By Tom Connolly

Lutz Seiler’s novel is part of the post-reunification literature landscape, in this case a brilliant exploration of the personal and political viewed through the consciousness of a pensively bedeviled protagonist.

Star 111 by Lutz Seiler. Translated from the German by Tess Lewis. New York Review of Books, 496 pages, $19.95.

I was in Thuringia, a few years after reunification, and it was a bizarre experience. By day I retraced the footsteps of Martin Luther and Johann Sebastian Bach, culminating in a pilgrimage to Goethe’s house, garden, and his celebrated grotto. Later though, I spent one of the most depressing evenings of my life conversing with German colleagues. They were in despair over what they saw as the failed promise of reintegration; they felt nothing but contempt and derision from former West Germany. They saw no possibility of ever feeling like full Germans again — they would always be Stiefkinder. The legacy of the Soviets looked to be a hollowed out society, and the paternalistic patronizing of the West was galling To this day, a salary surtax on “West” Germans subsidizes the “East”, which is increasingly depopulated.

Star 111 is a rich and strange novel of Germany’s change. It begins in Thuringia, the heart of former East Germany, at the onset of German reunification. The narrative follows Carl Bischoff as he journeys from communism’s backwater to Berlin, the hot spot for Germany’s transition, eventually taking a trip to California. Carl is a poet-bricklayer and proletarian-artist, a symbolic combination for an East German protagonist. His parents have just decided to leave for the West, driven by the promise of new opportunities; they have abandoned their son without explanation. Carl decides to leave the empty family apartment and heads for Berlin, where he becomes an unlicensed taxi driver, soon finding himself among the fringe-dwellers of a society in turmoil. Letters from his parents further estrange him from any idealization of his past. Still, even though the Halbwelt (demimonde) is filled with plenty of sexual and artistic energy, Carl never becomes an underground Dostoevskian or Ellisonian protagonist. No matter how disaffected or alienated he seems, Carl remains placidly contemplative in the face of social change. Carl has a revealing epiphany in a Berlin disco (“Jojo”):

Carl felt old and dirty in Jojo and he was sweating because he didn’t want to take off his leather jacket. It wasn’t just that he was out of place there, it was more than that. For a moment, he had the sneaking suspicion that the world he belonged to had furtively disappeared and he was one of its remnants, a rotting piece of driftwood on the great stream of the new times.

Star 111 is a dreamlike memoir, an example of German reunification literature that was penned decades after the Wall’s fall. In some ways it fits William C. Donahue’s argument in his essay “The Impossibility of the Wenderoman” — that post-reunification identity and dislocation was so slippery it eluded the power of fiction and film. But Seiler challenges Donahue’s criticism of the Wenderoman (“turn-around novel,” a term for German reunification literature), that it was  fragmented to the point that supplying a unified narrative, which  captured the breath of Germany’s historical convulsion, was impossible. Star 111‘s dense narrative style reflects an intriguing strategy: it is a phantasmagoric interweave of history and individual consciousness. Carl’s oblique perspective encapsulates the spiky turmoil of East and West Germany. His anti-bourgeois loathing takes the form of disaffected observation rather than frenzied action.

Seiler’s novel resonates beyond Die Wende  (one of the peaceful revolutions of 1989 at the peak of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in the late 1980s), harkening back to the earlier post-war collapse of Germany in 1918.  Carl’s spiritual inertia recalls the sufferers in Hermann Broch’s great novel The Sleepwalkers, which depicts pre-World War I Europe’s glide into oblivion. Mirroring the aimlessness of his grandparents’ generation, Carl drifts along as the GDR’s values disintegrate. Unlike Broch though, Seiler does not turn to despair. Neither does he resort to Thomas Bernhard’s acidic excoriation of cultural stagnation. Seiler’s critique of German anomie is rendered with a gentler hand, imbued with melancholy rather than invective.

Dreary Thuringia is contrasted with a vibrant Berlin that is always on the verge of grasping freedom or declining into chaos. In the city, Carl encounters artists, exiles, and dreamers who seize the day by reinventing themselves during the Wiedervereinigung (“reunification”). This vision of urban rebirth owes much to Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, which also serves up a churning cultural panorama. But, because the narrative is anchored to Carl, Seiler’s novel offers an introspective — often disjointed — version of the picaresque, Seiler’s Berlin is relatively sedate, a far cry from the furor in the earlier novel. Döblin’s Franz Biberkopf’s talks to the reader via syncopated interior monologues that echo jazzy Weimar Berlin. Carl’s Berlin reflects the ebb and flow of cautious introspection.

Another aspect of Seiler’s work, which confirms its place among Die Wenderoman, is that Carl’s journey through post-reunification Berlin and then across the Atlantic highlights a  new archetype — a quest for identity that is not about the struggle to assert self-esteem in a collapsing society, but about learning how to link fragmented experiences together. Carl longs for human connections; communism is in ruins and he longs for a new nurturing community. During Carl’s time in Berlin, especially his engagement with a syndicalist group,  the poet comes close to belonging to something more than himself, even if his crucial relationship with a woman falters.

This relationship is a part of the past that Carl fruitlessly pursues. After finding Effi, his lifelong unrequited love again, he reaches out to her. Effie rebuffs him, but not because she has no feelings for Carl. Effie is devastated by her mother’s suicide, and she tries to convey the depth of her grief by asking Carl if he understands Sylvia Plath’s death, because her mother chose to die the the same way. Carl says he does, but that isn’t enough for Effi. She cannot let go of her pain and share herself with him fully. She is the only woman Carl has ever loved, but it can’t work. Effie is immersed in the past, in the anguish that drove her mother to end her life. Carl, however haltingly, is advancing as Germany itself transforms. He senses that Effie is trapped, that their relationship goes no further. In larger terms, the West knows what the East has gone through, but knowledge alone is not enough for a consummated reunion.

The protagonist’s decision to remain in East Berlin — while the Berlin Wall falls — just as his parents are settling in California divides the novel.  Seiler’s ironic homage to Berlin’s anarchic and countercultural spirit — which had been long suppressed under the Third Reich and Soviet domination — is placed in counterpoint to Carl’s surreal California visit to his parents later in the novel.

Author Lutz Seiler. Photo: Wiki Common

Both Berlin and California fail to heal Carl’s inner conflicts: he doesn’t quite belong in a desolate, transfigured city but he also rejects the soothing pleasures of American amity. This bleak/bland duality self-consciously mirrors the schisms, sociological and spiritual, of a reunified Germany that was struggling to bind its gaping wounds. Near the novel’s conclusion, Carl’s California visit ends at a beach in Santa Monica, where his morbid revulsion at the sight of a mother playing in the water with her daughter suggests his disengagement from conventional domestic contentment.

Seiler’s compelling novel is part of the post-reunification literature landscape, in this case an attempt to explore the personal and political through the consciousness of a genially bedeviled protagonist. What’s particularly powerful about Star III is that the arc of the protagonist’s development begins on such an unpromising note. Slowly, the novel affirms that — even though crippled by a defeated ideology — victimized people can fashion a new identity and community. Carl is not seduced by Californian sunshine; instead, he returns to Berlin and decides to claim it, and his past, as his own. His identity as a free-thinking poet will take the place of the dictates of the “Star 111” transistor radio that was central to his childhood. Carl’s odyssey is about moving beyond passively accepting exterior transmissions and sending out his own, individual, signals.

Tom Connolly is Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd University. He recently edited a historical study (in English) of the 19th and 20th-century Jewish community of Döbling for the Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Institut für Kulturwissenschaften. His book Goodbye, Good Ol’ USA. What America Lost in World War II: The Movies, The Home Front and Postwar Culture is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin/PMU Press.