems of power through meaning [Macht-Wissens-Systeme].”²⁷

The allegorizing through the imposition of arbitrary meanings illustrated in chapter nine is not a matter of random personal judgements but it a system: individuals and beliefs, events and history have meanings assigned to them by the Marxist-Stalinist GDR system. If in Baudelaire it is capitalism and advertizing which lead to a transformation [Umfunktionierung] of allegory into a new form,²⁸ in Hein's GDR it is official ideology which performs this new transformation. Elsewhere in the text too there are discreet references to the power of that system and to the order that it imposes: “A gentleman in uniform had asked them to keep an eye out. They should report anything suspicious—unusual visitors, frequent parties, anything out of the ordinary” (DL 21–22). To become head physician Hinner has to join the SED (DL 156), someone notes the number of Claudia's car because she photographs a ruined saw mill (DL 39). Claudia's world is one in which everything has to be “in order” (DL 86) and where the “self-discipline” praised by Claudia's chief (DL 141) is the supreme value; yet it is an order imposed arbitrarily and with concealed, or at times open, force; the violence of the “order patrol” at the dance in chapter eight is its most naked manifestation. The parallel to Benjamin's theory of allegory, with its emphasis on the imposition of arbitrary meanings and its sexual imagery, is not hard to recognize. The alienation from self, or of the mind from the body and the emotions, may be seen both as a consequence and as an allegorical expression of that state.

According to Steinhagen, in Benjamin's later theory, based on Baudelaire, modern allegory is a “devaluation raised to a higher power”—attempts to transcend the devaluing results of the projection of meaning by the arbitrary subjectivity of another allegorist—capitalism.²⁹ Allegory criticizes and attacks another allegorizing practice. Claudia's narrative, with its allegorizing tendencies which we have considered, is her response to her powerlessness in face of the devaluation experienced in GDR society and has the same critical impulse. But Claudia cannot permit herself the degree of individual subjective authority which would permit the full development of her potential as allegorist; she is not one of the “anarchists … revolutionaries” with the look of “happiness and hope” in their eyes she sees in wedding photographs: “They want to flee, destroy, reform [i.e. submit the allegorical order to a further allegorical critique] the oppressive circumstances that encircle them so arrogantly in the picture. And the only conceivable alternative entangles them helplessly [rettungslos—a Benjamian term] in the old intolerable situation … humiliations, defeat—marriage contract, signature … at home in the innocent chokehold. And all shall be as it was: in order” (DL 65–66).

Benjamin remarks in his book on tragedy, in connection with “the allegorical character,” that “children are hopes” (OGT 191). Claudia agrees: “I need the child … for my hopes” (DL 176). Her childlessness may thus be viewed as an allegorical presentation of the hopelessness felt by Claudia and thus of the denial of “eros.”³⁰ Hillach comments: “The senses are deprived when the possibility of the sensual [erotische] fulfillment of our perceptions is excluded or so limited by surrogate meanings that no personal expectations for the future can be related to those perceptions.” Significantly, he then relates this to the GDR: “The sensual deprivation which dominated everyday life in the GDR became oppressive only when no one could believe any longer in the future of this kind of ‘socialism.’”³¹

For Benjamin, Baudelaire's Paris was a society which amid “petrification” continually spoke of progress: “speaking of progress to a world sinking into the rigidity of death”³²—behind “the new” was hidden “the unchanging process” of mass production. Hein has indicated that he saw the same contradiction in the GDR too: “this feeling of pointlessness and of marking time, which was very strong in the GDR … an immobility which was not far from a state of complete petrification … adorned with appropriate slogans about progress and advance.”³³

But what were the sources of that allegorizing practice which Claudia fears to assail openly? We noted earlier the distinction between a consciously critical form of allegory (that of Baudelaire's) and the earlier, almost involuntary form, whose roots lay in the underlying political and theological impasse of the age. In part as a reaction to its sense of time's headlong rush and the need to arrest it, the baroque period welcomed the absolute power of the ruler as a manifestation of “both history and the higher power, which checks its vicissitudes” (OGT 70). Benjamin argues, following Carl Schmitt,³⁴ that its conception of sovereignty was based upon the notion of the “state of emergency” and its avoidance: “The function of the tyrant is the restoration of order in the state of emergency: a dictatorship” (OGT 74). His account of the baroque age links ideological (that is, religious) and political factors: “The worldly and despotic aspects of the Renaissance emancipated themselves from its rich feeling for life to unfold in all its consequences the idea of a complete stabilization, an ecclesiastical and political restoration” (OGT 65—my translation). Hence its ideal of “the acme: a golden age of peace and culture, free of any apocalyptic features, constituted and guaranteed in aeternum by the authority of the Church” (OGT 80). The frozen fixity of allegory as the expression of arbitrary power aptly reflected this ambition.

Mutatis mutandis, a parallel account can be offered of the allegorizing force of GDR ideology and society, discussed above, to which Claudia is victim. The similarity between the picture Benjamin offers of seventeenth-century society and the conditions depicted in Claudia's GDR is immediately obvious. Benjamin's phrases quoted here could have been written about the SED-state with its mechanisms for control and its overriding concern for “order in the state of emergency.” As Benjamin says, “the only consequence could be that men were denied all real means of direct expression [as Claudia's case illustrates]. For this would have led to the unambiguous manifestation of the will of the age and so to … conflict with the Christian life …” (OGT 79).³⁵

The “restoration” of which Benjamin writes was as much religious as political—a return to “a time when the authority of Christianity was unshaken” after the secularization brought by the Renaissance (OGT 79). However, there burned within it “the ardor of a new secular will,” which looked back to the Renaissance as “an epoch of profane [i.e., lay] freedom for the life of the faith” but could find no direct expression against the renewed authority of Christianity (OGT 79). The baroque period was consequently marked by a continuing ideological struggle between Christianity and the Renaissance interest in the pagan ancient world. The resultant inner conflict led, on the one hand, to the “pious mortification of the flesh” (OGT 222) and, on the other hand, to the survival of the ancient gods, which persisted as allegorical figures, at once devalued and preserved. This conflict was the source of allegory: “If the church had³⁶ been able quite simply to banish the gods from the memory of the faithful, allegorical language would never have come into being” (OGT 223).

These religious/ideological conflicts can also be related to GDR reality, even if the parallel is imperfect. The socialism of the GDR is like the Christianity of the baroque age: it no longer has the full conviction which once gave it full moral authority.³⁷ It therefore continues to struggle against opponents who are supposedly dead yet refuse to lie down, like the pagan gods. In The Distant Lover, therefore, the roles are reversed: Christianity becomes the defeated yet persistent foe, while the “scientific” humanism of Marxism triumphs. Christianity survives in part in Claudia's continued longing for Katharina. It is also seen in her attitude toward photographing people; she refers to the refusal on religious grounds by some “primitive people” to be photographed and comments: “It amazed me to find that one of my own attitudes might be based on religious motives. Strangely, I had already discovered that certain religions shared other attitudes of mine. Yet questions of faith and transcendence never meant anything to me” (DL 86). The assertion is manifestly false when placed alongside her account of her friendship with Katharina (DL 123–28).

In consequence, Christianity survives in Claudia's narrative just as the pagan gods did in the Baroque—in linguistic and allegorical vestiges. This begins with the biblical echo in the very first line: “In the beginning was a landscape” (DL 1), and continues throughout the text: in the Adam and Eve scene in chapter five, complete with serpent; the “beautiful girl” in chapter six who gives Claudia an apple; Frau Rupprecht who is three days dead, evoking a resurrection which does not occur, the reminders of faith vestigially present in the celebration of Christmas; and in Claudia's remark about the futility of attempts to recover the past: “Behind us are only burning cities, and she who looks back turns to a pillar of salt” (DL 118). Another example is her phrase, “my impenetrable skin is my mighty fortress” (DL 177)—the hard shell created as protection by the “dragon's blood” imprisons as well as protects; yet the very linguistic formulation evokes the memory, as well as the loss, of a world of wholeness and meaning guaranteed by faith. The juxtaposition of Christian (the “mighty fortress” alludes to Luther's famous hymn “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott”) and pagan (“dragon's blood”) motifs in this passage is a microcosm of that unresolved struggle between Christian impulses and paganism, which, according to Benjamin, is the source of allegory.

Even the final lines of The Distant Lover may carry Christian, or rather biblical, overtones: “I've made it … The End” (DL 179) echoes the dying Christ's “It is finished” (John 19:30). On the surface, there could in Claudia's case scarcely be anything more bleak: just “the eternal return of the same” until death supervenes. However, Hein has always insisted on the necessity of hope: “In order to live as a human being at all, I must have hope.”³⁸ Of The Distant Lover he said in the same interview: “I should have liked to give this woman a hope, but I could find none for her,”³⁹ yet he is quoted as having said of this work: “This is my most hopeful book.”⁴⁰

How is such a claim to be understood? Eastern bloc critics tended to seek the grounds for hope in Claudia herself; G. Snamenskaja claims that she has become aware of her need and will finally “come to herself,”⁴¹ while L. Richter argues that she has achieved “an autonomous self,” as claimed for women by Maxie Wander, Irmtraud Morgner, and others.⁴² Hein himself sees it differently; in the Bischof interview he rejects hope in the Blochian sense: “I can no longer do anything with this notion of hope that Bloch employed. I no longer have this generous attitude, it appears simply naive.” Instead, he accepts as appropriate to the work a description by Bischof of The True Story of Ah Q as “a play … that seeks to inject me with hope via despair.”⁴³

Here once again Benjamin's theory of allegory provides an analogy for Hein's technique. Benjamin states at the end of his book on tragedy, in a rather surprising turn of his argument, that allegory cannot achieve a true redemption. He then argues that the seemingly endless play of allegorical transformations, not unlike Derrida's endless play of signifiers, does find its end; death and “transience,” having been the signified of the allegorical signifier, the baroque Golgotha, themselves become a signifier: “In it transitoriness is not signified or allegorically represented, so much as, in its own significance, displayed as allegory. As the allegory of resurrection. Ultimately … the direction of allegorical reflection is reversed; … it returns to redeem” (OGT 232). The melancholic knowledge of the world as “knowledge of evil” is revealed in its subjectivity, the product of “contemplation” (OGT 233), as mere “nonsense” [Geschwätz]. The allegorist awakens “in God's world” and “the supposed infinity of a world without hope … vanishes with this one about-turn” (OGT 232). In a dialectical reversal the extremity of despair evokes the saving miracle, just as death calls forth resurrection.

It is a reversal of this kind that Hein seeks to evoke through The Distant Lover.⁴⁴ The very blackness of world portrayed calls forth, not from God but from the reader, a counter-response. Hein seeks through “unsparing portrayal of things as they are”⁴⁵ to impel his readers to protest, to create their “counter-world” through “utopian thinking.”⁴⁶ We might thus argue that in The Distant Lover Hein offers us a model of the extreme, ironic form of “fragmentation of language” referred to earlier: the “antithesis of sound and meaning” would occur “where both could be successfully combined in one, without their actually cohering in the sense of forming an organic linguistic structure” (OGT 209).

To read The Distant Lover in this way helps us to recognize the Hein's distinctive place in the GDR literature of the 1980s. Compared with more obviously “difficult” work, such as that of Gerd Neumann and Wolfgang Hilbig, and the “postmodernism” of Prenzlauer Berg, Hein's writing might appear cautiously traditional. I would argue rather that its rejection of, and departure from, orthodox canons of thought and literary form are buried within it, concealed from cursory gaze, in keeping with both its central figure and with most of GDR society. Hein's practice might thus be said to correspond to what Benjamin wrote about Baudelaire: “the new, in the name of which the poet seeks to counter melancholy [Trübsinn], is itself to the highest degree marked by that reality against which the poet is in revolt.”⁴⁷

There may, however, be another way of seeing Hein's use of Benjaminian concepts. Most of his overt quotations of Benjamin elsewhere are taken from the later, materialist writings. But in an interview in 1985 entitled “Writing as a rebellion against mortality” [“Schreiben als Aufbegehren gegen die Sterblichkeit”],⁴⁸ Hein comments as follows:

Nature has no other meaning that the succession of generations. … In this all religions have an advantage. … They can provide an answer here, by pointing to immortality, to a life after death. Philosophies without a comparable eschatology have their problems here, because they can only refer the individual back to nature, which has no other answer except that we must return to dust.

The sentiments are almost those of seventeenth century melancholy as Benjamin describes it. A careful reading of Hein suggests both a dichotomy and an alliance in his thought between historical disillusion and a utopian hopefulness based on nothing but the need to hope,⁴⁹ not unlike that between the theological and the materialist Benjamin. The conjoining in The Distant Lover of Benjamin's two forms of analysis of allegory, as has been suggested here, tells us as much about the author as it does about his central character and the society which shaped them both.

Notes

1. The most notable references can be found in the following essay: “Maelzel's Chess Player Goes to Hollywood,” “Die Zeit, die nicht vergehen kann,” and “Die fünfte Grundrechenart,” all of which can be found in Die fünfte Grundrechenart. Aufsätze und Reden (Frankfurt/Main: Luchterhand, 1990). The praise for Benjamin appeared in Hein's “Heinrich-Mann-Preis 1983,” Neue Deutsche Literatur 31.7 (July 1983): 163.

2. See, amongst others, Bernd Fischer, Christoph Hein: Drama und Prosa im letzten Jahrzehnt der DDR (Heidelberg: Winter, 1990); and Joachim Lehmann, “Christoph Hein—Chronist und ‘historischer Materialist,’” Christoph Hein: Text + Kritik 111 (1991): 44–56. The most extensive of such studies is Ines Zekert, Poetologie und Prophetie. Christoph Heins Prosa und Dramatik im Kontext seiner Walter-Benjamin-Rezeption, diss., U. Leipzig, 1991 (Frankfurt/Main and New York: Lang, 1993).

3. It was originally published in East Germany as Der fremde Freund in 1982. Except where indicated otherwise, quotations will be from Christoph Hein, The Distant Lover, trans. Krishna Winston (Picador: London, 1991), hereafter cited parenthetically as DL. The original East German title is given in preference to the later West German alternative Drachenblut.

4. For critical work on Der fremde Freund, see Heinz-Peter Preusser and Klaus Hammer, “Auswahlbibliographie Christoph Hein,” Christoph Hein: Text + Kritik 111 (1991): 92–105; and Chronist ohne Botschaft: Christoph Hein. Ein Arbeitsbuch, ed. Klaus Hammer (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau, 1992).

5. David Roberts, “Surface and Depth: Christoph Hein's Drachenblut,” German Quarterly 63.3/4 (Summer/Fall 1990): 478–54; Neva Slibar and Rosanda Volk, “‘Das Spiegelkabinett unseres Kopfes.’ Schreibverfahren und Bilderwelt bei Christoph Hein,” Christoph Hein: Text + Kritik 111 (1991): 57–68; and Jens-F. Dwars, “Hoffnung auf ein Ende. Allegorien kultureller Erfahrung in Christoph Heins Novelle Der fremde Freund,” Christoph Hein: Text + Kritik 111 (1991): 6–15.

6. Except where otherwise indicated, quotations are from Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left, 1977), hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as OGT.

7. When asked in a letter about the possibility of links between The Distant Lover and The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Hein replied that links between his work and Benjamin's [i.e., in general rather than in particular] do indeed exist but that they are “hidden, almost like filigree … in the last analysis simply a game on the author's part and for the author, with the public excluded.”

8. The appropriateness of the use of the term “melancholy” in relation to the GDR in the 1980s is persuasively argued by, among others, Wolfgang Emmerich, “Status melancholicus. Zur Transformation der Utopie in der DDR-Literatur,” Literatur in der DDR. Rückblicke, ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Munich: Text + Kritik Sonderband, 1991) 232–45, which begins with a description and analysis of Dürer's Melencolia I. For the significance of Benjamin in relation to that process in the 1980s, see Ines Zekert, “Diese besondere Art von Hoffnung. Utopie und Geschichte in der DDR,” Freitag 6 Sept. 1991.

9. The appropriateness of the very concept of “alienation” within socialism was, of course, a contentious issue in the GDR. The Distant Lover is widely regarded as one of the most persuasive portrayals of it. For a discussion of this issue, see the entry under “Entfremdung,” DDR Handbuch, ed. Hartmut Zimmermann, vol. 1 (Cologne: Wissenschaft und Politik, 1985).

10. Benjamin's text has here “geschändet”—“violated” or “desecrated”—which frequently refers specifically to sexual violence.

11. One might speculate whether it was such analogies and the fact that Melencolia I depicts a women that contributed to Hein's choice of a woman for his central figure. If in Baudelaire's age it was woman as prostitute who best encapsulated the essence of commodity capitalism and who Benjamin saw as the nineteenth-century reincarnation of the figure of Melencolia, with the tools of allegory at her disposal, it seems appropriate that a woman should be the focus for the devaluation of the physical world and especially of the body, experienced, according to this text, in the GDR. The impoverishment of emotional and sexual fulfillment is a feature of Hein's portrayal of that society in almost his entire oeuvre.

12. Benjamin develops this idea in his comments on Baudelaire's “L'Horloge”: “The consciousness of time running empty [der leer verrinnenden Zeit] and the taedium vitae are the two weights which keep the mechanism of melancholia running” (GS I: 1141).

13. Still other details from Benjamin's picture of melancholy find their counterpart in Hein's text. Benjamin says that “all the wisdom of the melancholic is subject to the nether world. … Everything saturnine points down into the depths of the earth …” (OGT 152). The first chapter proper of The Distant Lover begins with Claudia awaiting the lift which comes from “the depths of the elevator shaft.” Then begins “a silent descent into the depths” (DL 6). Benjamin talks of “the melancholic's inclination for long journeys … hence the horizon of the sea in the background of Dürer's Melencolia” (OGT 149); Claudia spends her holiday on the beach on the Baltic coast. Benjamin quotes various writers who relate melancholy to madness and to “prophetic ability” (OGT 147); in Hein's text this capacity is ascribed not to Claudia but to her neighbor Frau Rupprecht, who suffers from an “uneasiness” the night before an air crash (DL 91–93).

14. “When a building falls into ruins, the objectivized spirit [Geist] returns to nature. … In a ruin we see how nature again takes possession of a creation of spirit, as a result of which the human falls under the domination of nature.” (B. S. Tyrner commenting on Georg Simmel's essay, “Die Ruine.” See Tyrner, “Ruine und Fragment. Anmerkungen zum Barockstil,” Allegorie und Melancholie 205.

15. My reading of the ruin motif thus differs from that of Brigitte Böttcher, who sees an idyllic element in its “[t]estimony to a stage in civilization which made use of nature without destroying it” in contrast to the nuclear power stations built by Henry. See Brigitte Böttcher, “Diagnose eines unheilbaren Zustands,” Neue Deutsche Literatur 31.6 (June 1983): 148. Though there is undoubtedly an element of Zivilisationskritik in The Distant Lover, Claudia's preoccupation with ruins of all kinds, including houses and bridges, cannot be accounted for by so simple a comparison. There also appears to be here some confusion between the perspective of Claudia and that of Hein.

16. Compare with Michael Jennings, Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin's Theory of Literary Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987) 66–70; and Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT, 1989), esp. chap. 3 and 6.

17. Claudia's collection of photographs could be seen as an involuntary form of collecting, a notion which occupies an important place in Benjamin's thought. The keepsake [Andenken], he says, “is the key figure in later allegory” (GS I: 689). While Claudia throws away all momentos of Henry (DL 178)—a sign of the repression of true emotional fulfillment—the photographs remain.

18. See, for example, the visit to Charlotte and Michael Kramer (DL 55–57).

19. Brigitte Böttcher employs Benjamin's term, Requisit, here in relation to The Distant Lover, though without reference to Benjamin: “The significant stage property, the car, is matched by another, the lift” (Böttcher 148).

20. Dwars 12. Another critic who appears to sense the resemblance to Benjamin, without mentioning him in this context, is David Roberts, who describes Claudia's photographs as “mute emblems of melancholy, images of the frozen self and of frozen time.” Roberts 485.

21. See Opitz.

22. One tiny detail may be interesting here in relation to Benjamin: Brecht recalls in his “Svendborger Notizen” a conversation with Benjamin in which the latter said: “I remember the Geneva production of Le Cid, in which the sight of the king's crown askew first gave me the idea for what I wrote nine years later in my book on tragedy.” Claudia relates in chapter ten a visit by the “Chief” who speaks to her of the need for discipline. She writes: “His broad bow tie with its blue pattern was askew” (DL 141). The “Chief,” powerless, melancholic, and aware of his age—“We're old people, Mother” (DL 84)—is Hein's version of the baroque sovereign; his bow-tie, slipped askew, reveals to Claudia the unnatural, imposed nature of the “order” and “self-discipline” which he embodies. See Bertolt Brecht, “Gespräche mit Brecht, Svendborger Notizen,” quoted by Witte 126.

23. Slibar and Volk 62–63.

24. Slibar and Volk 66.

25. Hein's choice of words, “represented” [“dargestellt”] and “synonymous with” [“gleichbedeutend mit”] emphasizes the authoritative assigning and determining of meaning.

26. Compare Hannes Krauss, “Mit geliehenen Worten das Schweigen brechen. Christoph Heins Novelle Drachenblut,” Christoph Hein: Text + Kritik 111 (1991): 16–27.

27. Weigel 50ff.

28. Benjamin, GS I: 671.

29. Steinhagen 677.

30. “Infertility” was for Benjamin a significant feature of Baudelaire's world, and he relates it specifically to allegory: “The motif of androgyny, lesbianism, the infertile woman needs to be dealt with in connection with the destructive power of allegory” (GS I: 661).

31. Ansgar Hillach, “Über Schwulst, Allegorie und Eigensinn. Für eine politische Lektüre von Benjamins Trauerspielbuch,” Literaturmagazin 29 (1992): 66–67. The use of sexual relationships as an allegory of Stalinism's allegorizing force and of the “sensual deprivation” which it imposed also has its precedent in Benjamin's reading of Baudelaire. He relates the growing impotence among the middle class in nineteenth-century France to what Hillach calls “a … failing of the utopian imagination among the bourgeoisie”: “The dream of having children is a poor stimulus when it is not imbued with another dream, that of a new order of things, in which these children will one day live or for which they will one day struggle” (Benjamin, Passagen-Werk, GS V: 432); See Hillach 67.

32. Benjamin, GS I: 682.

33. Klaus Hemver, “‘Gespräch ist das Gegenteil von Belehren’ Gespräch mit Christoph Hein,” Chronist ohne Botschaft: Christoph Hein. Ein Arbeitsbuch 22.

34. Witte 112–13.

35. A document in the Benjamin Archive entitled “Additions to the Tragedy-Book” [Nachträge zum Trauerspielbuch] includes a remarkable description, based on a passage by K. A. Wittvogel, of seventeenth-century German absolutism as a “police-state,” with “strong growth of organizational uniformity and administrative unity … an ever more powerful police apparatus, an institution … whose powers exercised surveillance over every expression of daily life …” Benjamin comments on “[t]he connection: spirit of the police—spirit of the executive—spirit of the baroque” (GS I: 954).

36. The word “not” included here in the published English translation completely reverses the meaning of the original text German, in which the negation is entirely absent.

37. That official Marxism, with its teleological view of history, bore a resemblance to theological thinking is one obvious implication of the first of Benjamin's “Theses on the Philosophy of History” with the image of the ugly dwarf theology hiding within, and actually directing, the automaton called “historical materialism.” For an interpretation of this image, see Konersmann 20–36.

38. Hein, “‘Mut ist keine literarische Kategorie.’ Gespräch mit Alois Bischof,” Christoph Hein. Texte, Daten, Bilder, ed. Lothar Baier (Frankfurt/Main: Luchterhand, 1990) 96.

39. Hein, “‘Mut ist keine literarische Kategorie’” 97.

40. Quoted by Roland Vetter, “Der Tod in Christoph Heins Prosa,” Der Literat 28.4 (1986): 101.

41. Galina Snemenskaja, “Die geistig-seelische Suche im Werk Christoph Heins,” Weimarer Beiträge 36.3 (1990): 510.

42. Lutz Richter, “Auf neue Art zum Nachdenken zwingen,” Deutsch als Fremdsprache, Sonderheft (1987): 80.

43. Hein, “‘Mut ist keine literarische Kategorie’” 95–96.

44. Rolf Michaelis concludes his analysis by quoting Claudia's words about her photographs: “‘they can't wilt or decay, and thus they also lack hope.’” He then adds: “This book rests upon the hope that blossoms out of decay.” See Michaelis, “Leben ohne zu leben,” Christoph Hein. Texte, Daten, Bilder 147. The notion of hope through and beyond despair and death is in accord with Hein—and Benjamin's—thought. Yet Claudia's words hardly mean this: she would put her lifeless trees and plants back into the natural environment from which her allegorizing photography has wrenched them. But nature knows no resurrection, no eschatology, but only the round of “the ever-the-same.”

45. Michaelis 96.

46. Hammer, “‘Gespräch ist das Gegenteil von Belehren,” 47.

47. Benjamin, GS I: 1152.

48. Hein, “‘Schreiben als Aufbegehren gegen die Sterblichkeit.’ Gespräch mit Uwe Homauer und Hans Norbert Janowski,” Christoph Hein. Texte, Daten, Bilder 85.

49. Compare to Hein's comments in “Maelzel's Chess Player Goes to Hollywood,” Die fünfte Grundrechenart. Aufsätze und Reden 33.