On the Seawalla community gallery of new writing, art and commentary hosted by Ron Slate

Ingo Schulze was born in Dresden in 1962. Now living in Berlin, he is often described as the writer most representative of the united Germany. Two years ago he visited Dresden, located in what used to be the GDR. “It was a very sobering experience,” he said in a recent interview. “The whole Disneyfication of the city. I realized that the city’s former blend of Stalinism and Baroque, which I never liked at the time, was actually architecture that attested to its times, it wasn’t just random … I’ve known the West since 1990, and since then I’ve seen everything become commodified.”

As other eastern European writers have noted, the new Europe emerged out of an unparalleled continental defeat. “Liberated and occupied,” writes Milan Kundera. “I say this without irony … The Europe that only the day before still considered its own history, its culture, to be a model for the entire world now felt how small it was.”

For Schulze, the collapse of the GDR resulted in the incorporation of East Germany into the more dominant occupation. In 33 Moments of Happiness (1995), he tells bleakly comical stories about people who devise ways of dealing with the chaos of post-wall Germany. Simple Stories (1998) describes the changing lives and circumstances in Karl Marx-Stadt, now known as Chemnitz. New Lives (2003), a novel especially bitter in tone, centers on an unmotivated and pretentious dramaturge in Altenberg who is given an opportunity to run a free-distribution newspaper making huge profits through advertising.

Now come thirteen stories in One More Story. Kundera says that the banality of everyday life was the great discovery of the nineteenth century novel, “a cohabitation of unbearably dramatic history with unbearably banal dailiness.” In that case, Schulze carries on the tradition. He worked as both a dramaturge and a journalist while living in the GDR, and his new stories often read like slice-of-life newspaper feature articles minus the sentimentality and axe-grinding. He evinces little interest even in Kundera’s modest taste for postmodern fictional devices. There is a subtle but persistent whiff of the unbearable history.

But Schulze’s notorious anger is now diluted. Instead, his narrators take a familiar, conversational stance, engrossed in anecdote. Ten of the stories are told in the offhand first-person. Last year, Schulze told a reporter that the merging of the two Germanys “was not a true unification. The East was absorbed by the West. In unification, you take something from this side and something from the other side. That never happened. Nothing was taken from the East.” Schulze’s characters are absorbed as well, set in motion in situations that characterize the new Germany. But they seem distracted, adrift, living on the surface. What “of themselves” did they bring with them? Hardly unique except in one or two instances, the situations nevertheless have the narrators in their grip.

Here are a few thumbnails:

“Cell Phone” – A man stays overnight at his rented vacation house when local toughs knock down his fence. The phone becomes his connection to others, such as his wife. Tenuous relationships.

“Calcutta” – The family next door is experiencing the trauma of a child in a coma. Meanwhile, the narrator sets out a mousetrap in his house.

“Writers and Transcendence” – A woman had spied on another woman during the days of the GDR. Payback time. The narrator-journalist writes up the story. Cameo appearance by a clairvoyant.

“Incident in Cairo” – A famous German author travels to Cairo with his girlfriend to give lectures. The girlfriend drifts off. So does he.

“Faith, Love, Hope Number 23” – Marek is about to become a partner in his firm. He spends the night with a vivacious woman and falls in love. When he goes to the office the next day, events make him more of a loser than ever.

Schulze’s stories are not propelled by the need to disclose some long-considered truth. The reader is carried along by the apparent closeness of the narrator to his ear. Intimacy is implied, a sense that this or that tale will be heard – and therefore, must be told without presuming to violate the ease in the relationship.

Badgered by his wife to set the mousetrap, the narrator of “Calcutta” says, “I could sense that it wouldn’t even take her asking me a questions – just one single word, something totally trivial – and I’d lose it. I’ve slowly learned to live with the feeling. It hardly scares me anymore. It comes over me with almost soothing regularity. And I give in to it – but of course only when I’m alone. Other people, especially those who think they know me, would find it upsetting. Basically it’s nothing more than bleeding radiators. This has to be done every now and then.” And then the story continues.

Schulze’s speakers and characters may have sprung from unique historical and cultural zones, but they are immediately recognizable as the contemporaries of children of the West. Kundera says that the time has passed for people “paying great attention to [our] particularities … which [we] hope are inimitable … Henceforth men will be shaped primarily from the outside. If the stories seem to have rather flat surfaces, it is because a withdrawal from psychology is implied in Schulze’s delivery. The outside forces are now simply the determinants. Cell phones, business urgencies, media noise, economics, fate.

Maybe this is why I was so drawn to these provisional characters: to enjoy their grasp of a reality attempting to race beyond them, so palpable in Schulze’s deceptively suggestive work.

 

[Published by A.A. Knopf on March 26, 2010. 270 pages, $25.95 hardcover.]