"Nicht das eine und nicht das andere": Hybridity, Gender, and (East) German Identity in Thomas Brussig's Wie es leuchtet

Thomas Brussig's most ambitious novel, Wie es leuchtet (2004), is set in Germany, with brief excursions abroad, during 1989–90. Most of its several dozen characters are East Germans undergoing a bewildering transition, caught between the familiar structures of a GDR that has ceased to exist and an unfathomable, emerging German society. This article is especially concerned with the representation of this ungrounded condition. Indeed, the novel's characters live through a variety of transitions that can be read as variously analogous to those of East Germans. These characters include a migrant author, a blind woman whose sight is restored, women in exploitive heterosexual relationships, a transsexual undergoing gender reassignment, and a postcolonial Thai woman who remains unscathed by modernity. The narrative brings these tropes into dialogue with East German experience and with each other. Given the primary focus on the Wende, these other transformations work allegorically in the narrative, allowing the implied author to explore facets of East German experience and to locate it as part of a broader human experience. One might ask what cultural work such rhetorical figures accomplish in a text ostensibly about the "German Year," written in the first decade of the twenty-first century by an established, male, German author with an East German background. How do they frame memory of German unification, and what do they imply about German, and eastern German, identity?

To pursue these questions, it is helpful to recall debates in German studies about postcolonialism and memory work in the literature of the Berlin Republic. A widely discussed figure here is Homi Bhabha, the theorist who celebrates the "hybrid agencies" of migrants, applying Mikhail Bakhtin's linguistic theories of hybridity to a postcolonial context (Bhabha, "Culture's in Between" 212). Postcolonial migration for Bhabha results in "partial culture, […] the contaminated yet connective tissue between cultures – at once the impossibility of culture's containedness and the boundary between" (167; emphasis in the original). For Bhabha, migrants' very presence interrupts the nation's "unisonant discourse," and their silence speaks "the foreignness of language," rendering impossible the selective remembering that engenders an intact national identity (Location 236). In German studies and more generally, Bhabha's optimism about the critical potential of hybridity to undermine the authority of hegemonic discourses is controversial.

Bhabha figures prominently in Paul Cooke's Representing East Germany since Unification: From Colonization to Nostalgia. Cooke demonstrates that numerous analyses presented German unification as the colonization of the GDR by the FRG, including Wolfgang Dümcke's and Fritz Vilmar's 1996 edited volume Kolonialisierung der DDR. Though historically dubious, "perceptions of colonization nonetheless have important implications for the way both east and west Germans relate to the unified state and the legacy of the past" (2; emphasis in the original). That is, for Cooke, postcolonial concepts such as hybridity and mimicry are relevant to German unification, if only as means of understanding the peripheral discourse. Appropriating Bhabha, Cooke discerns in Brussig's Helden wie wir (1995) the "hybrid position" of a former East German engaged in a form of mimicry or "writing back" to satirize others' reductive portrayals of the society in which he once lived (74, 73). Other scholars have followed Cooke's example. For instance, Martina Caspari employs Bhabha's theories of mimicry and hybridity to illuminate eastern German memory work in Jana Hensel's Zonenkinder (209).

But Bhabha is controversial in postcolonial studies owing to the wide applicability of his concepts and the concomitant danger of obfuscating sociological and historical distinctions (Loomba 148–51). Within German studies, both Todd Herzog and Leslie Adelson have aspired to historicize the use of hybridity, in the contemporary Jewish-German and Turkish-German contexts respectively. For Herzog, "the 'in-between' position is not an inhabitable position" since the historical baggage of a late-nineteenth-century figure, the Mischling, inevitably bogs down a poetics of Jewish-German hybridity (100). Similarly, Adelson rejects "the cultural fable suspending migrants 'between two worlds'" and finds Bhabha's discussion of the Turkish Gastarbeiter "of limited value" for reading Turkish...