2023-04-24 11:26:57
If you want to understand people, you have to tell 100 years
On the shortlist of the Leipzig Book Fair: Ulrike Draesner
Source: picture alliance/dpa/Ulrike Draesner
Mothers and daughters, from 1900 to today: That’s what Ulrike Draesner’s new novel is about. It becomes clear how normal violence used to be in families – especially against women. Those who could not have children of their own had to deal with a Lebensborn baby.
“Anyone who wants to tell and understand something about a person has to tell a story for a hundred years,” says Ulrike Draesner’s new novel, Die Verwandten, which made it onto the shortlist for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. The time span spread over 600 pages even covers a little more than a century. It is told from 1900 to the present. Draesner focuses on female worlds of experience. It’s about German-Polish mother-daughter connections and other complicated family relationships. About upbringing, genes and racial fanaticism, about the fate of women before, during and after the end of the Third Reich. About flight, violence and trauma that passed from one generation to the next.
Among the half-dozen heroines who bring up things that have been kept silent and taboo for a long time, one particularly stands out as a quick-change artist: Renate Valerius, born in Breslau in 1928 as the daughter of an educated German family. After 1945 Breslau became Wrocław in Poland and “Reni” became Walla from Poland, whose actual origins were soon not even revealed by an accent. Exactly what happened during this transformation was hinted at by Draesner before the start of her brick-thick book. A quote from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” precedes the “transformed”. It’s about Philomela, whose tongue was cut out by the perpetrator after being raped so that she couldn’t betray him.
Walla/Reni read Ovid’s Metamorphoses in their entirety and counted a total of 50 rape scenes in them. She herself probably had to go through more just before her identity change. Draesner succeeds in clearly naming the bestial events without exposing her character to voyeurism. This is due to her great linguistic and dramaturgical wealth of ideas and unconditional awareness of form. It is clear on every page that an award-winning poet is also writing here. Needless to say, this artistry is sometimes a tad too over the top and self-referential.
Were women always victims?
But the real question that Draesner leaves you with is a different one: Is it really such a good idea to merge the category “woman” with the category “victim” against this historical background of all things? So in this female destiny community is also Gerda – the eldest of the protagonists, born around the penultimate turn of the century. She, too, shows all the symptoms of being a suppressed woman, suffering from herself, the zeitgeist and the male world. She tries to chain her idolized husband to herself through sex practices that give her no pleasure.
“We, the women of 1900, were used like dough in each of the German empires,” she lamented, “throughout the wars: kneaded, enslaved, used.” Only Gerda had no scruples about serving her respective oppressors unconditionally. She became the “Hitlerette” and, as a Nazi pedagogue à la Johanna Haarer, gave courses for pregnant women and young mothers.
Gerda’s own urgent desire to have children ends in a personal tragedy for Draesner. All she can do is adopt a supposedly “Aryan” girl from a Lebensborn institution. In her cynical, pity-seeking tone, the non-figure of Gerda, who speaks as a ghost, seems almost grotesque, actually extremely amusing. Maybe the writer Draesner wants to test the inner compass of her readership here, whether it doesn’t simply turn blindly in the direction of empathy with everything that can be labeled as a “female perspective”? Or is it humorously camouflaged gender essentialism that threatens to tip over into revanchism? Everyone has to decide that for themselves.
Ulrike Draesner: The transformed. Penguin, 608 pages, 26 euros
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