Homecoming is the attempt to land a big coup, though it is hard to say what exactly this big literary coup is supposed to consist in. Th e novel is thematically full to the brim, and yet its narrative centre does not really emerge even aft er more than half of its almost four hundred pages. 1
Marginally more balanced, Cavelty acknowledges under the caption ‘Odyssey as Obsession’ that the novel may well be a ‘remarkable intellectual adventure’, but hastens to add that its ‘literary quality seems questionable’. 2 Th e central lines of criticism which recur in virtually all reviews are that the novel contains too many interwoven narrative strands, 3 covers too many phases of German history, 4 comes with too much erudition, and is too conspicuously constructed to be emotionally engaging. 5 Or, as Weidermann sums up his verdict under the charming headline ‘Dross is dangerous for little souls’:
Bernhard Schlink . . . storms through world history, through literary history and through the beds of ladies with peachy cheeks, he fi ghts against templates and is himself caught in a locked groove of kitsch. A pitiful sight. 6
If we want to engage with the book on its own terms, we should take the reading experience articulated in these reviews seriously and focus precisely on the
Diagnosis: Overdose.
Status: Critical.
Odysseys in Bernhard Schlink’s Die Heimkehr
Sebastian Matzner
147
convoluted Odyssean construction that is given such prominence in Schlink’s novel. Instead of assessing the book’s aesthetic value, this chapter will therefore concentrate on how its peculiar use of myth relates to the German struggle of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (‘coming to terms with the past’).
Needless to say, the year 1989, the watershed chosen for this volume, is of tremendous signifi cance for Germany and her literature. Th e fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent reunifi cation gave new urgency to lingering questions of German national identity. 7 Th e literature of the 1990s, though widely concerned with processing the diverging experiences of life in the two German states and the present intracultural rapprochement, 8 was dominated by a renewed engagement with the National Socialist ( NS ) past. 9 Th is joint return to the most recent shared past no longer focused exclusively on the Shoah, but extended to further victim groups, increasingly also including refl ections on German experiences during the war and post- war era. 10 Th is new interest in German wartime suff ering – Müller even speaks of a ‘new German delight in the victim discourse’ 11 – was and remains fraught with problems. It is oft en seen as a consequence of the one- sided empathy taboo that resulted from the 1968ers’
indignant confrontation with and condemnation of the generation of perpetrators and followers, 12 which found literary expression in the so- called Väterliteratur (‘fathers’ literature’) that explored the lives and actions of the parent- generation during the Th ird Reich. 13 More recent attempts to revisit the past thus not only risk being branded revisionist, but their access to the past is also inevitably infl ected both by preceding and competing contemporary modes of remembering. What and who is to be remembered, and how, remains a challenging issue to be negotiated in the self- refl exive medium of literature, which is a central site of what Fuchs calls ‘German memory contests’. 14 Schlink’s Vorleser is a prominent example for the re- evaluation of the memory politics of the generation of 1968, 15 and Heimkehr continues to address these issues by combining two further trends in post- unifi cation German literature: the privatization of history in family and generational narratives, and the ‘mythical turn’.
Friedrich has argued that the privatization of history resulted from the way the trauma of the Second World War was initially dealt with. He distinguishes between two conformations of victimhood: victima, the passive experience of having one’s life taken away; and sacrifi cium , the off ering of one’s life for a greater good. Th e Germans’ collective disavowal of Nazi Germany aft er the war, according to Friedrich, rendered it impossible for them to give their own wartime suff ering a meaning of sacrifi cium , which blocked its incorporation into a
collective narrative of national identity. 16 Instead of heroization and mythologization on a national level, wartime experiences were thus commemorated and processed on the small scale of family narratives. 17 Th e veritable ‘remembrance boom’ 18 aft er the reunifi cation in the context of the search for a new national identity, however, makes this ostensibly private form of memorial literature less innocent than it might seem: while individually upholding, by and large, the discursive taboo of interpreting German suff ering as sacrifi cium , the appearance of individual, private accounts of victima suff ering en masse collectively introduces into the public sphere an emotionally highly charged body of texts which shift s the balance and boundaries in the (self-) perception of Germans as perpetrators and victims. 19 Although these family narratives tend to adopt a metacritical perspective, actively refl ecting on the concepts of memory and victimhood that underlie this genre, 20 as a group they nonetheless give rise to the ‘perception of the nation as a family and of history as family history’. 21 Th us, the ‘family narrative represents the shattered or damaged post- war German family as a symptom of the impairment of the nation as a whole’. 22
Th e mythical turn, on the other hand, illustrates once more how die Wende , the turning point of the reunifi cation in 1989, connects to the turning point of 1945: as Stephan has pointed out, literary reworkings of myth tend to increase in times of crisis and change when individual and national identities become unstable, and the surge in neomythical writings over the course of the last two decades appears to point back to a similar surge in such texts aft er the collapse of fascism. 23 While these two trends might seem somewhat disparate – the family narratives deliberately zooming in on the individual and the particular, narratives with a mythical theme zooming out from the historical to a universal level – they share a concern of probing family relations and gender roles as focal points for the interrogation of past and future constructions of national identity. 24 In combining a mythological hypotext with a post- war family narrative, Schlink’s Heimkehr situates itself at the very centre of these literary discourses and off ers critical comments on their possibilities and limitations.
Leaving aside for the moment the ubiquitous references to Homer’s Odyssey , the novel can be summarized as follows: the narrator, Peter Debauer, searches for the lost ending of a pulp fi ction story he had begun to read as a child at his grandparents’ home and which never ceased to grip his imagination. On his search for the author, he meets and falls in love with Barbara Bindinger. She is already married but, given her husband’s extended absence, a relationship develops nonetheless and ends only when her husband returns. Peter leaves,
seeks a new start and moves to Berlin to experience the contemporaneous events of the German reunifi cation at fi rst hand. Some time later, he unexpectedly meets Barbara again. She has separated from her husband and they resume their relationship. Peter’s continued search for the pulp fi ction author reveals that the latter is actually his father, whom he had been brought up to believe had died in the war. Instead, he is alive and now working under the name John de Baur at the Political Science Department of Columbia University. Although anxious not to put his relationship with Barbara at risk again, he decides to go to New York to meet and confront his father. Under a false identity, he joins one of his courses, gains an insight into his life and work, and takes part in a group experiment de Baur has staged for his students as a dramatic, formative illustration of his political theory. Peter ultimately fails to openly confront his father, but feeling that he has accomplished as much as he could, he returns home to fi nd happiness in the comforting routine of love he shares with Barbara. Th is is the myth- free version of the story; a fairly straightforward addition to the aforementioned
‘fathers’ literature’. 25
So where does the Odyssey come in, how does it add to the story, and how does it relate to the memory contests about German history? Th e Odyssey is present on various and interconnected levels.