Barbara Honigmann

Acknowledgements

Most of the chapters in this book originate in papers and discussions held at a symposium at the University of London’s Institute of Modern Languages Research on 25 February 2019. Entitled ‘“Damals, dann und danach”: Barbara Honigmann at 70’, the event allowed us to reassess and at the same time celebrate the writer and her work – and it is the spirit of this joint endeavour that we hope to have captured in this volume. We thank the AHRC for their generous funding of the symposium under the umbrella of the Open World Research Initiative and the research project ‘Cross-language Dynamics: Re-shaping Community’ co-ordinated by the Universities of Manchester and Durham and the School of Advanced Study, University of London. We would also like to thank Jane Lewin for the meticulous and circumspect organization of the event and making the arrangements for Barbara Honigmann to come to London to join us for this.

Thanks also go to the estate of Chantal Akerman for allowing us to reprint part of Akerman’s text ‘Marcher à côté de ses lacets dans un frigidaire vide’; to Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig for her work on giving the texts their final shape; and to King’s College, Cambridge for their financial support.

Most of all, however, we are grateful to Barbara Honigmann herself, not only for her wonderfully thought-provoking writing, but also for being ready to answer our questions and join the discussion at every turn.

Introduction

Barbara Honigmann was born in 1949, the year that sealed the division of Germany following the defeat of the regime responsible for the Shoah. She is thus a member of a generation of Jews for whom the gas chambers, while not a present danger, are an abiding trauma. And her formative years coincided with what we might now call the First Cold War. Both her parents were intellectuals of Jewish extraction with communist sympathies. They had met in exile in London at a time when her mother was still married to the British double agent Kim Philby and her father was working as a journalist. After the defeat of National Socialism, they returned to Germany, specifically to East Berlin. It was in East Berlin that Honigmann was born and raised; her biography, her dialect, her culture and her writing have all been indelibly marked by this fact. At the time of her birth, Stalin was still alive, so for Honigmann and her generation Stalinism too was a traumatic recent memory that still reached into the present. Their left-wing pedigree stood Honigmann’s parents in good stead in the German Democratic Republic, as did their status as potential victims of fascism. But practising Jews were not welcome in the dogmatically secular and indicatively anti-Semitic state.

Following a period dodging dogma at school, Honigmann went on to read theatre studies at the Humboldt University and to practise as a dramaturge, in Brandenburg, at the Volksbühne and at the Deutsches Theater. There she came into contact with eminent and influential figures such as Heiner Müller and Einar Schleef. She also became heavily involved in projects to stage Heinrich von Kleist in the GDR.¹ As part of this enterprise ←1 | 2→she worked closely with Berlin schoolchildren, and with them produced a dramatized version of Kleist’s life, on the one hand, and a volume of children’s essays, on the other. Both works were published in short-lived alternative periodicals in West Berlin.² The production of her Kleist piece in the foyer of the Deutsches Theater was cancelled by the authorities after a single performance.

Honigmann’s time as a practitioner in the East German theatre was similarly limited. From 1975 onwards, her profession is given as that of a ‘freelance writer’.³ Her first major success, which is also the subject of the first essay in this volume, was an adaptation for the stage of a fairy-tale by the brothers Grimm: Das singende, springende Löweneckerchen (1979). In his account of that text, Martin Brady, following a lead from Honigmann herself, traces the way in which it evinces ‘evidence of a multiple departure and a surge of energy, one which has resulted in no fewer than three novels that revolve around the themes of theatre, fact and fiction, escape and agency’.⁴ He also touches on the issue of the relationship between life and text, text and politics in Honigmann’s writing, and demonstrates the influence of Heiner Müller on her work – an influence that can be clearly seen in the other plays that Honigmann wrote in the GDR, which Brady also discusses.

Honigmann’s writing activities in the GDR, though, were not limited to the production of original plays. The evidence of three further publications shows her also as a translator of verse. In a collection of poems by the Bulgarian poet Alexander Gerow published as Poesiealbum 157 in 1980, three of the translations are by Honigmann. She also translated the verse of Lev Ustinov’s fairy-tale play Die Holz-Eisenbahn (1979). And in the selection of texts by the Russian poet Anna Achmatova that ←2 | 3→was edited by the East German Slavist Fritz Mierau and published by the West Berlin Friedenauer Press in 1988, Honigmann is responsible for the translations of the poems. Moreover, two prose texts also appeared in GDR publications, one in the official organ Temperamente in 1981, and one two years later in the underground periodical Mikado. Both would later find their way into her first novel, Roman von einem Kinde (1986). The Mikado text indeed is explicitly subtitled ‘aus einem Roman’ [from a novel].

In the third chapter of this volume, Margaret May also takes Roman von einem Kinde as the starting point for an overview of Honigmann’s work as a whole. Her focus, though, is not on themes, but on style. Her corpus comprises passages from three books that are rarely studied together – Roman von einem Kinde, Damals, dann und danach (1999) and Chronik meiner Straße (2015) – and she discovers that in each of them the subject is the same: a description of a single day, which is the opposite of historical but still brimfull of significance. Writing as a translator with an intimate knowledge of how Honigmann uses words, May subjects Honigmann’s rhetorical devices to minute analysis, detecting an increasing sophistication in texts written nearly thirty years apart, while at the same time noting that the fundamental strategy has not changed. ‘Honigmann’s style and tone,’ she concludes, ‘while seemingly confiding, unthreatening and inclusive, are ←3 | 4→carefully honed, drawing from both literary tradition and the colloquial characteristics of German.’⁵

This profound attachment to German language and culture is doubly paradoxical, both because of what the Germans have done to the Jews and because, as a direct result of this, Honigmann herself has chosen to live not in Germany but in France. Having married in a Jewish ceremony in 1981 and given birth to her second son, Ruben, in 1983, she left the GDR with her husband in 1984 and took up residence in Strasbourg. This city is not only within striking distance of Germany but also home to a sizeable and thriving Jewish community. It is with this community that the narrative of Roman von einem Kinde ends – a narrative which, despite its fragmented appearance, reveals itself from that endpoint to have been compellingly linear. And the experience of voluntary exile that brought her there is thematized in a number of her subsequent novels. Eine Liebe aus nichts (1991), for example, details for us not only the experiences of unpacking and exploring but also the feelings of strangeness and metaphysical uncertainty, with Ellis Island standing metonymically for the sense of displacement. And in both Am Sonntag spielt der Rabbi Fußball (1998) and Chronik meiner Straße (2015), Honigmann takes the minute details of her everyday existence as a practising Jew in a French city and uses them to explore themes of much wider importance: politics and war, feminism and the family, truth and writing, deportation and reparation, religion and multiculturalism.

Strasbourg is also where the eponymous journey of Soharas Reise (1996) begins and ends. In his account of that novel in the fourth chapter of this volume, Ernest Schonfield reminds us that ‘Sohara’s story is thus another chapter in the history of Jewish diaspora and deliverance’⁶ and emphasizes that in this novel too Honigmann is concerned with the big themes, notably exile and deliverance, trauma and reconciliation. Adducing contextual information about the history of Judaism, and especially of women within Judaism, he reads the novel as ‘a call for dialogue – across the diaspora – between Orthodox and secular Jewish communities, and, especially, as a call for Jewish women’s solidarity and liberation’.⁷ He notes that while ←4 | 5→the plot and its resolution, its contrast between the bad ‘Rabbi’ and the good rabbi, and the co-operation of both Orthodox and secular Jews in securing the positive outcome, offer a potentially paradigmatic instance of solidarity, the gender debate nonetheless remains unresolved. And he concludes: ‘The moral of the story seems to be that there is an ever-present need for ongoing, informed dialogue and debate within the plurality of Jewish communities.’⁸