Renate Rechtien, Karoline Von Oppen. Local/global narratives. Rodopi, 2007. 335 pp. $95.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-90-420-2261-4.

Reviewed by Katrina L. Nousek (German Studies Department, Cornell University)
Published on H-German (July, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher

Relocating "Heimat"

Noting popular and political rhetoric that aligns the effects of unification, economic downfall, and globalization in Germany, Karoline von Oppen introduces the aim of this volume, a collection of essays derived from a conference at the University of Bath in September 2003, as a challenge to existing definitions of globalization and global versus local relationships as articulated through social, political, and theoretical discourse in German-speaking lands. Interest in globalization has also prompted a new way of considering cultural phenomena, one that "take[s] local/global encounters, rather than a national framework, as the key defining instance for identities and cultures without at the same time ignoring the continued influence of the idea of a nation" (p. 2). Germany offers a particularly interesting locus for globalization debates, not only due to the economic grounding of state legitimacy in West Germany, but also as a nation-state that expanded at the same time as notions of globalization indicated the growing importance of relationships that contest static notions of national boundaries. The volume is particularly informed by a treatment of Heimat as the expression of locality in its specifically German form, and analyzes the influence of globalization on its various uses and representations.

The introduction builds primarily on anthropologist Arjun Appadurai's theory of globalization to suggest a dialectical conceptualization of the relationship between local and global, in which increasing global pressures on national identities are seen to have simultaneously reinvigorated interest in and fundamentally altered notions of locality. Nationality does persist, but is constructed differently according to shifting social concern in the relationship between local and global identities. The contributions to the volume encompass a broad range of cultural objects and an equally diverse array of approaches to manifestations of local/global relationships. The first eleven essays examine notions of Heimat in the context of globalization, particularly within literature and film, and the final four shift the focus to institutions and monuments as nexuses of local and global tension.

The majority of the essays in the first section focus on literary representations of Heimat and its function in the discourses of various authors. In "Three Village Tales: Global Localities in Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea (1797), Kafka's Das Schloß (1922), and Leutenegger's Kontinent (1985)," Elizabeth Boa employs terminology from globalization theories in an analysis of three literary works to reveal the appearance of global issues well before "globalization" was recognized as a discourse in the 1960s. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's work, written during the French occupation of the Rhineland, interrogates the potentially contradictory aspects of cosmopolitanism and nationalism. Franz Kafka's novel explores the possibility of locality through the construction of alterity. Lastly, Gertrud Leutenegger describes the more literally global situation of a village opening to global trade. By analyzing the representation of rituals and lifestyles with which characters define their identities against and through historical changes that threaten locality, Boa shows that the "global village" has been a source of concern and innovation in the cultural imagination for centuries.

Juliet Wigmore's contribution, "From 'das Haus Österreich' to 'Häuser in Österreich': Local, Transnational and Global Images of House, Home and Heimat in Works by Ingeborg Bachmann, Elisabeth Reichert and Elfriede Jelinek," focuses her discussion of locality on the symbolic and metaphorical use and implications of the "house" in the works of three Austrian authors. In each of the author's works, the house represents a locality that only exists in the context of a larger world necessary for its definition. Wigmore concludes that "house," as a domestic institution within a larger nation, is for all of the authors a technique for probing a local identity, be it personal, female, or specifically Austrian.

Part of a larger project to reclassify East German literature as a regional instead of a national literature, Susanne Shanks's paper, "From Reflection to Speculation, from Memory to Fantasy: Exploring Local Identity in East German Narratives," examines novels by Uwe Johnson and Fritz Rudolf Fries with respect to the local identities they present their reader through regional elements. Her concise and acute assessment of the constraints and benefits of various methodological approaches fleshes out the volume's consideration of changing conceptions of Heimat on the theoretical level. Whereas regional literature traditionally referred to works recognized as anti-modern, the use of the term in the context of East German literature encompasses modern narratives as well. These works, she concludes, employ a modernist narrative that works by de-familiarizing regional elements, yet the techniques by which each author does so depend on fundamentally different configurations of reality, fantasy, memory, and myth that can be most successfully recognized through a regional analytical category.

The development of GDR author and mathematician Helga Königsdorf's conception of Heimat is the focus of Jean E. Conacher's essay, "'Die Sehnsucht nach Zugehörigkeit': An Exploration of Heimat in the Essays and Short Stories of Helga Königsdorf."  Conacher categorizes Königsdorf's formulations of Heimat in five different types that change in tandem with her relationship to GDR and post-Wende society: geographical/physical; familial/social; ideological/political; personal/individual; and dynamic/creative. After expanding each of these categories in particular, Conacher concludes with the general trend in Königsdorf's writing to establish a local identity through descriptions of Heimat that move toward reestablishing her as a writer in her post-socialist moment.

Renate Rechtien also addresses GDR literature in her essay, "'[...] so unwichtig sind die Orte nicht, an denen wir leben': Places of Longing and Belonging in Christa Wolf's Der geteilte Himmel and Sommerstück." Rechtien reads Wolf's works with particular attention to the notions of belonging the protagonists express with respect to place. Rechtien concludes that Wolf's increasing dissatisfaction with the political position of intellectuals in the GDR is evidenced in her works through a parallel shift from hopes that a Heimat could be found in universal socialism to disillusionment based on the effects of party policy on local culture.

Ellie Kennedy uses Judith Butler's performative theory to read the literary tradition of the picaresque and expose local and global contingencies of gender-based repression in her sophisticated yet lucid paper, "'Aber ich bin wirklich!' Identity Proliferation and Picaresque Subversion in Katja Behren's Die Vagantin." Arguing that the protagonists in the novel define their identities through a series of acts performed on the local level through episodic encounters in multiple specific situations, Kennedy concludes that the constant restructuring of the protagonists' personalities with respect to these local situations evidences the global existence of gender norms that depend on individual behavior to be reinforced or resisted.

The interdependence of local and global in identity construction is the focus of Kathryn N. Jones's essay, "Origins and Displacement in Maren Sell's Mourir d'absence." Sell, a German-born author who moved to France and wrote an autobiographical novel in French, negotiates her identity and search for homeland through the critical stance with respect to both the National Socialism of her parents' generation and the Red Army Faction-associated terrorism of her own generation that her displacement facilitates. Analyzing the text's mixed references to German proverbs and the German literary tradition and its formal assumption of the French "écriture feminine," Jones concludes that the narrator's voluntary exile offers at once the aesthetic and critical perspective to assess her relationship to history, as well as the isolation and displacement that make a stable identity impossible.

Marielle Sutherland turns to Rolf Dieter Brinkmann's interest in North American pop poetry for the seemingly global language its incorporation of popular culture could offer in her contribution, "'Globale Empfindsamkeit': Rolf Dieter Brinkmann's Poetics of the Global." Attempting to free himself from the traditional confines of literary practices defined by bourgeois values, Brinkmann sought to develop a metaphorical language that remained opened to global diversity and the expression of undefined human experience. After exploring Brinkmann's attempts in the 1960s to create this global language, Sutherland concludes that Brinkmann's original hopes turn to disillusionment when he reconsiders globalization as a homogenizing economic movement.

Two of the contributions focus on cinematic representations of Heimat. Rachel Palfreyman's paper, "Once Upon a Time in Critical Heimat Film: Der plötzliche Reichtum der armen Leute von Kombach and Die Siebtelbauern," examines these two critical Heimat films, made in 1971 by Volker Schlöndorff and 1998 by Stefan Ruzowitzky, to observe the changing conception of Heimat across decades. In both films, which center on peasants who seem to find ways out of their social position, depictions of Heimat no longer involve an idyllic life close to nature as they did in the 1950s, but rather "a life of unending servitude" in which only those characters who do not have ties to a notion of homeland seem able to escape (p. 45). The films differ, however, with Ruzowitzky's integration of the "Kunstmärchen" genre into his otherwise critical Heimatfilm. Palfreyman concludes that the historical contingency of the films is responsible for the varied transmission of Heimat: whereas Schlöndorff had been engaged in concerns about institutions as mechanisms of social control characteristic of 1968, Ruzowitzky's film responds to the globalizing economy by implying parallels between feudal society and the concentration of wealth and power that globalization potentially facilitates.

The pressures of globalization manifest in the journeys of economic migrants comes to the fore in Claudia Gremler's paper, "Migration und Utopie im deutschen Gegenwartskino am Beispiel von Achim von Borries's England! und Hans-Christian Schmids Lichter." Gremler emphasizes the importance of the imagination to migrant protagonists in a globalizing world and the difficulties that prevent them, in one case, from reaching England from Berlin and, in the other, from finding the utopian life in "the West" that their location at the German-Polish border at once facilitates and hinders. Gremler reveals a return of the picaresque correlated with discourses of globalization in which a social critic is demonstrated by the antihero, outsider protagonist whose unfortunate reality provokes a flight to an imagined utopia.

One paper in the first section does not examine a literary work, per se, but uses close reading techniques to examine the writings of Rudi Dutschke. In "Zwei, drei, viele West Berlin? West German Anti-authoritarianism and the Vietnam Conflict," Mereid Puw Davies reads the symbols and rhetoric Dutschke uses to refer to Vietnam in his essay Vom Antisemitismus zum Antikommunismus (1968). Taking the internationalism of the 1960s as a precursor to current globalization discourses, Davies shows how Dutschke uses Vietnam as a rhetorical Other to West Berlin that shares conflicts crucial to the latter's Cold War situation. However, this metaphor, Davis concludes, also serves to undermine Dutschke's criticism by concealing direct confrontation with Germany's Nazi past through a focus on Vietnam's perhaps parallel but not identical situation. In so doing, Dutschke perpetuates the very source of discontent against which his generation sought to protest.

The second section of Local/Global Narratives considers the historical manifestation of local and global interactions in institutions and monuments. Two of the four papers in this section focus on issues of cultural memory and commemoration. Anna M. Dempsey's essay, "Berlin's Hackescher Markt: Gentrification, Cultural Memory and the New Public Square," considers the post-Wall renovation of the Hackescher Markt with respect to Berlin's architectural traditions and the district's present social use and function. She concludes that, in contrast to the commercial center constructed at Potsdamer Platz, the Hackescher Markt renovations have successfully integrated elements of current and traditional urban planning such that the present experience of the district also allows access to its historical significance.

Annette Seidel-Arpaci discusses constructions of national and migrant memory in Hito Steyerl's 1998 filmic essay in her contribution, "Excavations at Potsdamer Platz: Die leere Mitte and the Dilemma of (Re)Narrating 'Other' Pasts and Presences." The film integrates experiences of marginalized communities in Berlin with descriptions of the "border regions" created at Potsdamer Platz over three centuries through the time of its reconstruction in the 1990s. Seidel-Arpaci suggests that it is framed by the theoretical writings of cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer to establish a connection between post-Wall Germany and pre-National Socialist traditions of critical thought. She concludes by lauding Steyerl's construction of a non-chronological history that creates a space in which previous voiceless communities can be heard, but notes a persistent silence with respect to the Holocaust that the film does not seem to justify adequately.

This section also contains a reception study of Herta Müller's work in various nations that demonstrates the national variation in cultural response despite a globalizing world, in Wiebke Sievers's "Von der rumäniendeutschen Anti-Heimat zum Inbild kommunistischen Grauens: Die Rezeption Herta Müllers in der BRD, in Großbritannien, in Frankreich und in den USA." Through a comparison of the images, quotations, and summaries on the book jackets as well as different translations of Müller's works, Sievers shows that despite unanimous interest in experiential descriptions of Müller's experiences under the Nicolae Ceauşescu regime in Romania, the editions published in each nation foreground widely different aspects of her work.

The final contribution in the volume is Joanne Sayner's "'Ich lebe nicht wirklich in dieser Zeit': Negotiations of National and Local Identities in Elfriede Brüning's Post-'Wende' Writings." Sayner focuses on Brüning's collection of autobiographical sketches, Jeder lebt für sich allein. Nachwende-Notizen (1999), to show how localized affiliation with gender and antifascist identities in East Germany and the national narrative of a globalizing historical interpretation converge in the narrator's descriptions.

Local/Gobal Narratives collects a laudably diverse range of subjects and methodological angles with which to explore culture as an interaction of local and global forces that acknowledges the instability (or perhaps nonexistence) of national identities. Recognizing this diversity in her introduction, Karoline von Oppen helpfully articulates the often implicit connections among the essays; however, some contributions remain more relevant to the volume's theme than others. Abstracts are usefully situated at the beginning of each individual essay to which the reader may refer for an explicit description of the connection of the essay's topics with local/global themes. Despite the thorough introduction, however, the reader longs for some sort of conclusion or afterword to weave the threads together. Perhaps including an index of terms would have helped to reorganize the work on a holistic level and served as a reference to negotiate individual essays through shared themes. These suggestions should not, however, distract from the productivity of using local and global categories to articulate complex and often problematic conceptions of national identity more precisely, a utility that is made obvious by this volume.

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Citation: Katrina L. Nousek. Review of Rechtien, Renate; Oppen, Karoline Von, Local/global narratives. H-German, H-Net Reviews. July, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24525

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