SOURCE: McKnight, Phillip. “The Vulnerability of Silence: The Distant Lover.” In Understanding Christoph Hein, edited by James Hardin, pp. 20–39. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995.

[In the following essay, McKnight explores the themes of emotional self-alienation and invasion in The Distant Lover.]

The key to Der fremde Freund, 1982 (The Distant Lover) is understanding Hein's use of short, staccato, matter-of-fact sentences relaying the thoughts of the first-person narrator about other people, her environment, and herself. Claudia, a physician, describes emptiness with the vocabulary of fulfillment, presents unlived life as existential happiness, and justifies a nihilistic attitude with the language of optimism. Her professed emancipation is reflected in her cynical manipulation of psychological mechanisms enabling her to repress inner moral guidance and to suppress affection or cordiality for friends, family, and acquaintances, and to facilitate the rejection of affection shown to her by them.

In the end she claims that she sleeps well, has no nightmares, but the book opens with a dream in which she experiences terror and helplessness. In the dream, Claudia finds herself—at least she thinks it is herself—together with a male friend whose face is blurred. They appear in her dream at the brink of an abyss. They try to inch their way across the broken ruins of a bridge when five runners come out of the forest and run silently and sure-footedly across the narrow beams spanning the chasm, leaving Claudia and her partner frozen in fear, unable to go back, hopelessly aware that they must go forward. The key elements of the dream consist of Claudia's desire for her frightened partner to stop clutching her—“everyone for themselves,” she thinks ([Der fremde Freund, hereafter cited as Dr] 5)—and her unwillingness to plunge into what could be construed as the depths of her own being. Finally, she equates the dream with the anxiety of remembrance. Her spontaneous reaction is to paste daily routines over whatever reality might be revealed by memory, as a schoolchild would paste new stickers over old on a notebook. This ploy is indicative of her refusal to confront earlier traumatic experiences, fearing the damage such memory could do to her well-constructed shell of safety.

Following the introductory dream sequence, the novella unfolds in thirteen tightly-knit chapters. Chapters two through twelve describe her year-long affair with Henry Sommer. Chapter one portrays her attendance at his funeral, and thirteen consists of her reflections six months later. Claudia's encounter with Henry is the point of departure for her break from her established routine to take a decisive journey into her past, culminating in a visit to the small village where she grew up. Henry's death marks her escape back into the routine and into her self-constructed fortress against the emotions of intimacy with other human beings.

ROUTINES

Hein began writing The Distant Lover with the intention of telling the story of a man he had known who died as a result of unspecified but irresponsible or foolish actions that seemed like a trivial way to waste a life. Dissatisfied with the story's potential, Hein came upon the idea of portraying the man from the perspective of a second party, a woman. From this vague background, the woman, Claudia, quickly emerged as the central figure of the novella. Her description of Henry, the “distant [or “alienated”] lover,” was extended to other characters and events as well, so that the narrative is related exclusively from Claudia's subjective perspective. She ultimately tells us a good deal more about herself than about other people. In fact, the reader must be careful not to assume that Claudia's opinions about people and events have objective value—they are usually revelations about Claudia. Hein never tells us whether her observations have any objective validity or which of them can be taken at face value. One aspect of reception aesthetics which Hein's writing entails is the obligation of the reader to exercise care in explicating the text. Hein releases the reader's thinking into an independent and highly subjective sphere, permitting a myriad of potential viewpoints, each of which acts as a continuation of a multi-faceted dialogue established between the written words of the author and the thoughts of the reader. This technique of drawing the reader into the inner thoughts of the narrator (with no chance to exit until the end of the book) can easily put the reader in a position of questioning one's own subjective reaction to the text and (unlike most of Hein's other works) tends to break down much of the traditional objective distance between reader and text. Hein establishes the reader's position with respect to the narrator in the opening chapters in the context of Claudia's self-described reactions to people and events encountered in her daily routines.

On the day of the funeral, Claudia demonstrates her self-imposed isolation from others on several occasions. In the dilapidated, unventilated elevator with speechless riders from her high-rise apartment, for example, she participates in their collective unwillingness to know each other, disgusted at the smell of too many people in the elevator. The atmosphere of the entire high-rise building is a mirror for Claudia's feelings, including her reflections about the concierge, whose only contact with the renters besides an occasional repair of a leaky faucet, according to Claudia's perception, is his obligation to deal with the apartments of those who have died.

At work in the clinic, she is annoyed at the head physician's request for her to accompany him to the mayor's office to ask for the restoration of their recently reduced contingency of available apartments, which they needed in order to recruit additional nurses from the province. (Although East Berlin was much too large for thorough or accurate controls, the state bureaucracy nevertheless tried to link housing permits for state-owned dwellings with work stations.) At the same time, Claudia is grateful she doesn't have to listen to the doctor's condolences when she begs off due to the funeral.

She also is irritated, as usual, by the chronic tardiness of her “cow-eyed” nurse, Karla, whose excuse is always her children. She uses this excuse, according to Claudia, “presumably in order to give her [Claudia] a bad conscience” (Dr 9) for not having any children herself—the reason her husband had supposedly divorced her. Claudia refuses to admonish a regular patient, a humorous and somewhat harmlessly perverse retired old man, for touching Karla, since she is old enough to take care of herself. Why should she help Karla? Karla annoys her by discovering her dark blue coat in the office closet and asking her if she were going to a funeral. Claudia's first thoughts in chapter one consist of her indecisiveness about attending the funeral at all. She had selected the coat because it could pass for black. Karla's question, intruding in the game Claudia has been playing in her mind, now determines that she will have to go to the funeral.

The routine lunchtime in the clinic's canteen includes a colleague's lament about his stolen car, a topic which is considerably more important than whatever sympathy the others might have felt for the fact that Claudia will be attending the funeral of a deceased friend. To be sure, the man had paid double the book value of the car, and the normal waiting period for purchase of a new automobile in the GDR was seven to ten years.

Claudia continues the day's routine by having coffee later with Anne—whose husband, Claudia reports, rapes her every other week. Their sex life is normal otherwise, and Anne is the mother of four children, but her husband seems to need to humiliate her once in a while. Claudia keeps her distance. Anne seems to be waiting for age to catch up with her husband, “senility as hope” (Dr 12). Claudia can only wonder if the new dress Anne's husband bought her—as compensation—would be more appropriate for the funeral than what Claudia is wearing: “what do I have to do with her being raped. God knows, she deserves to bear her burden alone” (Dr 12).

It occurs to Claudia that she had not thought about Henry all day. As she drives to the funeral, she can only think of one thing: that she is supposed to remember him, to keep him in her memory. She's tempted to stop at home to pick up her camera and take advantage of the free afternoon to go somewhere and take pictures, her hobby. Funerals, memorial services, seem like a waste of time, a kind of “atavistic death cult” (Dr 13). At the cemetery, Claudia is uneasy to discover there are two funerals and she is unsure to which party she belongs. She doesn't like being stared at. At the ceremony she decides to join, she notices a woman with two children, evidently Henry's widow. After listening and thinking about the routine banalities of the rites, she finds herself in the absurd position of having to shake the widow's hand after tossing a handful of dirt onto the coffin. Thinking that Henry's widow hates her, Claudia is amused by the notion that she could have her face slapped at the open grave. Later, she stops in a café for a cognac and tries her best to think about Henry, the burial, the soft voice of the minister. Then she gives up.

INVULNERABLE

These descriptive reflections by Claudia at the opening of the book disclose how she trivializes meaning by ritualizing what might have otherwise been appropriate behavior. Although Claudia's exact relationship to Henry is not revealed until later, shortly after she gives up trying to remember him, a funeral is an event associated with the trauma of loss and the commemoration of an individual held dear or important. Claudia's behavior would indicate that she is attending the funeral of some acquaintance or colleague whom she didn't know very well rather than the funeral of her lover and that she is reluctantly doing so as the fulfillment of an expected social obligation.

Each of the incidents of the day represents what Peter C. Pfeiffer calls a “potential for the recovery of lost meaningfulness and fulfillment,”¹ a potential never realized by Claudia. She sees the funeral as an “excuse” to avoid helping to find housing for the nurses. She belittles Karla's need for personal interaction on the grounds of Karla's promiscuity. Claudia's interaction with other colleagues about the funeral is pasted over with the talk about the stolen car. Her reaction to Anne's trauma is diverted by thoughts of the dress Anne had received from her husband. Most important, as we realize later in the text, the funeral represents a potentially unavoidable trauma for Claudia should she have to shake the hand of the widow, the woman whose husband had cheated on her with Claudia. In her comparison of The Distant Lover with Camus's The Stranger, Brigitte Sändig states that the “consistent retention of the character perspective” and the psychological constitution of the figures provide meaning in the text: “Indifference and imperturbability permit both Meursault and Claudia to forego involvement with things and people. … But it becomes increasingly evident [that] this indifference is a protective mechanism against reality for both of them.”²

The culmination of Claudia's alienation appears with her astounding words towards the end of the book: “I'm ready for everything, I'm armed against everything, nothing can injure me any more. I have become invulnerable. I have bathed in dragon's blood and no linden leaf left a vulnerable place on me. I will never get out of this skin. I will croak in my impenetrable shell out of longing for Katharina” (Dr 154). The last sentence, along with several others from the last chapter, reveals her vulnerability in the same breath she denies it. The imagery of bathing in dragon's blood refers to the famous medieval saga of the Nibelungen, of how Siegfried slew a dragon and bathed in its blood to make his skin impenetrable, how a linden leaf covered a single spot in the middle of his back, the spot struck by the spear which killed him in a cowardly act of betrayal. Claudia's childhood friend Katharina represents the vulnerable spot for her, the one spot she cannot cover, even throughout her continual posture of denial. Claudia's laconic, straightforward sentence structures appear together without necessarily containing a common sign of sense or coherence. As Sändig notes, “her reports are fixed in the structural syntax itself with the existential coercion to live in an alienated world and with her decision to confront this world with indifference.”³

Claudia's meeting with Henry ultimately serves as a catalyst to her memory and the reawakening of her emotional capacity for intimacy, powerful elements which may be understood as the cause for her visit to the village where she grew up—a place which contains the remembrance of her self and the origin of her personality, molded by events and emotions she had suppressed for years. She attempts to keep a certain distance between herself and Henry and finds him very willing to collaborate. The distance provides an unyielding brittleness for the relationship and an uncomplicated familiarity for Claudia, who “had no need to open up completely to another person ever again, to be in someone else's power” (Dr 29).

Henry is sometimes mistakenly seen by readers as a Kerouac type—free, wild, and exuberant, an architect who likes fast cars and whose imaginary career would have been that of a race-car driver or a stunt man.⁴ Although Henry may have generated this kind of perception in the forty-year-old Claudia, he describes his work complacently as building what he calls “useless nuclear plants” designed “sometimes for the river to flow on the right and sometimes on the left” (Dr 27), and his driving, during which time he “feels alive” (Dr 28), is just plain foolish and reckless, not adventurous or racy. It's also somewhat of a contradiction in terms, inasmuch as the vintage GDR cars were unable to go much faster than the official speed limit, about 60 m.p.h., so that Henry's speeding is relatively tame, even on the narrow country roads. Not to say that he, like other East Germans, was not aware of the sleek, swift Western cars seen on television and on the autobahn connecting West Germany with West Berlin, and he too probably would have dreamed of driving over 100 m.p.h. on the West German autobahn as a participant in the psychotic German driving culture, just for thrills.

Henry is ironic and aloof. To him, life has no meaning; his outlook is pragmatically nihilistic. The love relationship is devoid of familiar admissions to each other of compassion and real intimacy. He and Claudia avoid exchanging biographical details most of the time, and when they do, it results in disaster. They first meet in the confines of the apartment elevator, and Henry shows up that evening asking to be fed, after which he climbs into bed with Claudia, to her consternation and amusement.

That weekend Claudia visits her parents, and we find that her family ties are weak, forgotten. Her mother talks about Hinner, Claudia's previous husband, and seems to want them to get back together. Her father is disillusioned by the lack of political engagement on Claudia's part and complains that she has no idea what is happening in the world, since she doesn't even read the paper—actually Claudia does read the paper, but only the personals and the classified ads. Claudia's parents' generation were the idealist socialists, strongly political and committed to building an alternate German society. Claudia's apolitical attitude is symptomatic of an important generational conflict in East Germany. The older political activists had been unequivocally committed to socialism and worked hard to build what they viewed as an alternate society after the war, while a large portion of Claudia's generation tended to withdraw into mundane private life and the generation after Claudia openly rejected socialist ideals and the hypocrisy they perceived.

In this context it is essential to understand that aside from their haunting ring of self-deception, Claudia's claims at the end of the book—that she has it made, she is a success, nothing significant remains for her to accomplish—all underscore a self-centered life, one conducted without contribution to the public or social sphere, an existence without expectations. Back home in the city, Claudia attempts to formulate some clear concepts about her parents. She is unable to do so. There is only a vague remembrance, nothing much; she soon falls asleep. The words echo her inability to remember Henry after the funeral.

The importance of history—how it is distorted, changed, and covered up by political constituencies—is one of the subjects of Horns Ende, published in 1985. In The Distant Lover the significance of personal history is also accentuated; Claudia omits details, suppresses key incidents, and endeavors to exist only in a present that she defines and that is without encumbrances from the past. The issues of social memory found in Horns Ende are preceded with issues of psychosomatic personal memory in The Distant Lover. According to Pfeiffer, these two novels and their portrayal of confrontations with the past articulate the precariousness of the national identity of the GDR, the lack of which identity helps to explain the collapse in 1989: “In the process of remembering, the sediments of the past suddenly become translucent in The Distant Lover and Horns Ende, revealing the petrified structure of the present both in the private sphere (The Distant Lover) and in the historical and social sphere (Horns Ende). The use of history and stories should provide the present with a renewed dynamic potential.”⁵

Hein was strongly influenced by his readings of the Jewish social theoretician Walter Benjamin and of Marcel Proust on the subjects of history and remembrance. For both of these authors, the search for the past should be relentless and is central to a critical understanding of the present. Hein seems likewise to suggest that many of Claudia's internal deformities are related to her denial of the past and to her failure to come to grips with the totality of her being.

Avoidance of close contact with other human beings enhances Claudia's ability to stay out of their personal affairs, to remain ignorant of their personal lives. Each time an opportunity is presented, she manages to remain out on the beam over the abyss, unable to retreat, stationary, not moving forward, trapped in limbo.

When Claudia promises to use her connections to try to get a copper IUD for Karla from the West, Karla's gratitude almost leads to a closeness. They could have hugged, or shaken hands, an act that Claudia fears would lead to a daily rite, a friendly intimacy that she was relieved to have avoided. Why look for an explanation of this fear of touching in the vocabulary of psychiatry, she thinks, for her life was best seen as a clinical phenomenon: “expressions, movements, feelings,—merely false behavior in the face of the all-comprehensive termini of some abstract norm” (Dr 38). Even when she hadn't heard from Henry for a week, she recalled that they were not responsible for each other, they didn't owe each other anything. She was mildly annoyed to notice that she would have liked for him to have told her when he was leaving town for a few days.

It could also be that whole urban societies have, to some extent, “bathed in dragon's blood.” A passage from Hein's “Worüber man nicht reden kann, davon kann die Kunst ein Lied singen,” 1986 (“That Which Cannot Be Spoken of Can Have a Song Sung about It by Art”) indicates that Claudia may be seen as a representation of twentieth-century tendencies to respond to stress, trauma, daily routine. There, he argues that the drive of self-preservation, the conscious and unconscious reactions which help people avoid mortal danger is enhanced by the “ability to not perceive unbearable truth, to close one's eyes in its face” ([Öffentlich arbeiten, hereafter cited as Öa] 50). The world itself has become unbearable: “If the world were constantly before our eyes, we would not be capable of reading a poem or even of relaxing when drinking a cup of coffee. The self-preservation drive guards us from really having to endure the world by covering our senses with a thick hide. A useful second skin, which protects us from the things which would make us unable to live, but a dangerous hide, because it permits us to bear the unbearable and to thereby endanger life itself” (Öa 50). The dangerous side of “invulnerability” had gained the upper hand in Claudia's life. The insensitivity that is detrimental to the development of society toward the more humane retards the individual as well. The narrow line between having too thick a skin and being too sensitive has become precarious and fragile in the twentieth century, and Claudia is not able to find an effective balance between the two, always electing to thicken her skin.

As somewhat of a (foolish) risk-taking pseudo-anarchist, spontaneous and indifferent, Claudia's friend Henry represents someone who might actually be able to rekindle in her the youthful anarchy or the energy to change her life which she still had at the beginning of her marriage to Hinner, but which has lain dormant for many years.⁶ Claudia's encounter with Henry is a chance to overcome her apathy and indifference. At the very least, it represents an interlude of spontaneity, ultimately interrupted and broken by Henry's death. After the painful irritation of their encounter, she is able to return to the normal, painless, lifeless condition in which she previously led her life.

THE AURA OF ISOLATION

A key event in the novella, perhaps even a poetic turning point, takes place immediately following Henry's reckless driving and his run-in with the farmer on the tractor whose life he has senselessly endangered for the sake of a cheap thrill. The farmer gives him a black eye for his trouble. Claudia and Henry take a walk, and she comes to life—exulting in nature, taking pictures, enjoying herself even though she has noticed that Henry is too urbanized, bored, unenthralled by nature to share her feelings. Feelings begin to awaken in her. The sequence of events which follow her climbing up to a precarious position on the wall of some ruins to get a better angle to take pictures is quite possibly the literal enactment of the dream which opens the book.⁷ Since she neither plunged (or fell) into the “abyss” nor made it safely across when the opportunity presented itself, her mental situation in the bad dream remained unchanged, stagnant.

The scene in the forest is the only time we actually see Claudia in the act of photographing. It is structurally linked with the opening dream sequence by the visual effects that Hein achieves with language. Like the dream sequence, events are accented as with a “camera zooming in” (Dr 5). Claudia's relationship with her photography is expounded at length in other passages of the book, revealing the distorted perspective that makes her refuse to engage in what Bernd Fischer calls “philosophical reflexions on the meaning-question.”⁸ A close reading of The Distant Lover compels the reader to apply Claudia's later expositions about photography to the incidents which occur in the forest.

She never takes pictures of people, only of landscapes, because—as she says—landscapes are always changing but people appear awkward and unnatural in photographs. The opening sentence of the book, the start of Claudia's description of her dream, stated almost biblically, is, “In the beginning was a landscape” (Dr 5). Photographing people is for Claudia an “indiscreet violation of alien life” (Dr 75). The idea that a person can be captured in a picture is nonsense: “Trees always remain themselves, they don't try to lie by giving a favorable image of themselves” (Dr 75). It may be what Walter Benjamin refers to as the “cult value” or “aura”⁹ of portraits that makes Claudia uneasy. The cult value of portrait photography is connected to memory and remembrance. One is again reminded of Claudia's dream or “distant remembering,” which she describes as a “picture, unattainable for me, in the final analysis incomprehensible” (Dr 6). Photography can also capture the aura of landscapes in a remarkable web of time and space: resting on a summer afternoon, watching a mountain top on the horizon or a tree limb whose shadow falls onto the observer, until the moment itself merges with the mountain or the limb to become part of its existence is, to paraphrase Benjamin, the experience of aura.¹⁰

On this day, climbing up the wall of the ruins, Claudia subconsciously senses the aura, and this moment triggers her anxiety, her sudden fear of falling. She breaks out in a cold sweat, afraid to look down, inching her way back to Henry, clutching him in a role-reversal of the dream sequence. Her fear is dispelled by their closeness, and the aura is preserved in Claudia as they walk through the forest—that is, until Henry's unexpected revelation that he is married, that he plans to visit his wife and children on Sunday. Claudia's humiliation and feeling of betrayal reverse what might have been her first steps toward letting down her defenses and expedites her denial: “I didn't want him anyway. I never intended to have him for myself. I had decided some time ago to never marry again, to never again concede even the smallest power over me to another person. … I was convinced that I could never allow myself to give up my distance to other people, so that I would not be deceived, so that I would not deceive myself” (Dr 50). Henry's curtly stated piece of biographical information has paralyzed her, left her frozen on the metaphorical bridge of the dream, unable to move forward or backward, unable to merge with others or to escape from her neurosis.

Later, after Henry's burial, she begins to be afraid of her photos. She had filled her drawers and closets with her prints of trees, scenery, grass, country lanes, and deadwood—“a soulless nature, which I created” (Dr 155). Perhaps her fear is that her photos possess an aura of their own to which she cannot remain interminably blind, an aura over which she has no control and which could stimulate associations in her memory in spite of their lifeless objectivity. After all, “trees don't lie.”

Hein returns to the issue of photography in the seventh chapter as Claudia develops some film and thinks about Hinner. Her thoughts reveal that she had been frigid while with him. The fact that her diversion, or hobby, is a compensation for her fear of creative spontaneity is illustrated by her fascination with photographs as they develop on paper in the darkroom, “a germination I cause, direct, that I can interrupt” (Dr 76). This she contrasts with the two abortions she had undergone while still married to Hinner because, as she says, her pregnancies were a spontaneous, creative process over which she had no control: “A monstrous violation, one that would determine my entire future, a violation of my freedom” (Dr 77). Claudia again uses the word Eingriff, or “intrusion”—which I have translated as “violation” in this case—just as she has done in her reference to portrait photography.

The disappearance of spontaneous interaction between Claudia and others enables her to remain free, unattached, and private, covering her vulnerability with everyday trivia, secure in the unvarying fixational quality of life. Her attempt to escape dependency upon other people (and them on her, even though she is a doctor) or circumstances helps her, she surmises, to determine her own needs and to follow her own interests or inclinations without external direction or guidance. However, this course of action ends on a fatally discordant note: she is not free; she is isolated.

The tight narrative perspective never permits the view of anyone besides Claudia and seldom even permits quotes from other people to be related in her reports. This technique enables Hein to create an “aura of isolation” around his character, as Sändig aptly points out.¹¹ Claudia's dilettante artistic endeavors with photography ostensibly provide a form of therapy in her view. But “art is in this case simply a defunct ersatz, almost a neurosis,” according to Bernd Fischer, who points out additionally that Claudia's life consists of nothing but “ersatz” material and “art is one of the most harmless” substitutions for reality.¹² Photography, without Claudia's disturbing dilettantism, would have functioned to re-create an aura of memory instead of isolation.

VIOLENT INTRUSIONS

After learning that Henry is married, Claudia runs through the forest and, as he catches her, she breaks into hysterical laughter, uncontrollable. Unable to calm her down, he finally throws her angrily to the ground, himself on top of her. The description of the forced sex in the forest combines associations with the vulnerable spots left by the linden leaf on Siegfried's back and Claudia's exclusion from aura and intimacy. Throughout the sex, she feels a tree root rubbing her in the small of the back, rubbing her raw, and she fixes her gaze on an overhead limb which casts a shadow on her. Her rage and despair dissolve into “sudden carnal desire, into the dancing leaves overhead, into Henry's panting, into the feeling of terminal loneliness” (Dr 52), into a self-betrayal she refuses to acknowledge. In spite of this incident in the forest, Claudia remains with Henry. She does not protest when he shows up to join her while she is on vacation. They continue to see each other, usually in her apartment, two or three times a week. Every two or three weeks Henry visits his wife and children in Dresden, and Claudia and he simply don't pry into each other's private life.

Several of Hein's texts portray the act of a rape which leaves the participants or the victims unchanged—to the reader's shock—and which functions as a symbol of political or psychological unchangeability. When Hein's characters react emotionally to unimportant events and fail to react to events which are destructive to the integrity of human identity, the discrepancy between values and misdirected egocentrism (or helpless inertia) is made clear. The perversion of sexuality is a common denominator with which Hein degrades the standing of characters and creates antipathy. The rape of the nun in Ah Q is superseded by an alleged theft which did not take place. The two violent sexual acts in Horns Ende establish symbolically the continuity between fascism and Stalinism.

In his short story “Die Vergewaltigung” (“The Rape”)—published, significantly, in Neues Deutschland, the GDR equivalent of Pravda, on 2–3 December 1989—Hein describes a woman's speech at a ceremony to consecrate into the Communist fold youths who had come of age. Ilona R., a sincere and successful woman, describes the selfless aid provided by the Red Army at the end of the war, praising the GDR-Russian friendship. Afterwards, her husband asked her why she hadn't mentioned the rape of her sixty-four-year-old grandmother by two Russian soldiers in August of 1945. Her grandmother had hidden Ilona from the soldiers and attempted to soothe her afterwards: “What are you silly hens crying about? Did I break my leg?” Ilona doesn't think it appropriate to mention the rape on initiation day. It might leave the wrong impression, and, anyway, that was in the past. Her husband says that, if such is the case, she shouldn't have told the other side of the story either—a remark which seems almost to cause her a nervous breakdown—and she reacts by accusing him of being a fascist. Public acknowledgment or narrations of atrocities of the Red Army at the end of the war remained strictly taboo until the policies of glasnost and perestroika in the Soviet Union resulted in disclosures from Soviet news media, disclosures that remained unwelcome in official circles in the GDR. The women (the nun in Ah Q is dead) do not report the rape; they fall silent and go on as they had before. The self-imposed silence provides the connection between life experience under Nazi and Stalinist regimes.

The first structural study of The Distant Lover, by Hannes Krauss (1991), uncovered the theme more clearly pursued in Horns Ende: Hein's contention that fascism and Stalinism were inexorably linked in the GDR, even if the impact was lessened by the absence of overt terrorism. Krauss compares Claudia's journey into the past to restore memory with Christa Wolf's description of the same in Kindheitsmuster (Childhood Patterns). Both Claudia and the narrator in Wolf's novel are traumatized by recollection of their mothers' intimidating sexual education, including warnings about sexually transmitted diseases, which had been calculated to make them feel dirty and to instill fear to encourage abstention. Sexual taboos are connected with political taboos most clearly in the learned silence which causes the loss of the ability “to ask questions and to articulate desires for change.”¹³ The runic symbols on the shirts of the five runners in Claudia's dream are emblems which have been reinvented in modern form by the Nazis in their “research” to trace pure Germanness back in time and which represent the sport fetishness shared by fascist and Stalinist regimes. These clues and fragments themselves, according to Krauss, were an early attempt to break the personal silence of a GDR author about the silence of the victims of Stalinism—individuals who had been conditioned to such acquiescence by the forces of intimidation which existed in Germany during the Nazi period.

TURNING POINTS FROM THE PAST

The novella has been worked into a refined art-form in Germany, and Goethe defined its structural requirements as those of a story containing an unheard of, or remarkable, event. Of the many refinements of the novella, one of the most characteristic is the inclusion of a peripety or turning point, an incident which unalterably, often fatalistically, changes the course of the character's life.¹⁴ The turning point in The Distant Lover is generally considered to be the scene in the forest. It would have to be understood as an intentional and bitter-ironic “anti-turning point,” however, inasmuch as the opportunity for Claudia to change her life is wasted by her acquiescence to the non-committal relationship with Henry. Still, she has embarked on a course for change, and this turning point interrupts and diverts that course permanently.

A final chance presents itself when Claudia, against the advice of Henry, decides to make a trip to the small town where she grew up, “a journey into the past” (Dr 95). There she remembers the unheard of events which took place in her life. The actual turning point of Claudia's life occurred when she was twelve years old, not too long after the stationing of a single Soviet tank in the center of her town as a consequence of the strikes of 17 June 1953. Hein enables the reader to calculate the dates of the story by having Claudia mention the introduction of daylight savings time, which occurred in the GDR in 1981. Since she is currently forty years old, she would have been twelve years old in 1953. June 17th is a well-known date in Germany, marking the day of the violent suppression by Soviet tanks of an uprising. The working class had rebelled at demands to increase productivity without added compensation, and the farmers in the countryside were not cooperating with the effort to proceed with the collectivization of agriculture.

The most crucial source of understanding for Claudia's later behavior can be traced directly back to her experience with the public reaction to the political events associated with 17 June: at school, nobody spoke about the presence of the Soviet tank in town, and at home, her father urged her to avoid the subject. Claudia couldn't understand why the issue was suppressed, but since the adults were resolutely silent, she realized that “even a conversation could be something threatening … I learned to keep quiet” (Dr 108). The public reflex mechanism to suppress rather than to confront was internalized into Claudia's private personality.

Her life was fundamentally determined by political pressures. As Sändig has pointed out, the “emotional reactions [to political pressures]—internalization of problems, learning to remain silent, fear experienced in catastrophic situations—have become habitual for Claudia.”¹⁵ By avoiding public authority, she is able to remain immune to inclinations to become actively involved.

Because of the religious orientation of Katharina and her family, Claudia is further pressured by her own parents and her teachers and classmates to dissolve her relationship with her best friend, with whom she had sworn eternal friendship and loyalty. Claudia's parents are afraid that her association with Katharina—she was interested in Katharina's religious beliefs as well—would result in reprimands which could prevent Claudia from staying in school. The situation becomes tense after Katharina's three brothers go to the West.

In October of the next year, the administration of the school, in consultation with county officials, comes to the conclusion that Katharina will have to leave school after completing the eighth grade. It “was inappropriate that she be allowed to attain the educational goals of an accredited high school in our Republic” (Dr 110). Katharina then incurs the displeasure of the class by refusing to join the socialist youth club, the FDJ, and is criticized and badgered by the teacher. Finally, Claudia denounces Katharina, making a joke about the “Christian-superstitious views of a certain student” (Dr 112). Claudia and her classmates are irritated at being held after class because of Katharina's “stubbornness,” i.e., her refusal to compromise her values. Already in the beginning stages of avoidance and denial, they listen, bored and uninterested, to the worn-out phrases as the teacher equates Katharina's decision with warmongering. The class is not concerned about the issues at all, although the socialist tradition of enforced solidarity—the reason the others are kept after school repeatedly until the issue can be resolved—represents a key dialectic and existential problem in that society. For the students, it is not a matter of denouncing one of the brightest among them in order to subjugate her to the political collective; they simply want to go home and not have to listen to the teacher's harangues anymore.

Katharina responds to Claudia's denunciation by slapping her face. Claudia kicks her in the shin. Both girls receive a reprimand. Claudia's friendship with a girl “she had loved so unconditionally, as she would never again be able to love another human being” (Dr 113) is finished. On the psychological level, Claudia is not only under pressure from peers and authorities. The situation has been worsened by problems which are fairly universal to puberty and the fragility of friendships in the eighth grade: Katharina becomes interested in the precentor's son, a development which leaves her with less time for Claudia. Claudia feels a strange alienation when Katharina talks about her boyfriend; pangs of jealousy have disrupted her feelings for Katharina.

Claudia quickly represses the trauma of having denounced this friend she has loved so unequivocally. When she learns that Katharina and her mother have followed her brothers to the West, she proudly announces to her parents that Katharina has betrayed the country. It is evident to the reader that Katharina is a principled but vulnerable young girl and that Claudia has betrayed her, a betrayal not altogether unlike the betrayal of Horn in Horns Ende.

The psychological mechanism Claudia finds for neutralizing her trauma—her escape into daily routine—carries over into her adult life, where she masks her private feelings in a similar way. Superficiality has become a safeguard. Even on the day of Henry's funeral, she reduces the issues involved in the decision of whether or not she should attend Henry's funeral to the superficial question whether or not she would wear her dark blue coat, which could pass for black. Thus she diverts her attention away from her emotions, avoiding the risk of going out on the precipice where she could experience herself intensely and possibly have an opportunity to grow.

A second part of the turning point in Claudia's life takes place shortly after her estrangement from Katharina, when she discovers that her own uncle Gerhard, a grandfather figure for her, stands accused of having denounced his colleagues in the Social Democratic party during the war. Claudia feels that she, as the niece of a “Nazi criminal,” has lost the right to be shocked or indignant about the injustice of the Nazi regime or to feel sympathy for its victims.

From this point, the story begins a frenetic rush to the end, like water rushing down the drain. Claudia visits the head doctor at home, visits her parents, takes pictures, follows her routine, even perseveres in her routine when her elderly neighbor dies, resisting the temptation to get emotionally involved. When her sister shows up with her ex-husband during a visit with her parents, she feels no envy; thinking that they probably deserve each other, she does not share her mother's distress at the situation. She continues dating Henry. They make no demands on each other; they are always happy when they are together; they avoid complications. On 18 April, she learns that Henry has died.

He had gone into a bar for a drink. A couple of youths made fun of his felt hat. When one of them finally grabbed it, he stood up and went outside to fight. Henry had been a boxer in his youth. He danced around like a professional. The boys laughed at him. Then one of the young men punched him; maybe he had some sort of metal piece in his hand. Henry fell to the ground, dead. Claudia does not break up her daily routine when her relationship with the aloof and self-alienated Henry ends. After the brief interlude of spontaneity and hope that the liaison has given her, Claudia's attempt to come to grips with the past also ends. She returns to her normal, painless, lifeless condition of pragmatic nihilism, cleansing herself with a cathartic experience. At home after the funeral, she tries to think about what kind of a man Henry had been, but she cannot really form an opinion.

Henry had been wearing the felt hat when she met him; he always wore it. A few days after the burial, a friend brings the hat to her. Henry handed the friend the hat before the fight. As soon as the friend leaves, Claudia takes the hat into the hallway and tosses it down the garbage chute: “I can't be filling up my little apartment with old hats” (Dr 155).

TEXT AND SUBTEXT

Readers of the English translation of The Distant Lover should be aware that it often fails to convey the irony and cynicism of Claudia's thoughts and speech and to capture the everyday routine of GDR life. The translator's language sometimes preempts the communicative process between the text and the reader, leading the reader into secure areas when it should have left things fragmented—a practice that would have allowed the reader to develop his or her own interpretive continuity of meaning. The New York Times review, superficial in scope, to be sure, referred to Claudia as a “competent” (but without compassion) professional, as a “dutiful” (but indifferent) daughter, and as a “courteous recipient of other people's confidences and untidy concerns.”¹⁶ Claudia's professional competence, dutifulness, and courteousness are all called into question in the text—a fact indicating that the American reader can be mislead by the translation. The translation was troublesome from the beginning, the rights having been sold to a British publisher who then relinquished them to Pantheon Press. Hein had no control over the translation, and the negotiations had taken place by the time he came to New York in 1987. He was pleased with Pantheon—before the small literary press was redirected to publish books of lesser quality, which sold more copies—and enjoyed an excellent relationship with Sara Bershtel, the senior editor and the driving force behind getting The Distant Lover published in English.¹⁷ The translator, however, experienced considerable difficulty with the text, mistranslating a surprising number of words and phrases in the first draft and struggling to get the style under control. Bershtel realized that the style and use of language was absolutely essential for the success of the book and subjected the text to extensive editing. The manuscript took two years before it was ready to go to press, but it never reached the level of Hein's original and did not sell as well as could be expected when measured by its success in the languages of some forty other countries, a success which was by no means limited to academic and intellectual circles. The English translation is now out of print.

The difficulty lies in the communication of the subtext employed by Hein, who had modelled his use of subtext somewhat after Anton Chekov, of whose dramas he noted: “It is quite wonderful how the figures say something and the audience notices that they simultaneously are saying something else.”¹⁸ For his own part, Hein frequently pointed out that The Distant Lover was written with consistent use of subtext: “The figure states I feel well and every reader understands that she feels bad.”¹⁹ Chekov and Georg Büchner, for Hein, were capable of tossing out a half-sentence which would tear open a complete universe of meaning. The same is true for Picasso's paintings, “when he makes something with two or three strokes and one still has the feeling something is missing. Quite the contrary, it is absolutely finished, and one almost sees something more than he had painted. But he painted that along with it: this subtext or this un-painted portion is also painted in.”²⁰ All of this writing technique certainly doesn't facilitate a translator's task, but the problems are not only to be found in the language of the text. Hein, who continually maintained that The Distant Lover was a GDR story for him, was initially surprised at its success abroad, in other German speaking countries as well as in Eastern and Western Europe and in South America. He attributes this success largely to what must be a reflection of the status of civilization in industrialized nations in the book, something which transcends political and cultural differences.

A TWENTIETH-CENTURY PHENOMENON

Both West German (Die Zeit) and American (New York Times) reviewers claimed that Claudia's self-alienation and ultimate incapacity for intimate relationships is a phenomenon of late twentieth-century urban life which occurs in cities like West Berlin or New York. Although this may be accurate, especially in terms of the structure of Claudia's personality and the description of her behavior, the details of Claudia's biography and the specific elements which lead to her state of mind are closely linked with the social and political circumstances associated with life in the GDR, especially between 1950 and 1980.

The reaction of East German reviewers, for example, centered around the disturbing question as to “whether this story is supposed to be the description of a general condition of our society.”²¹ This was a cultural-political question as much as anything, with implications for censorship practices as well, for Hein had not included a positive contra-figure, a hope for a social solution to the human condition embodied by Claudia. The answers, both pro and con, have generated heated discussion about the book, including charges that the story is not realistic—people can't turn out to be like Claudia in the socialist system—that the story is missing the promise of a social corrective.²² But the outpour of mail Hein received, the majority of which came from female readers, attested that the story had struck a nerve in readers. Many people seemed to detect a bit of Claudia in themselves, and Hein was made uneasy when some of these women asked him for advice about how to conduct or change their lives. A large number of letter writers and critics both questioned and lauded his ability, as a male author, to probe so deeply into a woman's subjectivity.

By the 1980s, Western readers were not likely to be conscious of any blueprint for an enlightened and humane utopian society of the future which would also serve to fulfill a political mandate, to be applied collectively and universally by and for the population of a given country. In the GDR, the non-existence of the utopia was subsumed under the term “real existing socialism,” which constituted the given current stage of development towards real socialism. This logic depends on the acceptance of utopia as a valid goal orientation. With such a postulate, whatever stage society finds itself to be in can be justified, regardless of the quality of life it happens to impose on its members.

It was difficult to get through school in East Germany without forming some commitment to the realization of ideals which measured progress towards the utopian ideal. The natural idealism of youth lends itself to an acceptance of these kinds of commitments, a fact which one should keep in mind when reading the passages in all of Hein's works that describe different, petty, and self-centered sources of motivation for action taken by his characters. Even though the population eventually came to view the socialist utopian concept with deep cynicism, it is an ideal which would have been an integral part of Claudia's education and that of Hein's readers in the GDR. Claudia's personality is influenced by a variety of occurrences in GDR everyday life. These forces negatively affect the development of her personality and alter her assumption of what her social and political responsibilities should be.

Her altered state terminates the possibility of the social corrective—a fact which GDR reviewers writing in state-controlled journals professed to have missed. In 1983 and until about 1988, the reviewers would have been required by their superiors to write some dogmatic criticism as a prerequisite to publish other, more positive and literary-critical oriented comments. Failure to accept such a commission could result in a demotion.

Many East German readers understood that controlled behavior and the restriction of creative thought can both mirror and cause social stagnation. The impoverishment of Claudia's personality and the alienation predominant in her everyday communication manifest a danger to social emancipation itself. The “Catch-22” dilemma in such a society is the circular argument that (independent) individuals are harmful to social progress and (collective) social progress is harmful to individuals.

Since the topic of alienation is familiar to readers of Sarte, Camus, Kafka, and contemporary American writers, it might be best to focus more on those aspects of The Distant Lover which anchor Claudia's experiences in the GDR and support Hein's claim that it is a “GDR story.” Whether the text represents a condemnation of the politics of the GDR at that time is not the only issue at stake for a writer of Hein's stature; evidently conditions in other, Western societies could have had a similar alienating effect on a person like Claudia. Hein probes the specific conditions he knew contributed to Claudia's state of being and the subconscious blocking of contact with other people that it causes. Those conditions were created in the GDR by the Stalinist regime of Walter Ulbricht and continued after Stalin's death in 1953 in spite of initial efforts in the Soviet Union by Nikita Kruschev to reform the political structure and to do away with terror. Accepting 1953 as the turning point in Claudia's life and in the novella itself provides an important structural connection between the theme of alienation and the historical context. As can be seen in most of Hein's works, his modus operandi usually consists of incorporating history within the aesthetic framework of his writing.

Notes

1. Peter C. Pfeiffer, “Tote und Geschichte(n): Christoph Heins Drachenblut und Horns Ende,” German Studies Review 16.1 (1993): 22.

2. Brigitte Sändig, “Zwei oder drei fremde Helden,” Sinn und Form 45.4 (1993): 666.

3. Sändig 668.

4. See Bernd Schick's contribution to “Für und Wider,” Weimarer Beiträge 29.9 (1983): 1634–1655. He sees parallels between Kerouac's Dean Moriarty in On the Road and Henry.

5. Pfeiffer 22.

6. The wedding portrait of Claudia and Hinner at her mother's house reminds her that they were once two “helpless, shy revolutionaries” (Dr 74) radiating hope and the will to destroy the old order and improve social conditions. Hein does not explore what caused Claudia's transition from anarchy to apathy during the marriage, although her aversion to having children is linked with the failure of the marriage. The energy to change has been reduced to contempt and cynicism.

7. See Brigitte Böttcher, “Diagnose eines unheilbaren Zustandes,” Neue Deutsche Literatur 31.6 (1983): 147f.

8. Bernd Fischer, “Christoph Heins ‘fremde Freundin,’” Chronist ohne Botschaft. Christoph Hein. Ein Arbeitsbuch. Materialien, Auskünfte, Bibliographie, ed. Klaus Hammer (Berlin: Aufbau, 1992) 98.

9. See Walter Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” in his Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. Drei Studien zur Kunstsoziologie (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1977) 21.

10. See Walter Benjamin, “Kleine Geschichte der Photographie,” in his Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, 57.

11. Sändig 666.

12. Fischer, “Christoph Heins 'fremde Freundin” 103.

13. Hannes Kraus, “Mit geliehenen Worten das Schweigen brechen. Christoph Heins Novelle Drachenblut,” Text + Kritik 111, ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Munich: Text + Kritik, 1991) 23.

14. Other traditional elements associated with the novella which are evident in The Distant Lover include the objective style of reporting with no intrusion by the author and the meshing of dramatic and narrative techniques. The “unheard of event,” as spoken by Goethe to Eckermann 25 January 1827, is the existence of Claudia herself, a kind of person unheard of in the GDR socialist state.

15. Sändig 669.

16. Katharine Washburn, “A Confessor at the Funeral,” New York Times Book Review 7 May 1989: 33.

17. See Hein's “Brief an Sara, New York,” Als Kind habe ich Stalin gesehen 184–98, written in diary form describing Hein's daily reactions to the opening of the Berlin Wall and the events thereafter from 9 November to 20 November 1989.

18. Christoph Hein, interview, “‘Dialog ist das Gegenteil von Belehren.’ Gespräch mit Christoph Hein,” Chronist ohne Botschaft 28.

19. Hein, interview, “Dialog ist das Gegenteil von Belehren” 28.

20. Hein, interview, “Dialog ist das Gegenteil von Belehren” 28.

21. Hans Kaufmann, “Christoph Hein in der Debatte,” in his Über DDR-Literatur. Beiträge aus fünfundzwanzig Jahren (Berlin: Aufbau, 1986) 235.

22. See “Für und Wider,” Weimarer Beiträge 29.9 (1983): 1634–1655.