While the active emulation of Odysseus is confi ned to this episode, his story never ceases to serve Peter as a foil for interpreting his experiences. Be it in his reading of Barbara’s reaction upon the return of her husband, 36 be it in explaining why he enjoys his ‘adventure’ in New York despite genuinely missing her, 37 Peter continuously and explicitly refl ects on his relationship with Barbara in terms of Odysseus and Penelope’s bond. Simultaneously, the Odyssey is used as an interpretative framework for German history: witnessing the reunifi cation in Berlin, Peter discusses the historic developments with an American journalist and draws on the Odyssey to explain why there will be no violent settling of scores aft er the fall of the Wall:
Odysseus hat nur deshalb bei seiner Heimkehr die Freier erschlagen und die Mägde, die’s mit den Freiern getrieben hatten, aufh ängen können, weil er nicht geblieben ist. Er ist weitergezogen. Wenn man bleiben will, muß man sich miteinander arrangieren, nicht miteinander abrechnen. Es stimmt doch, daß in Amerika nach dem Bürgerkrieg nicht abgerechnet wurde? Weil Amerika nach der Spaltung wieder zu sich heimgekehrt ist, um bei sich zu bleiben. Auch wenn Deutschland wieder zu sich heimkehrt, will es bei sich bleiben.
[Th e only reason Odysseus could kill the suitors and string up the women who had reveled with them was that he did not go on to stay. He kept moving. When you stay on, you have to get along with people, not get back at them. Th ere were no reprisals in America aft er the Civil War, were there? Because the country had to heal the split if it’s going to stick together. Well, Germany too will have to heal the split if it’s going to stick together.] 38
Given this all- pervasive presence, it is easy to see why reviewers took issue with Schlink’s Odyssey overdose. Yet a critical voice is already embedded within the novel. Th e series ‘Romane zur Freude und zur guten Unterhaltung’ (‘Novels for Your Enjoyment and Reading Pleasure’), in which the inset story appeared, was edited by Peter’s grandparents. While his grandfather had a penchant for tales of historical battles, his grandmother detested war, 39 and while her husband had a professional attitude towards the stories they edited, Peter notes that his grandmother
liebte . . . Literatur, Romane wie Gedichte, hatte ein sicheres Gespür für literarische Qualität und muß unter der Beschäft igung mit den banalen Texten gelitten haben.
[. . . loved literature, fi ction as well as verse, and had a sure feeling for it; she must have suff ered from having to spend so much time on such banal texts.] 40
With this comment, the inset story is soundly rejected, its tale of the returning WWII soldiers in the guise of Homer’s Odyssey intrafi ctionally dismissed as bad literature. Indeed, the grandmother forbids Peter to read pulp fi ction novels: the post- war shortage of paper means that young Peter must use the novels’ proofs as scrap paper, but until his adolescence he adheres to his grandmother’s prohibition and does not read the stories on the back. Th is whole scenario poignantly encapsulates the memory constellation aft er the Second World War, in which the post- war generation receives its own education against the backdrop of a fundamental taboo, resulting in a problematic palimpsest that powerfully explodes when the generation of 1968 eventually ‘turns the page’. However, the grandmother’s literary verdict is of importance in its own right. It questions whether a neomythic approach to individual and collective histories within a light and entertaining framework is in fact appropriate. Whenever Peter expresses interest in the topic of a pulp fi ction novel, his grandmother discourages him from reading them and instead directs him to ‘the better book’. 41 Inevitably, this puts the question mark of irony over the main narrative itself: if an intrafi ctional character openly characterizes a thinly veiled adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey as painful to read, can the extrafi ctional reader be expected to think very diff erently
of the strikingly similar narrative technique that underlies much of the main narrative? For, what is the diff erence between the inset narrative evoking Homer’s Calypso in Karl’s stay with Kalinka, and Peter Debauer admitting in the main narrative an indiscretion during his New York adventure by saying ‘On New Year’s Eve [. . .] I ended up in bed with a woman who told me her name was Callista. I liked the name’? 42 An ironic reading of this overt reproduction of the same mode of classical reception gains plausibility not least from the fact that the novel is perfectly capable of more discreet allusions: the delayed mention of the protagonist’s name, for instance, which does not appear until page 102(/71), is reminiscent of the same technique in Homer, where Odysseus is named only at the very end of the proem in verse 20. Similarly, the secret of the immovable bed in the Odyssey fi nds a refl ection in Die Heimkehr , where Peter and Barbara get to know each other while hunting for furniture in antique shops, semiconsciously buy matching furniture, and eventually consolidate their commitment to a relationship by bringing their matching furniture together in a shared fl at. 43 Given such subtle allusions, the predominant mode of less understated Homer reception raises even more questions.
Following the grandmother’s advice to turn to ‘the better book’, a comparison with Schlink’s own Vorleser suggests itself. Here, too, the Odyssey plays a prominent role. It is the fi rst text the protagonist Martin Berg reads to Hannah Schmitz, the analphabetic woman with whom the schoolboy has an aff air and whom he meets again years later as one of the defendants in an NS war- crimes trial. Homer, Cicero, Lessing, and Schiller – the canon that formed the cultural core of traditional German Bildungsbürgertum (the ideology and identity of the upper bourgeoisie) – are all there at the start of their relationship. 44 Th e Odyssey then reappears at the end of the novel when Hannah is imprisoned and Michael resumes his position as Hannah’s reader by recording tapes of literary texts, beginning again with the Odyssey . 45 Aided by Michael’s recorded readings, Hannah teaches herself to read and write. She uses these skills to write to Michael but also to read historical accounts of the Holocaust, as Michael learns when he comes to pick her up on the day of her release, only to discover that she committed suicide at dawn. 46 In Der Vorleser , Hannah’s (re-)introduction to the Odyssey thus initiates a process of education and, as it were, empowering enlightenment which ultimately leads to historical understanding, but also to death. In a sense, the crisis of the entire enlightenment project at large, a central feature of post- war German intellectual debates, fi nds a dramatic echo in Hannah’s suicide. 47
In Die Heimkehr , the presence of the Odyssey elicits diff erent, but also damaging eff ects. As in Hannah’s case, Peter’s encounter with (Karl’s version of)
the Odyssey triggers historical enquiries: as he researches the pulp fi ction author’s fate, Peter reads Josef Martin Bauer’s 1955 work So weit die Füße tragen ( As Far as Feet Will Carry ). 48 Yet it is not just the subject of wartime suff ering and specifi cally his parents’ past that captures Peter’s interest; it is the pulp fi ction novel’s mythopoeia, its way of retelling lived experience by merging it with myth, that fascinates him; 49 a fascination borne out by his mythological readings of his own life and actions. 50 Th is obsession with the Odyssey ’s suggestive narrative structure, however, time and again gets in his way. During Peter’s midlife crisis, it is the emotionally shallow imitation of myth in his own life that distracts him from the people and questions he really cares about. Likewise, during his stay in Berlin, his experience of the reunifi cation is fl awed by the intrusion of myth.
Peter regrets not having engaged with the 1968 student revolution because he was too busy earning money and wants to prevent this from happening again. 51 Yet in Berlin he realizes that there is no big history show on display, that real life continues, and ponders:
Was hatte ich von der Begegnung mit der Geschichte erwartet? Daß die Menschen demonstrieren? . . . Die Polizei angreifen und entwaff nen? Die Mauer einreißen? Off ensichtlich hatte es die Geschichte nicht eilig. Sie respektiert, daß im Leben gearbeitet, eingekauft , gekocht und gegessen werden muß . . . . Was soll man den ganzen Tag in der gestürmten Bastille? Was an der off enen Mauer?
[What had I expected from my encounter with history? Demonstrations? . . . Police interventions? Th e destruction of the Wall? History is clearly not in a hurry. It respects daily activities like work, shopping, cooking, and eating . . . . What is there to do at a Bastille already stormed? Or a Wall already scaled?] 52 Still, when it comes to the meeting with the American journalist mentioned above, Peter is quick to draw on the Odyssey , foregoing his own genuine but limited and ordinary experiences in favour of the loft y heights of epic grandeur.
Th e value of his historical- mythological comparison, however, is at once thrown into doubt by the journalist’s response: ‘Lachte er mich an, oder lachte er mich aus? Ich war mir nicht sicher.’ [‘Was his smile a smile of goodwill or of derision?
I was not sure.’] 53 Similarly, when Peter fi nally meets his father amidst his new American family, he cannot bring himself to confront him openly and instead forces a conversation about Penelope, Telemachus and Odysseus in order to gauge his father’s feelings about abandoning his fi rst family. 54 Even the long- awaited reconciliation with the man his father turns out to be occurs only in an imagined conversation about homecomings: that of Odysseus, Karl, his father’s
and his own. 55 All this taken together creates the strong impression that the pervasive layer of myth invariably gets in the way of truly meaningful personal interaction and engagement. Th is is especially true of the protagonist’s continuous struggle with father–son issues, which gives the novel the air of a Bildungsroman . Without unfolding this complex at length, it is important to note that the turning point in Peter’s development (i.e. in fi nding his role as a partner, son, ‘father’) lies in his recognition of similarities between himself and his trickster father: both consistently avoid making genuine, concrete commitments, and cover up their evasiveness by self- deluding reasoning. 56 Th e Odyssey here off ers a blueprint for the exploration of fraught post- war father–son relations, 57 gives narrative shape to Peter’s own emotional escapism, and features prominently in de Baur’s pseudo- deconstructionist theory that legitimizes his immoral behaviour. 58
Precisely through this excessive and high- profi le emplotment of the Odyssey , Schlink’s Heimkehr builds up a critical momentum which draws attention to the mechanisms of narrativization in general and of mythical narratives in particular, 59 a concern it shares with Adorno and Horkheimer’s chapter ‘Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment’ in their Dialektik der Aufk lärung ( Dialectics of Enlightenment ) of 1947. 60 Die Heimkehr experiments with the myth of Odysseus’
homecoming as an ordering paradigm for the erratic events in the lives of individuals and of the nation – and repeatedly stages its failure. An important case in point is the character of de Baur and his theory, which provide the foil against which Peter’s development is cast into relief. De Baur resembles Homer’s and Adorno’s Odysseus in his readiness to (repeatedly) sacrifi ce his own identity and name to ensure his survival. 61 Porter, commenting on Adorno and Horkheimer, notes that ‘[i]n reducing himself to a nameless cipher . . . he [Odysseus] breaks the chain of mimesis between names and essences, and thereby cunningly reinvests language with a purely rational and intentional content’. 62 De Baur represents this move on two levels: his life exemplifi es the calculating rationality of Odysseus as the prototype of the bourgeois individual in all its moral dubiousness while his self- justifying theory develops its philosophical underpinnings. Combining (literary) deconstructionism with (legal) decisionism, De Baur argues:
Was wir für Wirklichkeit halten, sind nur Texte, und was wir für Texte halten, nur Interpretationen. Von der Wirklichkeit und den Texten bleibt nur, was wir daraus machen. In der Geschichte gibt es kein Ziel . . . Wir können sie interpretieren als ob sie ein Ziel hätte . . . als ob Wirklichkeit mehr wäre als Text . . . als ob es das Gute und das Böse, Recht und Unrecht, Wahrheit und Lüge gäbe . . . Unsere Wahrheit, die uns unsere Entscheidung treff en läßt, erfahren wir
nur in der existentiellen, der extremen Ausnahmesituation. Die Richtigkeit unserer Entscheidung erweist sich in dem Einsatz, mit dem wir sie verwirklichen, und der Verantwortung, die wir für ihre Verwirklichung übernehmen.
[What we take for reality is merely a text, what we take for texts are merely interpretations. Reality and texts are therefore what we make of them. History has no goal . . . We can interpret it as if it had a goal . . . as if good and evil, right and wrong, truth and lies actually existed . . . We come to our truth, which enables us to make decisions, in extreme, existential, exceptional situations. Th e validity of our decisions itself is felt in the commitment we make to carrying them out and the responsibility we take for carrying them out.] 63
Th e literary implications of this view are illustrated in his assessment of the Odyssey :
Alles sei im Fluß: Ziel und Sinn der Odyssee , Wahrheit und Lüge . . . Das einzig Bleibende sei, daß die Odyssee den uralten Mythos von Aufb ruch, Abenteuer und Heimkehr zu einem Epos gewandelt habe, zu einer Geschichte, die zu einer Zeit und an einem Ort spielt. Sie habe die abstrakten Größen Raum und Zeit geschaff en, ohne die wir keine Geschichte und keine Geschichten haben.
[[E]verything was in fl ux: the work’s entire intent and meaning, its portrayal of truth and lie . . . All that remained was that Th e Odyssey transformed the primordial myth of departure, adventure and return into an epic, a story set in a specifi c moment and place, thereby creating the abstract quantities of space and time without which we would have no history and no stories.] 64
Note the proximity to Adorno and Horkheimer:
Th e translation of the myths into the novel, which is accomplished in the narration of Odysseus’ adventure, does not so much falsify them as pull myth into time, revealing the abyss that separates myth from homeland and reconciliation. 65 De Baur’s notion of Homer’s poetry as the turning point where free, authentic myth becomes calculatedly controlled epic picks up central ideas of Adorno and Horkheimer, for whom ‘Homer represents the “precipitate” of archaic mythology, the mere unity of his plots standing for a wilful imposition of intentionality on their chaotic, massive sprawl’. 66 Although reframed in deconstructionist–
decisionist terms, these are the very problematics addressed by de Baur. Moreover, the ideological adaptability of the theoretical kernel of de Baur’s Odyssey of Law is not only disavowed as an intellectual cover- up for spineless opportunism, it also contrasts sharply with the problematic rigidity of the Odyssey as a structuring device imposed on lived experience for narrative framing. In this sense, Die
Heimkehr can be read as a narrative realization of Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of instrumental reason: in and with its narrative form, it problematizes the cunning inherent in the rational ordering of narrated myth.
Th eoretical refl ections on the value of myth for poetic production traditionally emphasize its combination of a durable narrative core and a fl exible shape. 67 Modern critics have added to this the notion that myths have the power to turn the contingency and absolutism of reality into aesthetic plausibility. 68 In Schlink’s novel, these notions are both expressed (in de Baur’s theory and Peter’s refl ections) and resisted (in the narrative). Th e resulting frustrations and absences point to the irreducibly human that gets lost when confronted with (pre-)fabricated narratives. In de Baur’s theory as in Peter’s life, myth becomes all shape and no core. Schlink’s novel neither rewrites myth nor corrects it, but rejects mythologization by narratively demonstrating its inadequacy. 69 From this perspective, it is especially signifi cant that the reader is left feeling uneasy about the novel’s tortuously interwoven compound of myth- family-nationhood. Th e recurring parallelization of the myth of Odysseus and Penelope, of Peter and Barbara’s relationship, and of Germany’s reunifi cation here comes into view as a fundamentally troublesome and fl awed perspective: 70 the notion of Germany’s
‘homecoming’ to its former unity aft er its historical errant wanderings is both suggested and critiqued. Narrative ‘failures’ thus gain signifi cance as a marked reaction against the traditional German longing for myth, 71 and as warnings against the risk of implicitly redemptive narratives. 72 If, as Adorno and Horkheimer write, ‘[a]ll demythologization has the form of the inevitable experience of the uselessness and superfl uousness of sacrifi ces’, 73 then one eff ect of this reading of Schlink’s novel is that it restores ex negativo – through manifest narrative obstruction – the rawness of individual experiences (including victima -suff ering) as something not containable in collectively shared, pre- scripted narrative frames. It thereby resists the movement of Odyssean myth as a cunningly told story, which turns suff ering into sacrifi cium , both on the individual and collective level. Schlink’s Heimkehr critically positions itself within the context of German memory contests as it denounces the tempting grand- scale narrative perspective of myth by letting it collide, repeatedly and variously, with the irreducible reality of individual historical experience. Against Frye’s assertion that ‘[o]f all fi ctions, the marvelous journey is the one formula that is never exhausted’ 74 and Adorno and Horkheimer’s verdict that ‘[o]nly by fi rst becoming a novel does the epic become a fairy tale’, 75 this novel turns the Odyssey against itself and into a stumbling block for mythologization: by exhausting it, it undercuts the epic’s signature move of turning life into a fairy tale.
Bibliography
deutschen Erinnerungsliteratur. Vienna : Picus .Bartov , Omer ( 2000 ) ‘ Germany as Victim ’ , New German Critique 80 : 29–40.
Beßlich , Barbara , Katharina Grätz and Olaf Hildebrand , eds ( 2006 ), Wende des Erinnerns?
Geschichtskonstruktionen in der deutschen Literatur nach 1989. Berlin : Schmidt . Blumenberg , Hans ( 1979 ), Arbeit am Mythos. Frankfurt : Suhrkamp ; here cited from
Work on Myth ( 1985 ), trans. R. M. Wallace . Cambridge , MA : MIT Press .
Börnchen , Stefan ( 2008 ), ‘ Derselbe Krieg mit anderen Mitteln? De Man, Derrida und die Dekonstruktion in Bernhard Schlinks Roman Die Heimkehr ’ , in M. W. Rectanus (ed.), Über Gegenwartsliteratur, Interpretationen und Interventionen. Festschrift für Paul Michael Lützeler zum 65. Geburtstag, 87–104 . Bielefeld : Aisthesis .
Mythenkorrekturen. Zu einer paradoxalen Form der Mythenrezeption, 411–435 . Berlin : de Gruyter .
Frye , Northrop ( 1957 ), Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton , NJ : Princeton Dispositiv des nicht nur literarischen Geschichtsdiskurses seit den 1990er Jahren ’ , in B. Beßlich . K. Grätz and O. Hildebrand (eds), Wende des Erinnerns?
Geschichtskonstruktionen in der deutschen Literatur nach 1989 , 133–156 . Berlin : Schmidt .
Schreiben nach der Wende. Ein Jahrzehnt deutscher Literatur, 1989–1999 , 89–98 . Tübingen : Stauff enberg .
Zusammengestellt von Karl Philipp Moritz: Mit fünf und sechzig in Kupfer gestochenen
Zusammengestellt von Karl Philipp Moritz: Mit fünf und sechzig in Kupfer gestochenen