To look at things differently:
Lessons from Uwe Timm's novel Johannisnacht
Monika Shafi

In Uwe Timm's recent novel Johannisnacht (1996), the protagonist spends an evening with a friend in Berlin. While cooking an elegant pasta dish, this friend explains:

Ist dir mal aufgefallen, wie die Franzosen allein durch die Steinmasse eine katastrophale Niederlage in einen Sieg umgewandelt haben?...Beim Anblick des Arc de Triomphe kommt doch niemand auf den Gedanken, Napoleon habe entscheidende Schlachten oder sogar den Krieg verloren. Das ist Ästhetik, verstehst du, man sieht die Dinge anders, darum gehts doch.1

To show readers how to look at things differently informs not only this novel but it also characterizes Timm's overall approach to literature and aesthetics. In his lectures on poetics, Erzählen und kein Ende: Versuche zu einer Ästhetik des Alltags (1993), Timm emphasizes that aesthetics should transform the perception of the mundane, everyday existence, and he compares the task of a writer to that of an ethnographer. Timm pursues his field work, however, not on foreign soil, but in reunified Berlin during the time of Christo's Wrapped Reichstag project, studying Wessies, Ossies, and foreigners in their complex and often conflicted interactions.

Johannisnacht can be read as an example of reunification literature, texts that address the monumental changes and transformations Germany has witnessed since 1989. The new capital Berlin has emerged as the principal location for exploring these issues, chief of which is "how Germanness is being molded within that capital" and how "the search for a German commonality and the concomitant fear of fragmentation (Zerrissenheit)" play out.2 Johannisnacht presents readers, as I will argue in this talk, not only with imaginative but also with highly entertaining answers to these questions, for it focuses on carnivalistic disorder, ambivalence, and playfulness.

My interpretation of Johannisnacht is informed by Bakhtin's analysis of carnival. In his classical studies Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929) and Rabelais and His World (1965), Bakhtin describes carnival as a temporary destabilization of order, calling carnivalistic life a "life drawn out of its usual rut, [...] to some extent 'life turned inside out,' 'the reverse side of the world' ('monde à l'envers')".3 Bakhtin also stresses that at the center of carnival lies "the pathos of shifts and changes, of death and renewal"4. Timm picks up on this philosophical core and the themes of carnival, but in a playful, postmodern manner, emphasizing carnival's essence rather than its rituals. Johannisnacht provides us with two carnival-like festivities, the celebration of Christo's Wrapped Reichstag which coincides with Midsummer Night and Shakespeare's comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream whose characters and themes are refracted in Timm's story of disoriented, uprooted Wessies, Ossies, and foreigners and their thwarted quest for work, love, and belonging. In contrast to carnival proper, the "Johannisnacht" functions, however, more like an enabling medium rather than an active agent of confusion, thereby shifting the focus to the true source of disorder, reality itself.

The novel's nameless, first-person narrator, an author, has been asked by a magazine to contribute an essay on the potato: "Peru-Preußen-Connection. Die Kartoffel und die deutsche Mentalität".5 Stuck at the beginning of a new novel, restless and frustrated, the writer eagerly accepts the assignment. He tells his rather surprised editor, "Mich interessiere der Zusammenhang zwischen Schmecken und Erzählen, beides habe ja mit der Zunge zu tun",6 and he travels to Berlin in order to meet with a few potato experts. His interest in the topic is very much fueled by an unanswered question from his own biography. One of his uncles, a true potato connoisseur, who was able to distinguish the taste of different kinds of potatoes, had muttered the words "Roter Baum"7 on his deathbed, and nobody knows what these words referred to. It is this secret, this linguistic puzzle, that propels the novel's actions. The search for this knowledge becomes the real driving force behind the protagonist's explorations. Once in Berlin, he becomes immediately entangled in a series of bizarre encounters, and his travels through bars, hotels, apartments, streets and subway stations of postwall Berlin bring him into contact with a number of East and West Germans as well as foreigners whose disrupted lives form the backdrop of his inquiries. Locale and cast obviously give him plenty of fieldwork to do, and his assignment grows with surprising speed into a jumble of confusions and mystifications which echo the bewilderment experienced by Shakespeare's characters.

It is important to note that all characters, German as well as foreign-born, are portrayed as people in transit and on the move. They are either losing or changing jobs, places, partners or political parties. Nobody works in the field for which he/she was trained for. People and events are literally "ver-rückt", and everybody is falsifying names, identities, passports or pictures. Christo's huge canvases, flapping around the Reichstag provide a fitting background and metaphor for the playful simulating, forging and copying that informs all aspects of the text.

On his first night in Berlin, the narrator is stopped by the driver of a Lancia with Italian license plates who tries to sell him two leather jackets. After some haggling over the price, done both in Italian and German, he buys one of the beautiful, soft, light jackets, even though he can't see it very well in the dimly lit car. Happy about the jacket and the bargain which confirms for him the grace, style and elegance of the Italian culture he is so very fond of, and well-clad in the warm garment, he steps out into the rainy night. Within minutes the jacket deteriorates, but it protects him in the next scene in a bizarre way from the violent attacks of three skinheads who mistake him for an Albanian immigrant.

The multiple misreadings and misinterpretations in this fast-paced sequence of events create a highly comical effect, but they also reveal how unreliable seemingly stable (national) markers can be. Language, skin color, dress or customs, commonly signs on which we base recognition and identity, are not to be taken as absolute truths, but like stories they need to be interpreted. This episode farcically debunks the myth of national character as a fixed and easily recognizable entity, without, however, pitting Germans against foreigners. Everybody is acting, deceiving and being deceived. Equally important as this ironic unveiling of identity's rather unstable co-ordinates is the writer's response to his (mis)fortune:

Dieser Italiener war ein genialer Mann, sagte ich mir [...] Und die 166 Mark, die sind, hätte meine Mutter gesagt, ein Opfer an die Götter. Deren Neid ist zu fürchten. Und in der letzten Zeit ist es mir gutgegangen, sehr gut sogar. Nein, ich war nicht wütend, nicht verbittert.8

By deciding to accept his loss, even interpreting it as positive, the writer foregrounds flexibility and tolerance. Instead of the expected rage, the wise man or 'fool' reacts with wisdom. The protagonist is also outwardly marked as a fool. An ex-GDR barber gave him a truly horrendous haircut, three gaping ridges at the back of his head. Puck, a supposedly brilliant hairstylist tries to correct these ridges by coloring them green. Yet, either way the writer is an object of constant attention and ridicule. The haircut plays on the topos of the grotesque or disfigured body, a decisive ingredient in carnival and carnivalesque literature, and it also shows how this character responds to his calamities with wit, humor, and humility, thus providing an example of alternative behavior.

Yet taking stock of the non-German characters in this novel, one is at first surprised by Timm's seemingly easy reliance on national stereotypes. The Italian is a charming liar, at a Polish wedding great amounts of alcohol are consumed, a Russian whom the writer meets at the end of his stay is a professional singer, and the owner of a Greek restaurant is pictured as a shrewd business man. The same practice also applies to inter-German relationships. Any Berliner worth his name treats anyone from Bavaria with derision, and relationships between Ossies and Wessies are muddled in resentment, anger, and nostalgia. The novel's population leaves little room for hybridity or hyphenated identities. On the contrary, people want to be known by their unique origins, as the abundance of stories told about home, family or migration demonstrates. Timm's careful attention to the nuances of German dialects and foreign accents further testifies to the significant role that difference plays for everybody.

Acknowledging the reality of such differences, however, is not the same as cordoning them off as species to be preserved for all times. Not only are almost all of the characters presented as slightly out-of-bounds, either self-deriding or being mocked by the narrator, but they are also surrounded by carnival's gay atmosphere and laughter. Christo's fabrics act as a continuing reminder that perception and knowledge rest on very fragile foundations. Things as well as people can put on performance and change appearance and identity.

In facing the daily reality of reunited Germany in Berlin, the city which more than any other location embodies the problems of the old and the new nation, each character is forced to explore (new) ways of belonging. Misunderstandings and quarrels abound in this search. Clothing, origin, class, gender, they all contribute to rather than clarify confusion. But if everything is constantly in flux, how does one then stay afloat? Johannisnacht provides ample evidence that life and culture are made in and through change. What had appeared in recent years as one of the main insights of Cultural Studies, namely the idea that cultures are constituted through movement and change and cannot be defined as primeordial essence has been put to good use in Timm's novel.

The quest for identity and belonging, be it to a nation, gender, region, language, is thus formulated as the struggle to cope with change and uncertainty. Carnival and comedy supply not only the narrative framework for this quest, but they also furnish strategies and survival skills, as exemplified in the adventures of the protagonist. Timm, in fact, excels in devising extraordinary situations or "scandal scenes," as Bakhtin called them, which are dominated "by eccentric behavior, inappropriate speeches and performances"9. Almost every chapter develops a hilarious situation, bizarre character or both, and often they revolve around erotic or culinary temptations. Retired old ladies applying karate-moves to knock out hostile teenagers, women trained as Germanistinnen who use their schooling in narratology to deliver first-rate phone sex, or a disco serving a terribly spicy chili con carne made out of Chappy, a well-known German dog's food brand provide the juxtaposition and incongruity typical of comedy.

Carnival also allows, as Bakhtin explained, for "a new mode of relationships between individuals, counterposed to the all-powerful socio-hierarchial relationships of noncarnival life."10

The novel's characters and encounters can be seen as probing different modes of relationships in which narration, the art of story-telling figures prominently. Criss-crossing Berlin in search of information about the potato, the protagonist is constantly catapulted into the life stories of complete strangers. Stumbling from one adventure to the next, he is, in fact, collecting stories. By telling stories about their past, the characters construct and validate their identities in the present.

In the last hours of his stay, the protagonist hears a Russian baritone sing the German folksong "Die Gedanken sind frei", and suddenly remembers the story his uncle had once told him as a young boy. "Roter Baum" was the name of a pub in which the uncle's father, a farm worker, had met with lobbyists for a farmworker's trade union. As a punishment for this activism he had lost his job and his home, and when packing his few belongings, the other servants had sung this song by which they tacitly expressed support of his actions as well as opposition to the landowner who dismissed him. Migrating from Mecklenburg to Hamburg, the family had subsisted on potatoes and on narratives, telling stories to forget the hunger. In his lectures on poetics, Timm predicts that the outcome of the ethnographic quest, undertaken to gain a new perspective on reality would lead into one's own consciousness, a prediction that has certainly be fulfilled by the protagonist who is now able to close the story, for he discovered the secret, the meaning of the term "Roter Baum".

The novel allegorically performs what the protagonist sets out to do, searching for and completing a narrative, finding both its beginning and its end. It is both a metanarrative--a novel about a novel to be written--and a narrative itself, both performance and truth, play and reality, thus calling attention to its own artifice. The novel's main intertextual strand links it to Shakespeare's dreamland, but the ethnographic gaze practiced by the novel's narrator, calls for a narrative firmly grounded in realism. It is between these two distinct poles that Johannisnacht displays and unfolds its subversive potential. In adhering to the realist paradigm, Timm is able to canvass the current German social landscape, while simultaneously placing the heavy weights of past and present history in the realm of carnival and Midsummer Night. Not only does this double-bind allow him to focus on disorder and ambivalence, it also infuses the text with elements of playfulness and gaiety that have been largely absent from reunification narratives.

Timm seems to emphasize less the material, social, and political inequities that the sudden merger of two distinct ideological and economic systems has produced, but he explores instead how such fundamentally altered national parameters translate into everyday life. For Timm the crucial issue in the new narrative of the nation is how to deal with uncertainty and loss, and how to deal with it politically as well as personally. Within the context of reunification narratives this focus allows for a different set of questions and issues that those commonly found in many of these texts, and as a result Johannisnacht departs from their main paradigms and trends in significant ways. Most importantly the novel does not present the hero as historical agent, whether as victim or oppressor. The protagonist is not attempting to settle old accounts or ponder alternative historical paths. Timm is not interested in the narrator's ideological stances and political perceptions, hence his lack of name and biography, but rather in his ability to listen, to watch and to understand the lives and performances of those around him. Precisely because he is not trying to impart his own interpretation of events and is keeping an ironic distance, he can function as the wise man who embodies the type of conduct needed in a society facing such tremendous upheaval. Also by shifting attention to the way people cope with change, Timm is foregrounding lived reality not historical analysis. By presenting a number of characters with very distinct West and East German biographies no single perspective takes center-stage. Each life story, in itself ambivalent, is offset by another, so that the different narratives are contesting and questioning each other.

Moreover, as in Shakespeare's comedy, events cannot be neatly divided into fiction and truth, and perception and knowledge also provide no safe compass. Disguise, cunning and pretense set the tone instead. This carnivalesque atmosphere serves, however, not only to stimulate pleasure but also to address social injustice and instability. As Bakhtin explained, carnival traditionally offered a temporal relief from the pressures of such inequity, but it did not alter the order which produced and maintained disparity. Timm, however, seems to move beyond the temporal, the momentary liberation, advocating carnival's spirit as a general attitude to be adopted toward contemporary reality. Not that the institutions of reunited Germany aren't firmly in place. On the contrary, traversing Berlin's urban sites and spaces serves as a continous reminder of their power and legacy. Surviving and (successfully) adjusting to the loss of work, home, ideology or partners, requires the ability to play, to perform. The answer to the question raised at the beginning of my talk, "how Germanness is being molded in the capital" lies in these subversive, carnivalesque practices.

Like the silvery sheers of fabric Christo draped around the Reichstag, Timm veils, disguises, and plays with people and their stories, showing them and us the "joyful relativity of all structure and order."11




Endnotes

1 Timm, Uwe, Johannisnacht (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1996) 16.

2 Roper, Katherine. "Imagining the German Capital: Berlin Writers on the Two Unification Eras," 1870/71-1989/90. German Unifications and the Change of Literary Discourse, Ed. Walter Pape (Berlin: Walter der Gruyter, 1993) 173.

3 Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Ed. and transl. Caryl Emerson ( Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984) 122.

4 Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics 124.

5 Johannesnacht 10.

6 Johannesnacht 12.

7 Johannesnacht 10.

8 Johannesnacht 36.

9 Problems 117.

10 Problems 123.

11 Problems 124.