Housebound: Selfhood and Domestic Space in Contemporary German Fiction by Monika Shafi (review)

Despite the boom in scholarship on the spatial turn in German cultural studies, the focus of these investigations has been on urban and public spaces; domestic space, Monika Shafi argues, has been largely overlooked. Housebound seeks to redress this by examining the role of homes in contemporary German-language fiction. Looking beyond the idea of house as metaphor or as “a mere backdrop for the important forces such as ideology, gender, generation or power,” Shafi looks at the house as “a space in which and through which these factors are shaped, articulated, and comprehended” (4). In six chapters that generally pair two works illustrating a similar representation of the home, Shafi considers novels and short stories by Jenny Erpenbeck, Katharina Hacker, Arno Geiger, Katharina Hagena, Walter Kappacher, Monika Maron, Judith Hermann, Susanne Fischer, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and (somewhat unexpectedly) Ian McEwan. A wide range of secondary material informs this study, including works by Marjorie Garber, Doreen Massey, Witold Rybczynski, Charles Rice, Georg Simmel, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, and Gaston Bachelard.

Chapter 1, “Bodies, Biographies, and Buildings,” pairs Erpenbeck’s Heimsuchung and Hacker’s Der Bademeister to “show the messy lives of bodies seeking permanence through buildings” (29). Both texts also tackle the issue of political changes and their effects on personal lives, communicating a sense of the insignificance of the individual. Chapter 2, “House Inheritance,” examines the idea of inheriting a family house and history—and thus an assigned role within that history—in Geiger’s Es geht uns gut and Der Geschmack von Apfelkernen by Hagena. (Note that the table of contents misattributes the latter work to Katharina Hacker, the most significant error in the book.) “Escaping to the Countryside” is the unifying theme of Chapter 3, which pairs Kappacher’s Selina oder das andere Leben and Maron’s Endmoränen, novels that speak to similar texts in English (Shafi mentions Peter Mayle’s Provence books) and provide examples of differing attitudes towards Italy and the United States in the German cultural imaginary.

For the mobile and unrooted characters in selected short stories by Hermann and in Fischer’s novel Die Platzanweiserin, as discussed in Chapter 4, the house is uncanny, in part because the characters (and the generation they represent) reject the bourgeois home and its attendant gender roles. At the same time that they are repelled by these traditions, Shafi argues, they are nonetheless drawn to them: “Alternately depicted as comforting and frightening, stable and elusive places, houses show problems whose roots lie not in poorly designed spaces but in deeply conflicted selfhoods” (136). Chapter 5 focuses exclusively on Özdamar’s “Der Hof im Spiegel” and the first half of Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde. Wedding-Pankow 1976/77. Here Shafi considers the performance of the domestic, praising the main character in “Hof,” who dissolves the boundaries of privacy that define the home by using mirrors placed in her apartment to interact with the world outside it. At the same time, Shafi critiques the students living in the West German WG of Sterne for their attempted subversion of bourgeois domesticity, which unintentionally reifies exclusion and hierarchy. Finally, Chapter 6, “(Un)safe Houses,” pairs Hacker’s Die Habenichtse and McEwan’s Saturday, two responses to the post-9/11 anxiety surrounding home, safety, and violence.

While the works paired together undoubtedly speak to the same issues—Die Habenichtse and Saturday are almost uncannily similar, especially given their authors’ geographic divide—overall the list of authors included is a mixture of German literary figures: one former GDR author, several women in their 40s, two “literary newcomers,” two winners of the Deutscher Buchpreis, a Turkish-German, and two Austrians (and one male, British author). Shafi points out in the introduction that her aim is not to provide an overview of current German literary movements, but rather to highlight trends in the representation of domestic space. Yet the list of authors is both representative of current German literature and...