Stuart Walton finds Lutz Seiler’s latest Wenderoman a picaresque of German reunification that transforms ultimately into a novel.
Lutz Seiler, Star 111, translated by Tess Lewis (And Other Stories, 2023), 487pp.
There was little point only in staring at East Berlin from the viewing platforms on the Western side of the Wall, poignant enough as that was. In the dead of winter, grey-uniformed soldiers could be seen patrolling the other half of the Unter den Linden, the deserted streets swathed in January mist, the whole scene painted in faded monochrome, like a photograph of an era that hadn’t heard that it had passed. An elevated train floated over the razor-wired intermediate zone to a station where hard currency was exchanged, passports forensically scrutinised.
In the Eastern sector, which citizens of the German Democratic Republic knew as their capital, Karl Schinkel’s Neue Wache guardhouse had been equipped with an eternal flame in a glass prism, the Wilhelmine monument of the post-Napoleonic era now rededicated to the victims of fascism and militarism. Department-store windows were less glitzily dressed than on the Kurfürstendamm, and the central element in a display was not the Sacher jewellery box, but a bottle of shampoo. The revolving restaurant at the top of the Television Tower was mostly stationary, the white bread a touch past fresh, but the Romanian Pinot Noir very drinkable.
This was the city that Günter Grass, who lived on the Western side of it, famously described as best reflecting the political realities of the age. It was the partly healed wound of Hitler’s war, a metropolis bisected between gaudiest capitalism and adamantine state socialism, its cicatrice the detested Wall that went up almost overnight in 1961, and would only finally be demolished, virtually by political accident, in the febrile autumn of 1989. The eventual reunification of Germany – more accurately, the absorption by the Federal Republic of its impoverished eastern neighbour – led to a difficult period of social and cultural realignment within German society as a whole.
The period since the Wall fell, known as die Wende (the turning-point) in Germany, has generated its own cultural events and styles. A DDR Museum by the Cathedral offers views of what daily life was like in the communist state. Films such as Good Bye Lenin! (2003), The Lives of Others (2006) and Balloon (2018) have depicted, in fifty shades of grey, how love and the yearning to escape struggled forth. Meanwhile, a new genre of novel, the Wenderoman, reflecting the transformations in consciousness that accompanied the reunification, has been a rich testamentary source for cultural historians of the future, who will surely find much within imaginative prose that does not necessarily show up in the writing of academic history.
Lutz Seiler has written two of the most widely read works in this genre in recent years. In Kruso (2014), the title character gravitates to the anarchist communes of the Baltic island of Hiddensee, also a way-station for nocturnal refugees seeking asylum in Denmark. The island may be crowded with thwarted dreamers and the politically desperate, but the resonances of its eponymous character’s name are unmissable. Perhaps like his namesake, Daniel Defoe’s castaway, he can construct a new life for himself. It was a substantial novel in every sense, and was followed in 2020 by an equally weighty companion volume, Star 111, now given an American translation, as was its predecessor, by Tess Lewis.
The central family in the second novel, the Bischoffs (Bishops), are shipwreck survivors too, although they have also been pieces in a chess game controlled by unseen hands. Inge Bischoff’s maiden name was König (King). It’s November 1989, the Wall has come down, and Inge and Walter leave their home in the Thuringian city of Gera and set out for West Germany, to pursue an ambition they were forced to abandon in the 1950s. They leave their son, Carl, in occupation of the apartment, but after a short time, he heads off too, towards the Eastern sector of Berlin and the ferment of social and cultural creativity that was erupting there.
Carl joins a syndicalist community that breaks into and occupies vacant apartments, and has founded a café-bar called the Assel (the Woodlouse) in the basement of a building in Prenzlauer Berg. Its nominal head is a faintly absurd hippie figure known as the Shepherd, who keeps a goat that provides the community with milk. With braided beard and a permanent poncho, and apparently exercising unquestioned authority over the entire cohort, the Shepherd is given to making nebulous political pronouncements in the misty border-zone between Marxism and anarchism, but eventually repines into an emaciated ghost. Trained as a bricklayer, Carl has rolled up at the Assel in his father’s Russian-made Zhiguli, in which he earns a dangerous living for a while as an unlicensed taxi-driver. His real ambition, though, is to become a poet.
“There is a sense of security that is only possible in strange places”, Carl’s mother remarks, having taken a domestic’s job with a family in Gelnhausen, and the same could apply to Carl’s picaresque progress through the cobbled alleys, overgrown courtyards, unkempt cemeteries and dilapidated warehouses of eastern Berlin. He is drawn to a headstrong would-be artist called Effi, with whom he conducts an intermittent, troubled affair, but the hoped-for convergence of their respective aesthetic enterprises, in painting and poetry, fails to coalesce. Eventually, after much painstaking creative labour, Carl manages to have a few of his poems published in an anthology, but the sense of achievement, of becoming his own man after a dingy undervalued childhood and a spell as an Army driver during national service, continues to elude him.
The great ingenuity of Seiler’s narrative lies in the displacement that it effects between Carl’s exploits and those of his distant parents, from whom he receives regular letters written in a floridly formal style. They miss him painfully, and at one point, send some money for him to take the train to Frankfurt for a reunion with them. He fails to go, for reasons that he is not yet sufficiently honest with himself to acknowledge. A weight of suppressed memory has to await the final stretches of the novel before it is allowed to come to light.
Star 111 – the title alludes to a ubiquitous make of transistor radio, the VEB Trabant of audio technology in the GDR – is a ramshackle construction, written in short episodes that have the cumulative effect of a journal, a literary factor that often characterises autobiographical work. Everything happens and nothing happens: the doomed love affair, some other sex, a suicide, an outing to Paris, all set against the enervating background of economic privation, a fissiparous state morphing from two unmatched halves into something that will pass for an equitable civil polity. The potentially fascinating crowd of regulars at the Assel – sex workers and their handlers, the last Russian soldiers still on secondment, aspirant creatives, people improvising a free existence amid the dismal salads and cheap beer, the vodka-and-goat-milk house cocktails – are drawn in only the sketchiest peripheral outline. This is not ultimately where Carl wants to be.
The fragmentary style of Star 111 recalls much of the later work of Grass, but without the fantastical elements. Forgoing an obvious narrative strand, even the paratactic structure of a Bildungsroman eludes it, and the reader is left reliving the unremarkable vignettes and watery dialogue that make one’s own diaries a pleasure to rediscover during a clearout, but that too often fail to bring a long novel to life. Compared to the nimble precision of Peter Schneider’s novella The Wall Jumper (1982), or the gigantic, richly realised GDR mausoleum that was Uwe Tellkamp’s The Tower(2008), Star 111 seems content to play along on one note.
Only in its final phase does the novel become properly novelistic. Carl’s venturesome parents are now living in Los Angeles, and he finally goes to meet them, on the first air journey he has ever taken. Here, within sight of the beach at Malibu, amid the air-conditioned bars and palm-trees, Walter Bischoff takes his son to the Hollywood Walk of Fame and shows him the pavement star consecrated to Bill Haley. An astonishing tale of his and Inge’s youth emerges, in which Haley played a prominent role for a moment, a moment that could have changed their lives in the last period before the Wall was built and the populace of the GDR locked in for its own political good. The revelation helps Carl understand why he might not have received the undeviating love an only child traditionally claims as its birthright. And yet, while his affair with Effi falls apart, a reminiscence crystallises that forms a prelude to the trip to California:
… on the horizon appeared his home village with the large barns on the eastern perimeter, the three oaks commemorating peace and the slate-roofed church tower. And there were his parents, coming across the fields from the village. It seemed they had good weather for their excursion. Carl’s mother was pulling a wagon behind her and in it sat Carl, the child … Carl had a cushion behind his back and on his lap the Star 111, their portable radio.
Did someone say “Rosebud”?
The shadow of something darker in Carl’s personality is illuminated for a moment in the sun-dazzle of Santa Monica when, watching a mother and daughter disporting themselves in the breaking waves of the Bay, “Carl felt his hatred. He hated the woman in the waves and the way she did her best to pose like a twelve-year-old. And he hated her mother, the falsity of her kindness and he would have liked to hit her in the face”. And to spare the engagement of an expensive Hollywood analyst, the plaintive declaration is voiced: “I was never happy as a child”. We leave him paddling in the water himself, feeling the luxurious ooze between his toes, the other beach-bums a community of the dead, his parents nowhere near. “Wasn’t it wonderful to be alone?”
Stuart Walton is the author of many books including Intoxicology: A Cultural History of Drink and Drugs, In The Realm of the Senses: A Materialist Theory of Seeing and Feeling, Introducing Theodor Adorno, a monograph on the chilli pepper, The Devil’s Dinner, and a novel, The First Day in Paradise. He lives in southwest England. His latest book is An Excursion through Chaos: Disorder Under the Heavens, which links postwar alienation to a preference for rules in every aspect of our lives, and is published by Bloomsbury.
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