SOURCE: Jackman, Graham. “‘Nur wo er spielt, ganz Mensch?’ Christoph Hein's Das Napoleon-Spiel.” German Quarterly (winter 1999): 17–32.

[In the following essay, Jackman examines the character Wörle in Das Napoleon-Spiel, and the psychological reasons behind his obsessions.]

On its appearance in 1993 Christoph Hein's novel Das Napoleon-Spiel was on the whole not well received. In part, the critics' lack of enthusiasm was the result of disappointed expectations: Hein had not produced the awaited Wende-Roman. However, this did not prevent many reviewers from reading the novel in terms of immediate post-Wende concerns: “Das Napoleon-Spiel ist eine literarische Umsetzung der deutschen Vereinigung,” wrote Helmut Böttiger.¹ A similar view was heard two years later in an essay by Ulrike Böhmel Fichera, who claims that “Der Bezug der gesamten Erzählung auf die Gegenwart ist eindeutig, programmatisch …”² She argues, as many had done before her, that the locating of the killing of Bernhard Bagnall (the central event in the novel) in the Berlin U-Bahn between East and West Berlin in June 1989 “verweist zeichenhaft auf die Problematik der deutschen Wiedervereinigung, auf deutsche Geschichte …”³

Certainly, the date and place of this incident can hardly have been chosen at random, an impression which is confirmed near the end of the novel when its central character Wörle is visited while in custody by his step-brother “im vergangenen November, wenige Tage nach dem Fall der Mauer” (199).⁴ We need not be deterred from suspecting such associations by Wörle's disingenuous claim: “Es gab für mich keine Möglichkeit, es [mein Spiel] in eine nationale oder doch politische Dimension zu transportieren” (166). Nevertheless, Böhmel Fichera is probably right when, instead of looking for such connections with specific historical events, she stresses Wörle's mentality and relates this to particular intellectual attitudes, even though her interpretation is perhaps over-restrictive: “[Hein] beschäftigt sich mit einem ihm und seinen Landsleuten bisher wenig vertrauten Typ des westdeutschen oder weitergefaβt westlichen Intellektuellen und dessen überzeugt amoralischer Weltsicht.”⁵ As the Wende recedes into history, readings which emphasize what Martin Krumbholz calls “das geistige Klima, der ideengeschichtliche Kontext”⁶ appear a good deal more appropriate than dubious attempts at immediate “relevance” and are, moreover, buttressed by Hein's assertion that he first conceived the work in 1982, though it was written much later, in the period immediately before and after the Wende.⁷ We shall return to the relationship between the work and its historical context later. First, though, we need to examine Hein's portrayal of his protagonist Wörle.

The reviewers' difficulties with Das Napoleon-Spiel derive only in part from questions about its immediate relevance. The work was also widely criticized on more technical grounds: its central character and action were held to be unconvincing (“abstruse Konstruktion, Motive aus der Luft gegriffen …”⁸), and the unbroken monologue by Wörle was found boring (the novel comprises two letters from Wörle to his defense counsel Fiarthes, one long one written while in custody and accused of the murder of Bagnall, and a much shorter one written after his admittedly very surprising acquittal). Jamal Tuschik described this monologue as “[die] zwischen Delirium und Meditation schwankenden Einlassungen zum Wesen des Spiels und dem Charakter bedeutender Spieler.”⁹ Above all, it was argued, Wörle's talk of his brilliant exploits is not substantiated by accounts of specific events. “Dann wird das Spielerische … nur noch behauptet. Des Ich-Erzählers Beteuerungen … bleiben leer,” Hannes Krauss wrote in Freitag.¹⁰ Such reactions led in numerous cases to the assertion that with the demise of the GDR Hein had lost his subject-matter: “Christoph Hein ist mit der DDR auch sein Thema abhanden gekommen.”¹¹

It would seem that some critics have difficulty with the work's central narrative device, the use of Rollenprosa. Though virtually all critics note the use of this technique, some making specific comparison with Claudia's unbroken monologue in Der fremde Freund, its implications are not always followed through. Some critics confuse Hein with his character, accusing him, for example, of moralizing,¹² while others simply find Wörle unworthy of interest and attention.¹³ Generally, Western reviewers' objections curiously mirror some of the early published responses of GDR critics to Der fremde Freund: either the author is accused of not making explicit his own critical view of his protagonist, or the character is dismissed as eccentrically non-representative and therefore of no interest.¹⁴ In the earlier case Western critics generally were well able to supply the “fortlaufenden Untertext, der sich dem aufmerksamen Leser erschlieβt;”¹⁵ with Das Napoleon-Spiel they appear to have been less able, or willing, to do so.

The key to understanding this work lies in the way in which the reader approaches Wörle's triumphalist, self-justificatory monologue. No less than with Der fremde Freund, we need to grasp the logic of Hein's use of Rollenprosa, realizing the manipulative, yet ultimately revealing nature of Wörle's account.¹⁶ In his Spiel with Fiarthes, which is finally revealed only in the second letter, language is his essential tool, determining the latter's actions and responses as skillfully and as calculatedly as his cue does the billiard balls—and as Hein's own use of language, narrative structure and technique do the reader: “Ein falsches Wort, eine ungenaue Bezeichnung, und der Ball kann unmöglich die gewünschte Karambolage machen oder die angesagte Tasche erreichen” (122).¹⁷ Hein himself hints in an interview that it is Wörle's rhetorical performance which should be the focus of our attention rather than the story:

Ich habe eine bestimmte Erzählweise vorgehabt, die zum Beispiel dem Leser die Story in weiten Strecken versagt. Der hat aber, wie ich weiβ, die Story ganz gern. Es gibt so ein erstes Drittel, da bekommt er sehr viel davon. Dann gibt es zum Schluβ noch einmal so ein Drittel. Und in dem groβen Mittelblock, da “steht” die Geschichte gleichsam. Man sollte nicht übersehen, daβ der Autor das nicht völlig unbewuβt gemacht hat. Ästhetisch hat mich gerade dieser Mittelteil interessiert.¹⁸

Within Wörle's account the reader finds sufficient grounds for wariness. For example, Wörle appears to contradict himself. At one point he claims that billiards is superior to chess because it includes the physical dimension—the actual execution of the planned shot—which involves the player's emotional state and his experience: “… der Moment des Stoβes aber wird von einem Gefühl bestimmt. Dieses Gefühl ist geprägt von Erfahrungen und meinem körperlichen und seelischen Zustand im Augenblick des Spiels …” (101). A few pages further on he appears to deny both: “Gefühle jedoch verderben alles. Wer mit Gefühlen an den Spieltisch tritt, ist verloren” (114); “Erfahrungen, verehrter Fiarthes, sind etwas für Handwerker, sie prahlen sogar damit. … Für den Spieler jedoch sind Erfahrungen das Ende” (115).¹⁹

Similar suspicions are aroused by Wörle's account of his choice of Bernhard Bagnall as his victim. He is, Wörle insists, “das einwandfreie, mustergültige Nichts” (189), or “diese perfekte Null, diese[r] unübertreffliche […] Niemand” (190). He is chosen, Wörle claims, for his lack of any individual characteristics, emphasizing the absence of any other motivation for his killing than pure Spiel.²⁰ Yet Wörle's first description of him emphasizes not him but the eight women in whose company he is first espied: “Die Frauen waren undefinierbar. Eine Komposition in Grau. Kein störendes Hervorstechen eines individuellen Zugs. … Er war eine Art Chef der acht Damen, aber keinesfalls ihr Wortführer …” (188–89). Is it mere coincidence that there are eight women? The opening section of Wörle's narrative focuses on his encounters with the eight women in his father's chocolate factory, whose significance for his later life Wörle repeatedly emphasizes: “Die wenigen Bemerkungen zu meiner Kindheit haben hier ihren Platz. Denn was Sie zu erfahren haben oder zu begreifen wünschen, ist damit verwoben.” (25). Two pages later he comments:

Adieu, Sophia und Therese und Maria und Gerti und Brigitte und Hilde und Josephine und Johanna. Ich gestehe, es bereitet mir noch heute Vergnügen, ihre Namen aufzusagen. Mit ihren Namen erscheint dieses versunkene Paradies vor meinen Augen. … Adieu, süβe Gespenster meiner Kindheit. Eure Schatten werden meine dunkler werdenden Tage begleiten

(27)

Our wariness must, of course, extend to Wörle's own suggestions for a correct understanding of his life and attitudes. Yet the omission of any reference to this coincidence in number, and the highly emphasized contrast between the uniformity of Bagnall's eight women and the differing types among Wörle's own, lead us to suspect that the choice of Bagnall is not so devoid of personal motivation, possibly jealousy—the symbolism of the cue points in this direction—or a sense of failure to realize the prospect held out by the childhood experience. For an awareness of unfulfilled possibilities dominates the memory of childhood:

Ich bin nie hineingegangen. Die Frauen haben mich nie dazu aufgefordert. Heute bin ich sicher, daβ sie darauf warteten. Sie hatten erwartet, daβ ich ihnen nachkommen, daβ ich irgendwann mich durch die dicke gelbliche Tür, den Schlitz meiner Sehnsüchte, schieben … würde.

(26–27)

The heute is significant. How much of the account is the fictive work of creative memory? Our necessarily unproven suspicions are reinforced by the fact that Wörle's discovery of his victim follows immediately upon his discomfiture in his affair with Katja, which, according to his own account, is his only “defeat” in his various short-lived affaires.²¹ His report reveals his failure of control in this episode:

… ich verstand nicht … meine verwunderten Blicke … Etwas beunruhigte mich … unklar … verwirrt … im unklaren … Ich wuβte nicht … Unsicherheit … nicht einmal gewiβ … ich war nicht fähig … das erklärt mir nicht … verunsicherte … diese verschwommene und mir völlig unklare Beziehung.

(182–85)

Wounded pride, from which a sexual component may not be absent, requires easing, and one who appears to enjoy what he was unable ever to take advantage of presents himself as the pre-ordained victim.

At stake here is the question of motivation. What causes does the text suggest for Wörle's obsession with Spiel? It is noteworthy that, though billiards is Wörle's own chosen metaphor for his calculating, manipulative activities, the idea of Spiel as a game of hazard, involving the placing of a stake and possible gain or loss, i.e., something closer to gaming or gambling, also runs throughout the text. We note that in the two passages in which Wörle first explains his addition to “Spiel” (pp. 36–41 and 72–79), he speaks in these terms: “Doch groβen Gewinn gibt es nur bei groβem Einsatz” (40); “Ein Spieler ist der, der setzt” (73). It is true that he is not out for financial gain—as a millionaire he has no need of it. Moreover, he is interested only in a game in which he can be actively involved to control its course—hence his disdain for lotteries of every kind:

Kein wahrer Spieler wird an einen Spieltisch gehen oder ein Los einer Lotterie kaufen. Ein Spieler will setzen, um zu spielen, der Gewinn langweilt ihn bereits. Und ein Spiel, in dem er nicht eingreifen kann, wo allein der Einsatz gefragt ist, aber nicht das Setzen, ist nur eine Gelegenheit, Bestellungen mit ungewissem Anschaffungswert zu notieren.

(74)

In his study of the links between gaming and narcissism Franz Schütte comments that by contrast with the distinction in English between “gamble” and “play,” the German Spiel covers both meanings (and others) and that this allows German makers of Spielautomaten to use slogans very like Wörle's, such as “Spielen ist menschlich.”²² Conversely, it also enables Wörle (and Hein) to conflate the two ideas of billiards and a game of hazard, thus permitting Wörle, as we shall see, to enjoy all the glamour and literary prestige which has accrued to the figure of the gambler as well as the more intellectual prestige which derives from a successful billiards stratagem, with its combination of calculation and skillful execution.

In fact, if we follow Wörle's promptings, it is easy enough to interpret his Spielernatur in sociological and psychological terms, along lines suggested by Schütte. At times the latter might almost be describing Wörle: gambling, he says, offers “Befreiung von den Schwierigkeiten des Alltags”: “In dieser Freiheit wird eine surreale Phantasiekonfiguration von Geist, Selbst und Gesellschaft erzeugt, die dem Selbst hohe Achtung erweist.”²³ Schütte's account of the sociological, family roots of gambling could obviously apply to Wörle: gamblers' fathers are often authority figures who are “streng, dominierend, moralisch, selbstbezogen, geizig und emotionslos,” admired by women but hated and feared by children, while their mothers either overcompensate or are hard and unfeeling, so that the child has no emotional relation to the mother.²⁴ We need not believe Wörle's assertion: “ich hatte eine glückliche Kindheit …” (14).

The psychoanalytical reading of the gambler's mentality is, however, perhaps more important for Das Napoleon-Spiel.²⁵ Schütte follows Simmel, Freud and others in seeing compulsive gambling as the result of a disorder in a child's development, either as a reversion to the anal-sadistic phase,²⁶ or as an oedipal disorder, of the kind Freud identified in Dostoevsky's The Gambler, or as a disorder in the oral phase.²⁷ The latter in particular leads to the “Allmachtsfiktion des Spielers”²⁸ in which narcissistic gratification is sought in defeating Schicksal, identified with the father and mother, the representatives of the Realitätsprinzip. Spiel permits, Schütte claims, the construction of a “Gröβen-Selbst” in defiance of the normal recognition of the limits of the self, which permits the “ozeanisches Gefühl” never experienced as a child. Schütte's description of such a mentality closely resembles Wörle:

Die zwischenmenschlichen Beziehungen narzissistischer Persönlichkeiten haben im allgemeinen einen ausbeuterischen und zuweilen sogar parasitären Charakter. Sie nehmen gewissermaβen für sich das Recht in Anspruch, über andere Menschen ohne jegliche Schuldgefühle zu verfügen, sie zu beherrschen und auszubeuten. … Der Spieler ist überzeugt … das Schicksal bestimmen zu können.²⁹

A possible source for Hein's portrayal of Wörle in this way is Walter Benjamin's Passagen-Werk (Hein's admiration for Benjamin is well known³⁰). Here Benjamin quotes the very sources referred to by Schütte: Simmel, Freud and Edmund Bergler, including references to narcissism, the rejection of the Realitätsprinzip and aggression against the parents.³¹ One quotation from Bergler concludes: “Zutiefst ist jedes Hasardspiel ein Erzwingenwollen der Liebe mit einem unbewuβten masochistischen Hintergedanken. Deshalb verliert der Hasardeur à la longue immer”³²—a notion developed in Wörle's musings on the unending desire of the Spieler for new hazards, leading finally to his “Moscow” (132–40)—or his Waterloo.

What grounds have we for seeing Benjamin as Hein's source? Section O of the Passagen-Werk, where these quotations occur, is headed “Prostitution, Spiel,” and the same association of ideas is suggested in Das Napoleon-Spiel. The young Wörle's association with the eight factory women is modeled on relations with prostitutes, with each women being introduced as a specific type: “Brigitte, stark parfümiert, ein schlanker Oberkörper auf einem breiten Becken, groβporige Oberarme” (24), reminding us of Benjamin's comment: “Die Prostitution zieht einen Markt der weiblichen Typen auf.”³³ Hein also locates the eight women at a production line, in keeping with the link between prostitution, as a commercialized, repetitive form of love, with mechanized production methods: “Die Liebe zur Prostituierten ist die Apotheose der Einfühlung in die Ware.”³⁴ Hein is also following Benjamin when he links gaming with capitalism:

Denn in dem Maβe, wie die mechanische Produktion sich entwickelt, wird das Eigentum entpersönlicht und in die kollektive unpersönliche Form der Aktiengesellschaft gekleidet, deren Geschäftsanteile im Strudel der Börse herumwirbeln … Die ganze moderne ökonomische Entwicklung hat die Tendenz, die kapitalistische Gesellschaft mehr und mehr in ein riesiges internationales Spielhaus umzuwandeln.³⁵

The common element in prostitution and gaming is, according to Benjamin, the desire to defeat the relentless necessity (Schicksal) inherent in time's progression, transforming, in Benjamin's terms as elaborated in his Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire,³⁶Erfahrung into Erlebnis by means of the Choc-Erlebnis: “Denn in Bordell und Spielsaal ist es die gleiche, sündigste Wonne: In der Lust das Schicksal zu stellen.”³⁷ “La notion du jeu … consiste en ceci … que la partie suivante ne dépend pas de la précédente …” (quotation from Alain); “Die Folgenlosigkeit, die den Character des Erlebnisses ausmacht, hat einen drastischen Ausdruck im Spiel gefunden.”³⁸Schicksal similarly becomes an important word in Wörle's vocabulary, especially in the second half of the text, where Schicksal or Geschichte is portrayed as Wörle's (and Napoleon's) only true opponent.³⁹

With his opening account of his childhood Wörle thus offers us the key to a psychological or socio-psychological understanding of his subsequent behavior. Indeed, he prompts the reader to see his career as Spieler in relation to his early adventures with the factory-women. Yet the connection is never explained—he simply presents the impulse to Spiel as an alternative to, or replacement for, his fascination with women (36–37). He claims that the memory of them alone gives “ungeteiltes Vergnügen” (27), but now he has put behind him such childish things; precisely because of the ever-present opportunity to begin afresh (e.g., 108–16), Spielen offers more lasting satisfaction (36–37) than do his various affaires, “angelegt auf Willkommen und Abschied” (84) and offering only “einen sich wiederholenden und weitgehend überraschungslosen Ablauf” (160). Wörle thus first suggests an explanation for his way of life in terms of psychological causation—but then blandly ignores it; the Folgenlosigkeit of Spiel is asserted as a form of freedom from such mundane processes of cause and effect.

Wörle's rejection of a psychological motivation to which he has himself pointed is reminiscent once again of Der fremde Freund. There Claudia offers insight into her psychological state through the opening dreamlike sequence but then strenuously denies that there is anything which requires explaining. Whereas, however, Claudia is herself the victim of her own propaganda, here the problem is not a subsequent lack of self-analysis and -explanation, but a surfeit of it. Wörle is altogether more knowing—he appears to know how his actions can (should?) be interpreted but puts up an elaborate smokescreen of alternative accounts. These center on what Lothar Baier calls the “schillernde […] Bedeutungen”⁴⁰ of the term Spiel. We shall look briefly at the various interpretations or motivations of Wörle's behavior which it implies.

Wörle's preferred interpretation denies any idea of psychological compulsiveness. For him the Spieler is an heroic figure, as he was for Baudelaire.⁴¹ His own talk of the impulse for Spiel invites us rather to see it as an existential necessity, as an antidote to boredom. This note first occurs early on: “Was mir blieb, was mich am Leben hält, ist der Kitzel des Spiels” (37). Later on, the claim is repeated in ever-more extravagant terms, in which Hein allows us to recognize familiar philosophical notions: Spiel with its uncertainty mirrors the openness of life itself (146), countering the fear of a Kierkegaardian Wiederholung: “… um einer sich andeutenden Wiederholung zu entgehen” (154–55). It is a modern, atheistic version of Pascal's pari; other men may prefer the contemporary versions of what Pascal called divertissement: “Diese jämmerlichen Surrogate von Leben und Wirklichkeit, Lotto und Sport, Polizeiberichte und Spielautomaten, sie können nur für Minuten oder Stunden die in sie gesetzten Erwartungen erfüllen” (146),⁴² but Wörle faces bravely “die Schönheiten und die Schrecken der Freiheit” (150).

Other Existentialist ideas are also evoked by Wörle's monologue: his life is the epitome of a Sartrean freedom (149–51), and thus the expression of a courageous, aristocratic, Nietzschean approach to human existence, with an accompanying disdain for the Knechte (147–51); the killing of Bagnall is the motiveless acte gratuit by which that freedom will be expressed and, in its elegance and perfection, the true Jahrhundertwende aesthete's answer to nihilism—like Ibsen's Ejlert Lövborg, Wörle aims to “do it beautifully.”

It is indeed impossible to overhear in the text the literary echoes too—of Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov (another would-be-Napoleon) or Gide's Lafcadio performing their motiveless crimes; Camus' Meursault in his cell awaiting his case and longing for women (95, 138) or his juge-pénitent in La Chute, commenting cynically on the collective evil of mankind (e.g., on pages 94–95, where his calculations are likened to those that led to the making of the atomic bomb, or on pages 133–34, where he argues that self-interest is normal and that it is selflessness which merits the description monströs) and drawing the recipient of his confidences into guilty complicity;⁴³ Sartre's Roquentin overcoming his Lebensekel through the perfection of Spiel (100). Even Wörle's business-man client, the Casanova with his collection of “Damenhöschen” (84–89) reminds us of Camus' Don Juan in Le Mythe de Sisyphe, while Wörle's comment: “Aber halten wir nicht alle etwas versteckt? So eine winzige, rosafarbene Damenhose? Ein hübsches kleines Geheimnis, das uns zu entlarven vermag?” (89) is like an echo of Max Frisch's metaphor in Stiller of the “fleischfarbener Stoff” that cannot be got rid of.

However, the links explored by Benjamin and traceable in Hein's text, despite Wörle's bland denials, enable the reader to construct a very different “subtext,” much as in Der fremde Freund. For example, despite his claims to superiority, it is precisely “Langeweile,” Pascal's “ennui,” that Wörle fears, and Pascal's account of ‘divertissements’ describes Wörle exactly:

De là vient que le jeu et la conversation des femmes … les grand emplois sont si recherchés. Ce n'est pas … qu'on s'imagine que la vraie béatitude soit d'avoir l'argent qu'on peut gagner au jeu … mais e'est le tracas qui nous détourne d'y penser et nous divertit … Ainsi s'écoule toute la vie; on cherche le repos en combattant quelques obstacles, et, si on les a surmontés, le repos devient insupportable, par l'ennui qu'il engendre.⁴⁴

Pascal refers specifically to Wörle's chosen game of billiards: “[l'homme] est si vain qu'étant plein de mille causes essentielles d'ennui, la moindre chose, comme un billard et une balle qu'il pousse, suffisent pour le divertir …”⁴⁵

Despite the prominence of the notion of Spiel as gaming, confirmed by the range of associations evoked, Wörle prefers, as we have already noted, to emphasize another meaning: Spiel as a game of calculation and skill. At times his language, with its emphasis on Varianten and the need to outwit an opponent (e.g., 35, 37, 55, 80), implies Spiel as chess: “Ich spielte … die Partie des Stiefbruders mehrfach durch und fand keine Variante für ihn …” (55). However, his chosen game is billiards, which combines the cerebral dimension of chess with physical elegance in the performance of the stroke which his aestheticism calls for and which enable him to pose as a kind of Schillerian schöne Seele (101) as against the Aufklärung-style rigid rationalism of chess, which he sees as “ein starres Spiel, welches sich in der reichen Logik seiner Regeln und Möglichkeiten erschöpft” (102).

For all Wörle's disregard for history, except as backdrop for his own existence—“Geschichte existiert für den Erzähler nicht,” writes Ulrike Böhmel Fichera—both chess and billiards evoke ideas associated with historical causation and its manipulation. Chess reminds one of Benjamin's famous image of the chess-playing automaton in Über den Begriff der Geschichte;⁴⁶ here, however, there is no hidden dwarf, theology, to enable the automaton always to win. Instead, Wörle aspires to a similar godlike control through the perfection of his calculation: “Was uns zu alledem anspornt, ist der Wunsch, ein Schöpfer zu sein, ein Gott … Was uns reizt und antreibt und endlich zufriedenstellt, ist die Vollendung.” (36).

The cultural associations of billiards are more obvious. It is David Hume's chosen image to explain human notions of causation in his “Abstract” of his Treatise of Human Nature.⁴⁷ Later, it was used, negatively, by Musil in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften as a figure for causation in history: “Der Weg der Geschichte ist also nicht der eines Billardballs, der, einmal abgestoβen, eine bestimmte Bahn durchläuft, sondern er ähnelt dem Weg der Wolken … Es liegt im Verlauf der Weltgeschichte ein gewisses Sich-Verlaufen.”⁴⁸

However, if chess suggests the player as subject manipulating the pieces (other people) as objects, billiards as image is capable of development to suggest not only the mechanistic subject-object interactions implied by Hume's use of it but also the altogether more risky enterprise of oneself becoming the ball, exposed to forces exerted by others as subjects. Such, Wörle, claims, is politics: “Alle und alles sind Bälle, man bewegt und wird bewegt und muβ versuchen, das ganze Spiel im Auge zu behalten” (108), and sooner or later every true Spieler comes to the point “in dem er Spieler und Ball zugleich ist” (176). The image evokes the idea of genuine subject-subject relationships, or at least of a dialectical subject-object relationship such as Hegel's “master-slave” relationship.

In historical terms it implies entrusting oneself to history or Schicksal, which is Wörle's, and Napoleon's, only truly worthy opponent—and at whose hands the latter at least is finally defeated: “Die Dame Geschichte ist eine groβe Spielerin, die Göttin der Spieler. (Auch Napoleon wurde von ihr geschlagen, nur von ihr …)” (201). Hein suggests here a view of history akin to that suggested by a phrase which recurs in his speeches and essays, “die stattfindende Geschichte,” and to his acknowledgment of history as playful ironist: “Die Geschichte liebt Ironie … Die Geschichte, sagte ich, kennt keine Moral und liebt die unerwartete Wendung.”⁴⁹

The continuing parallel to Napoleon invoked by Wörle is reminiscent of Hegel's view of him as incarnation of the Weltgeist (“den Kaiser—diese Weltseele—sah ich durch die Stadt … reiten”⁵⁰) but also as one who, like all the welthistorische Individuen, for a time inadvertently furthers the progress of the Spirit while actually pursuing private aims but in due time, when his part is done, becomes expendable: “Ist ihr Zweck erreicht, so fallen sie, die leeren Hülsen des Kernes, ab. Sie sterben früh wie Alexander, sie werden wie Cäsar ermordet, wie Napoleon nach St. Helena transportirt.”⁵¹

Yet, for all his talk of Moscow and of the inevitable defeat which is death, Wörle has no intention of losing or of surrendering to “die Dame Geschichte.” Nor does he show any taste for being ball rather than Spieler. Only once in the text does he find himself in this uncomfortable position, during his brief affair with Katja which appears to be a three-way relationship:⁵² “[ich erfaβte] in dem Moment …, daβ die Geschwister mit mir spielten. Und ich, der groβe Spieler, ein kleiner Ball” (186). Upon realizing this, he extricates himself as soon as possible and returns to Berlin. As already pointed out, the killing of Bagnall follows closely upon this incident: Wörle, acting as it were “on the rebound,” reclaims his preferred position as Spieler, with himself as subject and Bagnall in the most literal sense his object or Spielball. In all other three-way relationships, as during childhood with his half-brother, he insists on seizing control. In his trial, following the killing of Bagnall, he again portrays himself as object: “Auch ich liege auf dem grünen Tuch und erwarte den Stoβ.” Yet even here he remains in control: “Der Spieler als Ball, der mit dem Gegenspieler spielt” (177).

The outcome of the trial and Wörle's ruthless exploitation of his knowledge of Fiarthes' “kleine dumme Geschichte” (203) to exert pressure on him reveal his talk of Napoleon to be as much a part of his rhetorical disguise as his claims to existential heroism. Wörle's talk of Geschichte and ‘Schicksal’ is part of the rhetorical game: though he uses the term Geschichte it is ultimately no more than a necessary part of his self-aggrandizing Napoleon-myth—he believes in no Weltgeist governing the affairs of men and therefore working out its enlightening, ultimately moral purpose. His preferred concept is Schicksal, viewed essentially as not much more than “the run of the balls” in billiards. His elaborate calculation of others' reactions to his various stratagems rests upon a rationalistic assessment of the cause-and-effect mechanism in human affairs, but cause and effect in any wider sense, and especially any notion of moral responsibility, is foreign to him.⁵³

A further meaning which attaches to the notion of Spiel is that of Schauspiel, play-acting. At one end of his “career” his Wednesday-afternoon encounters with the women on his father's production line provide him with early practice in role-play, deceiving both himself and others; at the other end, the legal proceedings at his approaching trial are portrayed by Wörle as a play, with barristers as actors and the accused in the Hauptrolle (9). As a good Aristotelian he consequently insists that what matters in a trial is not Wahrheit but Wahrscheinlichkeit (91). It is apparent, however, that this attitude pervades the whole of Wörle's life as portrayed to us, and it too may be seen as a part of his narcissism: through role-play he creates an alternative, better reality, with himself in the leading role. According to Eugen Fink, such play constitutes “… a pinnacle of human sovereignty … The player experiences himself as the lord of the products of his imagination.”⁵⁴

Close to the notion of acting but more important for this text is the idea of Spiel as game, i.e., a rule-governed activity. This notion has an honored place in Western culture and its significance was explored in Huizinga's famous Homo Ludens, in which play or the game is seen as a vital source of culture of all kinds and as the framework in which social values are learned and practiced. Wörle's arguments profit from the prestige surrounding this notion, but his variant of it is more like its modern version, what John Fowles in The Magus has called the “godgame” and which R. Rawdon Wilson defines as: “… a gamelike situation in which a magister ludi knows the rules (because he has invented them) and the character-player does not.”⁵⁵ The concept of the “godgame,” based on the creation of illusion and the exercise of power by one person over another, describes closely Wörle's treatment of various other figures in the novel, pre-eminently his half-brother but later also Fiarthes. As Wilson writes of Semele in her dealings with Zeus: “She uncomprehendingly … falls into a trap without knowing that she has done so, fails to see the correct implications, makes the wrong decisions …”⁵⁶ How well Wörle fits into this pattern is underlined by another of Wilson's comments: “The world of the gamewright, the god … is always essentially monological.”⁵⁷

The final sentence of Das Napoleon-Spiel echoes the most famous lines in German about the notion of Spiel: “Schlieβlich ist der Mensch, wie schon unsere Vorväter wuβten, nur wo er spielt, ganz Mensch” (208). In Schiller's conception, Spiel is the epitome of human freedom both from the sway of passions or material necessity, and from a one-sided mechanistic rationalism; it is expressive of both an inner harmony and a harmony with one's fellows and the physical world, which permit a creative, spontaneously “playful” and aesthetically pleasing form of self-realization. The degree to which Wörle's relations with himself and the world are a travesty of such a conception needs no elucidation. “Ein solcher Staat des schönen Scheins,” Schiller writes in the closing lines of his Über die Ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen, is found

… in einigen auserlesenen Zirkeln … wo der Mensch durch die verwickeltsten Verhältnisse mit kühner Einfalt und ruhiger Unschuld geht und weder nötig hat, fremde Freiheit zu kränken, um sie seinige zu behaupten, noch seine Würde wegzuwerfen, um Anmut zu zeigen.⁵⁸

We may also point out the fundamental contradiction that Wörle calls on this concept in justification of a killing performed out of Notwehr (i.e., the very circumstances in which, according to Schiller, the schöne Seele must abandon Spiel in favor of the morally sublime, even at the cost of his own existence).⁵⁹

The significance of these final lines lies rather in their betrayal of Wörle's technique. Like an over-confident criminal, he goes too far and reveals his guilty secret. For in his blatant misuse of the Schiller quotation we recognize a perversion of an idea of free yet morally noble, spontaneous yet purposeful human activity into a mere “plaything.”⁶⁰ This is symptomatic of Wörle's technique throughout. The range of echo and allusion, surely intended by Hein to be recognized by the reader—his narrative technique is as calculated in its unmasking of Wörle as the latter's is in concealment—suggests the reverse of what Wörle intends: they speak of inauthenticity, of a man metaphorically posing in other men's clothes. His life is what Hans Mayer described, in relation to Stiller, as a Leben im Zitat,⁶¹ with the whole of Western literature and thought at his disposal to choose from.

This brings us back to the question of interpretation and to the work's relation to its historical context. Two of Hein's essays from the early 1980s, the period when, as we have seen, he first conceived this work, deal with this notion of a Leben im Zitat. His essay of 1981 on the relationship between literature and its time, “Waldbruder Lenz,” includes reflections on Mode which would also describe Wörle's technique:

Mode ist das aktuelle Zitat … Die Geschichte ist der Fundus der Mode, die die Vergangenheit als Klamottenkiste ihres Repertoires benutzt. Das Zitat ist keine Zutat der Mode, sondern macht Substanz und Effekt aus.⁶²

Even more significant is the parallel with Hein's scathing critique in 1983 of Peter Sloterdijk's Kritik der zynischen Vernunft of the same year. His protagonist Wörle embodies the essence of “cynicism” as defined by Sloterdijk: “‘aufgeklärt falsches Bewuβtsein,’ eine morallose Herrenhaltung der Ideologie und Maskerade.”⁶³ For Wörle both suggests the sources of his behavior and cynically denies them. His technique is that with which Hein charges Sloterdijk too, a wilful (i.e., “cynical”) Spiel with texts and ideas: “Da spielt man mit Nietzsche … Wie Sloterdijk mit Philosophen und Texten umgeht … ist geprägt von dem unbekümmert fröhlichen Atem des Feuilletons … Fälschungen und Verdrehungen, jedoch ein Schelm, wer Arges dabei denkt” (emphasis added). He quoted Sloterdijk's own admission “… daβ man es mit dem Überlieferten nicht zu genau nehmen darf. Darin liegt natürlich auch eine groβe hermeneutische Chance, und von der machen wir hier hemmungslos Gebrauch.”⁶⁴ This is surely precisely Wörle's strategy. The whole arsenal of Western culture provides the raw material from which Wörle has woven his elaborate self-justification. This, I would argue, is the significance of the plethora of literary and philosophical allusions and echoes which Hein's text reveals. Wörle exploits this stock to develop the elaborate “spiel” (in its English sense) which will enable him to continue his Spiel at the expense of others.⁶⁵

Hein's essay on Sloterdijk offers us a further key term in identifying the ideengeschichtlicher Kontext referred to earlier: “Sloterdijk bündelte die Surrogate von Leben und Zynismen der Hilflosigkeit, um sie als Monument einer neuen Ethik erscheinen zu lassen, postmodern …”⁶⁶ In Wörle we do indeed recognize three of the features associated with the “postmodern”⁶⁷: firstly, role-play and quotation, with the past treated as a museum of styles and roles⁶⁸ whose entire stock of cultural and philosophical forms and ideas is available on a “pick-and-mix” basis to create one's personal “style” or “costume”; secondly, an aestheticization of experience in which art and reality merge, with an accompanying emphasis on performance rather than content;⁶⁹ thirdly, play no longer as conceived by Schiller, Huizinga, and others but rather as the notion developed by Derrida and others of jeu libre, an endless movement without goals or ends and a consequent “Gleichberechtigung der Spiele” and “deren Unverbindlichkeit und Folgenlosigkeit.”⁷⁰

Whereas Western critics such as Scherpe's and Schnell's accounts of postmodernism see it above all as a cultural phenomenon, a product of modern (“postmodern”?) society (Scherpe speaks of an “ästhetische Entsorgung der Modernisie-rungs-schäden”⁷¹), left-wing critics such as Gudrun Klatt view it more harshly, as a despairing response on the part of the 1960s generation to the failure of their utopian ambition, a reading similar to Sloterdijk's view of the cynicism of the 1970s and 1980s in his Kritik der zynischen Vernunft. Klatt sees postmodernism as a “Bestätigung des So-Seins” and as a “Tendenz zur Ästhetisierung des Krisenbewuβtseins.”⁷² Hein's critique of Sloterdijk pursues the same line of argument: he brackets together “postmodern” and “cynicism” as “das … neue Gefühl der westdeutschen Linken, eines Teils von ihr,”⁷³ specifically “nach vielen Enttäuschungen und verlorenen Hoffnungen.”⁷⁴ Their engagement for such causes, Hein claims, was never really serious and was therefore doomed to failure. “Und das geschulte Bewuβtsein kann den Verfall nur verarbeiten, indem es seine Katastrophe als neue Tugend ausstellt: Man ist nicht einfach zynisch, das wäre ja bourgeois; man unterscheidet sich und präsentiert den Zynismus zynisch.”⁷⁵

Christoph Hein, by contrast, who has repeatedly asserted the need to hope despite all disappointments, cannot so readily abandon his ideals: “Diese Beliebigkeit langweilt mich. Meine Kämpfe hier habe ich nicht so billig … Wir haben keine Wahl, denn es ist unsere Wirklichkeit, unsere eigene, unaufgebbare Wirklichkeit.”⁷⁶Das Napoleon-Spiel reflects this critical stance: it reveals that, despite all Wörle's talking and posing, his Spiel is not folgenlos—not only does it leave Bagnall dead but the underlying “theory” is then pressed into service as mask for Wörle's real motives and as justification for a killing. As Fritz-Jochen Kopka says at the close of his review: “Ein reicher Irrer findet immer eine Ideologie, wenn er töten will.”⁷⁷

These links to the essays of the early 1980s confirm that the germ of Das Napoleon-Spiel lies in Hein's critique of some Western—and doubtless Eastern too—intellectual attitudes as he saw them at that time. Later, in the late 1980s, Hein became an outspoken critic of attempts in East and West alike to falsify or blandly disregard history and the moral responsibility which it imposes, attempts which illustrated the cynicism that he had attacked in the earlier essays.⁷⁸ Then, as McKnight has persuasively argued,⁷⁹ his close-up experience of some of the leading figures in the GDR apparatus while working on the committee which investigated police brutality on 7 and 8 October 1989 in East Berlin⁸⁰—and probably also further exposure to the less attractive aspects of the West in the immediate post-Unification period—gave a further impetus and a new, more immediate relevance to Hein's portrait of Wörle.

Despite the thematic similarities there is a world of difference in approach between Hein's essays and Das Napoleon-Spiel. The figure of Wörle is not conceived as a realistic portrait; Hein's aim is not verisimilitude—he regards a direct connection between events and their literary representation as “eine Gefahr für die Literatur, auf jeden Fall für die meine.”⁸¹ Instead he gives us a satirical version of the cynical disregard both for the integrity of the sources and for morality which is inherent in such contemporary intellectual poses. Moreover, the discursive analysis of the essays is replaced in the novel by an aesthetically more satisfying view from within which offers to the reader a game-like challenge to “see through” its protagonist's mask as well as they did in the case of Der fremde Freund—and for Western critics this involved a degree of detachment from their own cultural environment which not all were able to achieve. In opting for Rollenprosa he has placed Wörle in the position of narrator and thus enabled him to make the reader, as well as Fiarthes, the potential victim in his “godgame.”

In fact, Hein's text as a whole leaves the reader with little solid ground under the feet. The final section of the text, Wörle's second letter to his lawyer Fiarthes, opens up the dizzying perspectives of a structure en abîme. If Wörle is planning to have his first letter published by “einem Schriftsteller, der das Ganze unter seinem Namen herausbringen soll … ich werde unter diesen ausgehungerten Burschen leicht einen geeigneten Strohmann finden …” (197), what is the status of the text before us? Does the same apply to the second letter? What will be the outcome of the second Spiel announced in the entirely open-ended second letter? The final pages consist in large measure of instructions to Fiarthes, by which Wörle seeks to direct his and our reactions. As Fritz Rudolf Fries comments in his NDL review: “Doch dann ist in den Bekenntnissen dieses geistigen Hochstaplers eine Bodenlosigkeit, die der Autor uns planvoll bereitet hat. Wir alle, ob Masse oder Spieler, taumeln ins Nichts.”⁸²

Instead of the text as collaborative game between reader and author, it thus becomes what R. Rawdon Wilson describes as the text as labyrinth, with “corridors of doubt, passageways of perplexity, forking paths of decision” or even as “a challenge flung in the reader's face,”⁸³ requiring the reader to challenge its monological nature and elaborate its suppressed subtext. It exhibits, with its overt lack of historicality, its intertextuality and its wilful way with its sources, just those features against which its implicit critique is directed.

This is not to claim for Das Napoleon-Spiel that it is the fashionable “postmodern text,” only that it engages with such tendencies, revealing within a specific historical context their potentially destructive consequences for moral values, whether in the personal, national or international spheres. From Hein's own point of view, it represents a considerable departure from his previous work, as the rather baffled initial reactions of commentators indicate. Indeed, one might go so far as to suggest that, in as far as every work of art is a kind of Spiel and every artist something of a Spieler—a notion repeatedly suggested in the text⁸⁴—Das Napoleon-Spiel may well be seen as a risky enterprise, his Moscow, though not, one suspects, his Waterloo.

Notes

1. Helmut Böttiger, “Das Amoralische hat Hochkonjunktur,” Frankfurter Rundschau 3 April 1993: 4.

2. Ulrike Böhmel Fichera: “Der Sieger. Christoph Heins Das Napoleon-Spiel, (1993),” Literatur für Leser 3 (1995): 134.

3. Böhmel Fichera 130. Her suggestion of ‘Eindeutigkeit’ is hardly borne out by the variety of attempts to spell out what the connection is. Jürgen Kanold saw it as an ‘ostalgic’ portrayal of “die Banalität des Bösen in Gestalt eines Macht-Wessis” (Jürgen Kanold, “Memoiren eines Bürokraten,” Schwäbisches Tageblatt [Tübingen] 22 June 1993). By contrast, Helmut Böttiger saw in the work “ein Modell des DDR-Problems: die Durchdringung der Gesellschaft mit dem Stasi-Geflecht” (Böttiger 4). Other, and more subtle, attempts to relate the novel directly to contemporary concerns include Werner Rossade's linking of the central character's taste for difficult, self-imposed problems to “… machtpolitischen Verfahren … die Krisen erst selbst erzeugen, um sie dann mit viel Aufwand—und nicht ohne eigenes Risiko—zu ‘meistern,’ mit mörderischen Folgen für die unwillentlich Betroffenen,” of which Russia's adventures in Georgia are cited as one example (Werner Rossade, “Der absolute Spieler,” Deutschland-Archiv 11 (1994): 1216).

4. All page references are to Christoph Hein, Das Napoleon-Spiel (Berlin/Weimar: Aufbau, 1993).

5. Böhmel Fichera 134.

6. Martin Krumbholz, “Unendliche Balläufe,” die tageszeitung [Berlin] 3 June 1993.

7. For information on the circumstances of the writing of Das Napoleon-Spiel see Phillip McKnight, Understanding Christoph Hein (Columbia, South Carolina: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1995) 113.

8. Thomas Rietzschel, “Doch die Verhältnisse, sie sind nicht so,” Literatur Spectrum 10 July 1993:7.

9. Jamal Tuschik, “Manipulation an der Reizschraube,” Rheinischer Merkur 9 April 1993: 22.

10. Hannes Krauss, “Steigender Einsatz,” Freitag 9 April 1993.

11. Anon, “Tödliche Spiele gegen tödliche Langeweile,” Der Bund [Bern] 24 June 1993:31. These literary judgements must be distinguished from the disgraceful suggestions by Die Welt's reviewer, Chaim Noll, that the work is a “Versuch der Selbstanklage”: “Der Autor hat etwas zu verbergen, vielleicht etwas sehr Schäbiges, aber macht das allein schon interessant?” Noll adds that whereas other former GDR writers “sich öffentlich zu ihrem Mittun bekennen und daraus noch Kapital schlagen … [zu] diesem Spiel fehlt Autor Hein der Mut.” (Chaim Noll, “Lieber ein Verbrecher sein als ein Versager,” Die Welt [Hamburg] 25 March 1993).

12. For example by Jamal Tuschik (see note 9).

13. As Irmtraud Gutschke rightly pointed out in Neues Deutschland, the reader “kann sich auch abwenden; Was gehen mich die Obsessionen dieses Wörle an? Solchen Unterton hatten mehrere Rezensionen zu ‘Das Napoleon-Spiel’” (Irmtraud Gutschke, “Spielen oder gespielt werden,” Neues Deutschland [Berlin] 3–6 May 1993, Literaturbeilage: 1).

14. E.g., the contributions by Gabriele Lindner, Bernd Schick, and Ursula Wilke to the “Für und Wider” debate in Weimarer Beiträge 29 (1983): 1635–55.

15. Böhmel Fichera 134.

16. Some critics, while sensing this, appear to draw the wrong conclusions, e.g. Jamal Tuschik, who describes Wörle as “ein in Ideen vernarrter Marottenkopf mit der Spezialität, zu behaupten, von allem, was er unternimmt, es gelänge ihm auβerordentlich gut” (see note 9). By contrast, Fritz-Jochen Kopka rightly comments, in one of the most perceptive reviews, “Weiβ der Teufel, ob Wörle wirklich ein Spieler ist. Ein Schwätzer ist er auf jeden Fall. Und ein Schwätzer lügt.” Fritz-Jochen Kopka, “Reicher Irrer,” Wochenpost 29 April 1993:26.

17. “Wörle uses language in the same way he practices [sic] billiards: the spin of each word, sentence, and phrase he uses is calculated to impact on his colleague Fiarthes in a certain, predictable way. Likewise the spin placed on the language by Hein has an impact on the reader as well, a calculated impact which causes his or her disbelief to grow with the increasing realization of the potential for human atrocities contained in this man Wörle” (McKnight 115).

18. Christoph Hein, “Ich werde als DDR-Schriftsteller in die Grube fahren,” Freitag 28 May 1993:9.

19. While some reconciliation of the apparent contradiction might be possible, it indicates that Wörle's statements at any particular point are governed by the rhetorical needs of the moment rather than by a strict concern for either truthfulness or internal consistency.

20. An assertion which all the critics appear to accept without demur.

21. Strangely, the early encounters with the factory women and the Katja episode are virtually ignored in the reviews of Das Napoleon-Spiel.

22. Franz Schütte, Glücksspiel und Narziβmus. Der pathologische Spieler aus soziologischer und tiefenpsychologischer Sicht (Bochum: Studienverlag Brockmeyer, 1985) 11.

23. Schütte 59.

24. Schütte 60.

25. Though these may well be historically or sociologically rooted—see Böhmel Fichera's analysis of his psychological deficiencies (note 2).

26. Heinz-Peter Preuβer suggests that Hein alludes to Freudian theories about the “anal character” in his portrayal of Racine in “Einladung zum Lever bourgeois”; see Heinz-Peter Preuβer, Zivilisationskritik und literarische Öffentlichkeit. Strukturale und wertungs-theoretische Untersuchungen zu erzählenden Texten Christoph Heins (Frankfurt/Bern: Peter Lang, 1991) 18, note 21.

27. Schütte 71ff.

28. Schütte 86.

29. Schütte 116, 119.

30. See, for example, Ines Zekert's Poetologie und Prophetie. Christoph Heins Prosa und Dramatik im Kontext seiner Walter-Benjamin-Rezeption (Frankfurt/Berlin: Peter Lang, 1993), and my article “The Fear of Allegory. Benjaminian Elements in Christoph Hein's The Distant Lover,” New German Critique 66 (1995): 164–92.

31. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 8 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974) 5:635–37. Much of the material in this section of the Passagen-Werk was used in the writing of Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire which could also be Hein's source.

32. Benjamin 636.

33. Benjamin 641.

34. Benjamin 637.

35. Benjamin 621, quoted by Benjamin from Paul Laforgue, Die Ursachen des Gottesglaubens. These associations emphasize the socio-economic and historical sources of Wörle's psychological deformation. Bourgeois politics too are seen as a form of Spiel: “Für die Bourgeoisie insbesondere nehmen die politischen Ereignisse leicht die Form von Vorgängen am Spieltisch an” (Benjamin 640). Benjamin thus brings together the three fields—financial gain, politics, and sexual adventures—in which Wörle the Spieler is active.

36. Benjamin 609–18 and 629–53. Wörle's short-termism, relative indifference to financial gain, and rejection of Erfahrung echo Benjamin's account of Baudelaire's portrayal of le jeu (Benjamin 632–37): “Das Immer-wieder-von-vorn-anfangen ist die regulative Idee des Spiels (wie der Lohnarbeit)” (Benjamin 636).

37. Benjamin 612.

38. Benjamin 638.

39. Other links between Das Napoleon-Spiel and the Passagen-Werk might be seen in the common portrayal of gambling in the one case and billiards in the other as an unending succession of Konstellationen, each requiring a new reaction from the Spieler (Benjamin 639), and in Benjamin's reference to Schwellenerfahrungen (Benjamin 617–18). Hein leaves Wörle poised on the threshold of the women's shower-room, into which he is never allowed to enter (27). The Realitätsprinzip, in the form of war and flight, frustrates the satisfaction of the Lustprinzip—a source, according to psycho-analysis, of the narcissism seen in Wörle. One wonders also whether it is only coincidence that Gracian's maxim “in allen Dingen die Zeit auf seine Seite zu bringen wissen,” quoted in the “Prostitution. Spiel” section of the Passagen-Werk (Benjamin 640), also occurs in Hein's Horns Ende, which was written in 1982–83, the time from which the idea for Das Napoleon-Spiel dates. Hein says in his Freitag interview (see note 18) that “die ersten Notizen für diesen Roman gibt es vom November 1982.”

40. Lothar Baier, “Jenseits von Gewinn und Verlust,” Süddeutsche Zeitung [Munich] 31 March 1993, Feuilleton 1.

41. Benjamin 634.

42. Evidence for Hein's reception of Pascal is to be found in Preuβer 18–20.

43. The echoes of Camus have been noted by many critics. The references to death from a falling rooftile (165) or from a collapsing bridge (169) also have a familiar ring, recalling the manner of death of Ödön von Horvath and Cyrano de Bergerac, but I have not been able to trace any specific reference.

44. Blaise Pascal, Les Pensées, ed. Z. Tourneur and D. Anzieu, 2 vols. (Paris: Armand Colin, 1960) 1: 93, 97 (= Brunschwig edition, no. 377).

45. Pascal 1:97.

46. Benjamin 693.

47. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Abstract), ed. I. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd ed. by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978) 649ff.

48. Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1970) 361.

49. “Unbelehrbar—Erich Fried. Rede zur Verleihung des Erich-Fried-Preises am 6. Mai 1990 in Wien,” Christoph Hein. Texte, Daten, Bilder, ed. Lothar Baier (Frankfurt: Luchterhand Literatur-Verlag, 1990) 29–30. The idea also occurs in Die wahre Geschichte des Ah Q of 1983: “Eine unerwartete Wendung der Geschichte … Die Geschichte liebt Sprünge, Dialektik. Vom Niederen aufsteigend zum Höheren und abfallend ins Triviale.” Christoph Hein, Die wahre Geschichte des Ah Q. Stücke und Essays (Darmstadt/Neuwied: Sammlung Luchterhand, 1984) 125.

50. G. W. Fr. Hegel, Briefe von und an Hegel, ed. J. Hoffmeister, 4 vols. (Hamburg: Meiner, 1969) 1:120.

51. G. W. Fr. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschicht. Sämtliche Werke, Jubiläumsausgabe, ed. H. Glockner (Stuttgart: Fr. Frommann Verlag, 1961) 11:61.

52. Ulrike Böhmel Fichera points out the prevalence of the number three in the novel and ascribes this to Wörle's being a member of the “dritte Generation” (Böhmel Fichera 133). It seems more likely that it is related to the three balls used in billiards and to the ever-changing “constellations” of three thus created.

53. For a discussion of the “moral” dimension within what Hein calls “die stattfindende Geschichte” see my article “‘Unverhofftes Wiedersehen’: Narrative Paradigms in Christoph Hein's ‘Nachtfahrt und früher Morgen’ and ‘Exekution eines Kalbes,’” German Life and Letters 51 (1998): 398–414.

54. Eugen Fink, “The Oasis of Happiness: Towards an Ontology of Play,” Yale French Studies 41 (1968): 24–25.

55. R. Rawdon Wilson, In Palamedes' Shadow. Explorations in Play, Game and Narrative Theory (Boston: Northeastern UP, 1990) 123–24. In literature the “godgame” has a long history, sometimes with evil intent, as in Othello, but more often with an honorable, educative purpose, as in Die Zauberflöte, Wilhelm Meister, and Der Steppenwolf.

56. Wilson 124.

57. Wilson 124.

58. Friedrich Schiller, Sämtliche Werke, ed. G. Fricke and H. G. Göpfert, 5 vols. (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1980) 5:669. Hein's knowledge of Schiller is emphasized by a comment in his speech to the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung in October 1992: “… seit meinem zwölften Lebensjahr, seit der Lektüre von Schillers Gesamtwerk in einem Band, war mein Beruf entschieden.” Christoph Hein, “Über mich selbst,” Die Mauern von Jerichow. Essais und Reden (Berlin/Weimar: Aufbau Taschenbuchverlag, 1996) 241.

59. “Die schöne Seele muβ sich also in Affekt in eine erhabene wandeln … die schöne Seele geht ins Heroische über und erhebt sich zur reinen Intelligenz,” writes Schiller in “Über Anmut und Würde” (Schiller 5:474–5).

60. Wörle indicates his real view of any such idealism when he describes “die Aufklärung des Menschengeschlechts” (Lessing?) as “eine Fantasterei von Burschen, die die Welt nicht kennen” (76).

61. Hans Mayer, “Anmerkungen zu ‘Stiller,’” Dürrenmatt und Frisch (Pfullingen: Neske, 1963) 38–54.

62. Die wahre Geschichte des Ah Q 156–57. Another passage in the same essay also seems to describe Wörle's attitude to history: “Macht erlaubt sich keine Historie, läβt den Sinn für Geschichte verkümmern, da sie allein besorgt ist, Anspruch und Erhalt ihrer Herrschaft zu sichern” (Die wahre Geschichte des Ah Q 142).

63. Christoph Hein, “Linker Kolonialismus oder Der Wille zum Feuilleton,” Schlötel, oder Was solls, Stücke und Essays (Darmstadt/Neuwied: Sammlung Luchterhand, 1986) 184. This connection is pointed out by Fritz-Jochen Kopka (see note 16).

64. Schlötel, oder Was solls 184–85.

65. Schlötel, oder Was solls 192.

66. Schlötel, oder Was solls 192.

67. I rely here on definitions advanced in the following: Klaus Scherpe, “Von der Moderne zur Postmoderne,” Weimarer Beiträge 37.3 (1991); RalfSchnell, “Zwischen Geschichtsphilosophie und ‘posthistoire,’” Weimarer Beiträge 37.3 (1991); Gudrun Klatt, “Moderne und Postmoderne im Streit zwischen Jean-François Lyotard und Jürgen Habermas,” Weimarer Beiträge 35.3 (1989).

68. Scherpe 358, 363–67. Scherpe identifies one feature of the postmodern particularly relevant to Wörle: the only form in which authentic experience is available is one's own death, hence the “Lust am Untergang” and the tendency “mit der Selbstzerstörung zu kokettieren” (Scherpe 361–63). This last phrase aptly describes Wörle's “gambling” with his own existence.

69. Schnelle 343.

70. Klatt 274.

71. Scherpe 361.

72. Klatt 277, 275.

73. Schlötel, oder Was solls 192.

74. Schlötel, oder Was solls 184.

75. Schlötel, oder Was solls 199. Significantly, Hein echoes Sloterdijk's words quoted earlier (see note 64) when discussing “die Postmoderne” with Frauke Meyer-Gosau during the time when he was writing Das Napoleon-Spiel: “Postmoderne ist die Chance, in eine selbstver-schuldete Unmündigkeit zu gelangen, von der man auch hemmungslos Gebrauch macht.” Christoph Hein, “‘Ich bin der Leser, für den ich schreibe.’ Ein Gespräch mit Frauke Meyer-Gosau,” Christoph Hein. Text + Kritik 111 (1991): 87.

76. Schlötel, oder Was solls 199.

77. Kopka (see note 16).

78. For Hein's critique of the Western Historikerstreit, see his essay of 1989, “Die Zeit, die nicht vergehen kann,” Christoph Hein, Die fünfte Grundrechenart (Frankfurt: Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 1990) 129–54. For his criticism of GDR historiography, see “Die fünfte Grundrechenart,” also of 1989, in the same volume, 163–72. His experience with the Untersuchungskommission in particular could lie behind his quotation in 1992, in his “Über mich selbst” of Nietzsche's famous dictum about the clash between memory and pride—and its cynical outcome (Die Mauern von Jerichow 240).

79. McKnight 131–35.

80. Und diese verdammte Ohnmacht. Report der unabhängigen Untersuchungskommission zu den Ereignissen vom 7./8. Oktober 1989 in Berlin (Berlin: BasisDruck, 1991). Hein comments in his introduction: “Wenn man den vor der Kommission erfolgten Aussagen Glauben schenken will, so waren die mächtigsten Männer des Staates und seiner Sicherheitskräfte alle heimliche Widerstandskämpfer. (Auch die aus dem Politbüro zur Anhörung vorgeladenen Personen legten Wert darauf, entsetzt und unschuldig und mit Widerstand beschäftigt gewesen zu sein).” (Und diese verdammte Ohnmacht 12). This experience is possibly reflected in Wörle's ability to escape penalty for the killing of Bagnall.

81. “Ich bin der Leser, für den ich schreibe.” 88.

82. Fritz Rudolf Fries, “Das Feldherren-Syndrom,” Neue deutsche Literatur 41, 5 (1993): 139.

83. Wilson, 155, 242.

84. Wörle might be thought to speak for Hein when he writes “Ich will den Erfolg, aber wenn ich ihn erreicht habe, werde ich den nächsten und schwierigeren anstreben. Und nur das Miβlingen eines Spiels kann mich bewegen, einen Ballstoβ zu wiederholen” (203)—a remark entirely in line with Hein's repeated rejection of repetitive, unadventurous art as “Makkulatur.”