Gender, Identity, and Memory in the Novels of Antje Rávic Strubel

This article examines Antje Rávic Strubel's sophisticated play with gender identity, complex narrative structures, and intertextual references in three of her novels: Snowed Under (2008, Unter Schnee, 2001), Fremd Gehen (2002, Going astray), and Kältere Schichten der Luft (2007, Colder layers of air). While her novels celebrate the liberating potential to transcend narrow categories of nation and gender, I argue that this potential is disrupted by the continuing burden of the troubled German past and by deterritorialization and homophobia in contemporary reunified Germany. Strubel's genderqueer narrators and characters deconstruct binary categories of East and West German identity, butch and femme, male and female, yet they are not able to achieve liberation and end in self-dissolution because the oppressive presence of the Nazi and East German pasts lingers in their memories and in the landscapes around them.