Love and Survival and the Cold War: Imagining Masculinity in Michael Kumpfmüller’s Hampels Fluchten and Ingo Schramm’s Entzweigesperrt

Most research into the impact of German unification on gender relations, in particular the work of sociologists and political scientists, has tended to focus on the plight of women as the losers of unification (Meyer and Schulze; Schaeffer-Hegel; Scholz; Trzcinski). Postunification fiction, it would seem, has a different, possibly more balanced, story to tell about the ways in which the rupture of unification and the transition process from communism to capitalism have affected gender. In fictional representations, we find that there are just as many, if not more, male as female characters among unification’s losers. While this may be simply a function of the author’s gender, the last eighteen years have nonetheless seen a significant rise in the number of male characters in literature and film who are losers, outsiders, underdogs, social outcasts, deviants, or even pariahs. Films such as Andreas Kleinert’s Wege in die Nacht (1999), Hannes Stöhr’s Berlin is in Germany (2001), Andreas Dresen’s Halbe Treppe (2002) and novels such as Ingo Schramm’s Entzweigesperrt (1998), Jurek Becker’s Amanda Herzlos (1992), Jens Sparschuh’s Der Zimmerspringbrunnen (1995), Michael Kumpfmüller’s Hampels Fluchten (2000), Wolfgang Hilbig’s “Ich” (1993) and Das Provisorium (2000) all reveal eastern German masculinity as being in a state of crisis. Even obvious exceptions to this rule, such as the parodic hypermasculinity of Thomas Brussig’s Helden wie wir (1995) and the Machiavellian male gambler of Christoph Hein’s Napoleonspiel (1993), present a predominantly negative picture of manhood, of men who are resilient but deviant, powerful but perverse. In many texts, the loss of male authority is made explicit through an exploration of the negative effects of this loss on intimate relationships. Hence, the crisis of masculinity after unification is frequently figured in terms of a crisis of intimacy. In two novels that address the topic of male failure in love, Michael Kumpfmüller’s Hampels Fluchten and Ingo Schramm’s Entzweigesperrt, the crisis of intimacy is contextualized in terms of the Cold War. In both novels, the main male protagonists can be classified as losers. One is a loser of the communist period immediately prior to unification, the other a loser of the postcommunist era. In both cases, the male character’s failure to “survive” the Cold War and to “arrive” in the West is expressed in terms of his dysfunctionality in love and marriage. Significantly, the crisis is precipitated less by the events of unification per se than by the burdensome past of the Cold War.

Gender studies has, for some time now, recognized the study of men and masculinity as a legitimate field of enquiry and has begun to incorporate explorations into the nature of masculine identity into its purview. This has occurred to a far greater extent in the Anglo-American context than it has in Germany. Recently, however, persuasive cases have been made for extending the methodological tools of gender studies to the study of men and masculinity in Germany and, in particular, to German literature (Jerome; Tholen). The methods of gender studies have opened up the possibility of interrogating gender as a discursive construction with specific socio-historical dimensions and genealogies. One avenue is to reframe questions of subjectivity in German literature in terms of gendered subjectivities, that is, into representations of femininity and masculinity. Male characters in novels can be analyzed in relation to dominant gender norms, images, stereotypes, and forms of embodied masculinity. Figures that are often thought to be universal types or even archetypes that transcend history, such as the outsider or the picaro, can thus be reconceptualized in terms of nonheroic, “nonhegemonic,” or possibly even “deviant” masculinities.

This article argues for the rise of new forms of marginal, nonhegemonic masculinity in the postunification era that have come into being as a result of the rapid social, economic, and cultural changes that were sparked by unification. Here, Robert W. Connell’s four categories of masculinity – hegemonic, subordinate, complicit, and marginal – provide a useful transhistorical framework for conceptualizing men’s...