Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• McMillan, Clare Ann

Titel

The ends of detection: Allegories of Germanness in recent German detective fiction

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2000

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This study draws on psychoanalytic and narratological approaches to examine constructions of German identity in recent detective novels by Akif Pirinçci, Jakob Arjouni, Pieke Biermann, and Uta-Maria Heim. It proposes that the implied reader of these novels is cast as the new German subject, charged with making meaning out of the heterogeneity that now characterizes Germanness. The detectives in these novels represent different challenges to defining Germanness. Pirinçci's severely deformed protagonist Daniel searches unsuccessfully for his origins. Correspondingly, in the larger narrative of Germanness that Der Rumpf explores, the problem of the national-socialist treatment of the disabled is documented, but then grimly erased. The implied reader, faced with a story that denies its origin, must determine whether this undecidable origin can still allow for the production of a satisfactory narrative. When Arjouni's Turkish-German detective Kayankaya cannot be validated as German, he exploits the confusion he causes to further his own ends. Germanness cannot be reliably recognized, so that strategies of masquerade and appropriation are necessary. The implied reader, identified with the first-person narrator, performs these acts of misrecognition and experiences their effects. Biermann's novels eroticize the imperative of unification, representing the coming together of East and West as a Geschlechterkrieg. Here sexual relations function crudely as a model for redressing inequities in power. Yet the detectives, blinded by their own desires, cannot work together effectively. The implied reader is called upon to synthesize, to draw from these different orientations of desire to form a narrative of Germanness. In Heim's novels, a fantasy of unity and wholeness, embodied in the character of Hermine, contrasts with the reality of a contradiction-ridden Germanness, personified in the Afro-German detective Chris LeBrun. LeBrun suggests the strategy of deferral—a gesture performed as well by Heim's narratives, which refuse to end, shifting the duty of closure, albeit ironically, onto the implied reader. To compensate for the incoherent, imperfect, and contradictory Germanness expressed in these detectives, the implied reader functions as a site of nostalgic or fantasmatic wholeness, synthesis, and closure.