"I am not a part of this. I can laugh at it. But I know it.": A Conversation with Jeannette Lander

"I am not a part of this. I can laugh at it. But I know it." A Conversation with Jeannette Lander Marjanne Goozé and Martin Kagel Introduction When we met Jeannette Lander in November 1998 at her sister's home in Atlanta, she was open and eager to talk about her work and her life. At that time, she was in the midst of a reading tour to numerous American universities and Goethe Institutes, and seemed at home with herself and in the country where she had spent her childhood and youth. Lander was born in New York City in 1931 to Polish-Jewish immigrants and grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, where her parents had moved when she was three years old. Her father had a grocery store in an AfricanAmerican neighborhood and the family lived there during the era of legalized segregation. In 1949 she left Atlanta to pursue studies at several colleges, including Brandeis and Bryn Mawr, and in 1957 she received her B.A. from Southeastern Louisiana College. During this time she also became the mother of two children, Marcel and Tove. From 1950 to 1952 she lived in West Berlin and returned to Berlin in 1960, where she has lived ever since, except for a year in Sri Lanka in 1984-85. She currently resides in the Eastern Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg. While living in the United States, Lander published Yiddish poetry as well as short stories and essays in English, for which she received several prizes. Her first German publications, however, were academic. In 1966 she received her doctorate from the Free University of Berlin with a dissertation on William Butler Yeats, and two years later she published a monograph on Ezra Pound, which appeared in English in 1971. Since then, although she is not a native speaker of German, she has written all of her literary works in German. Women in German Yearbook 15 (2000) 18A Conversation with Jeanette Lander Lander's first novel, Ein Sommer in der Woche der Itke K. (A Summer in the Week of Itke K.), set in 1940s Atlanta, appeared in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1971 and in the German Democratic Republic in 1974. Her second novel, Auf dem Boden der Fremde (On Foreign Soil), came out in 1972. A collection of short stories, Ein Spatz in der Hand (A Bird in the Hand), and her third novel, Die Töchter (The Daughters), both appeared in 1973. These were followed two years later by a short story, "Der letzte Flug" (The Final Flight). Her fourth novel, Ich, allein (I, Alone)—the first without an explicitly Jewish protagonist —was published in 1980. Between 1980 and 1993 she switched media and worked on documentary films for German public television (ARD). More than a decade passed before the appearance of Lander's fifth novel, Jahrhundert der Herren (Century of the Masters), which reflects her journey to Sri Lanka. The next major work, Überbleibsel: Eine kleine Erotik der Küche (Leftovers: A Brief Look at the Eroticism of Cooking), published in 1995 and structured like a memoir, centers on the relationship of writing and cooking. It was succeeded the next year by a novel set in Greece, Eine unterbrochene Reise (An Interrupted Journey) . Given her extraordinary culinary skills, it comes as no surprise that our conversation first revolved around the recipe for the cake she offered , which, according to her, was handed down from generation to generation as an essential element of her family history. We then turned our attention to her most recent novel, entitled Robert, an ironic Fall-ofthe -Wall novel that had just appeared and is her first novel with a male protagonist. Interview Marjanne Goozé/Martin Kagel: The protagonist of your most recent novel, Robert, is male and the story is told in thefirst person. What intrigued you about this excursion into the male psyche? Jeannette Lander: Well, in the first place, I wanted to write this in the first person because I wanted to make it funny. If I had been Katja or Ricarda, it could not have been funny, because those are very serious women, both of them, and then that would have gotten...