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  • “New concept – new life”: Bodies and Buildings in Katharina Hacker’s novel Die Habenichtse
  • Monika Shafi (bio)

“New concept – new life” (Hacker 34) is the name of the advertising agency in Berlin that employs the graphic designer Isabelle, one of the protagonists in Katharina Hacker’s recent novel Die Habenichtse (2006), which won the Deutscher Buchpreis in 2006. The promise of enrichment through change implicit in the firm’s logo describes not only Isabelle’s vague longing but, in fact, the aspirations of almost all characters. They hope to find “new life” by entering new relationships or relocating to new places that are to supply the meaning absent from their existence, be it privileged or deprived. In its praise of innovation, the firm’s catchy phrase also suggests that change is easy to attain, provided one buys and follows the correct new formula and that this process can in principle be endlessly repeated. This is, of course, the language of advertising, of manipulating images and desires, offering goods and services in order to fulfill inner needs. The characters in Die Habenichtse certainly follow this logic, yet their hopes remain unfulfilled. The text thus asks us to consider where and why the protagonists erred or, more precisely, what their stories reveal about life modes shaped by global consumer capitalism and a quest for authenticity that is seen as the essence of selfhood. Should the failure to lead an authentic life be attributed to personal shortcomings, to socio-economic conditions, or to globalization’s relentless transformation of the everyday? While the novel does not provide definitive answers to this question, it depicts individual and social developments leading to lack of meaning and engagement.

Sociologist and globalization theorist Ulrich Beck coined the term “risk society” as a short-hand designation for the structural transformations societies are experiencing under conditions of globalization (see esp. Beck and Willms). One of the dominant features of risk societies is the waning of borders – be they national, institutional, or social – that translates into new modes of individuation. In contemporary Western societies, biographies, according to Beck, are no longer fully anchored and constrained by class, gender, ethnic, or national origin, but instead have become “fluid structures” (Beck and Willms 65), leaving it up to the individual actors to select a life narrative based on their subjective needs and desires. Beck is not arguing that such choices occur without any social constraints [End Page 434] but that the normative power of social roles and norms is declining, particularly for the middle class, and that more biographical options are thus becoming available.

But how, Beck wonders, can these new fluid structures perform the tasks formerly assigned to class, gender, or religion (Beck and Willms 65)? How are decisions made in the absence of normative criteria and guidance? Similar questions are raised by Eva Illouz. Her 1997 study, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, presents a sociological account of the interplay between economic, cultural, and emotional structures and their impact on the powerful paradigm “romantic love,” which, according to Illouz, has been enmeshed with and appropriated by consumer capitalism. Another influential scholar in the globalization debate is Anthony Giddens, who has specifically emphasized the relationship between rapid and radical individuation and issues of social and personal morality. His analysis of moral responsibilities in his 1991 Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age is of particular relevance to Die Habenichtse, since the protagonists are confronted with a case of child abuse, which they choose to ignore.

Based on the work of Beck, Illouz, and Giddens, as well as other theorists of globalization, this article reads Die Habenichtse as depicting the conflicted transition from prescribed to self-selected biographies, a process in which individual choice meets with socioeconomic conditions, national histories, as well as cultural memories. The impact of these forces on individual lives takes on new contours in globalized contexts, often dislodging the routines and meanings of the everyday (Tomlinson 29) and resulting in a sense of ennui and disenchantment as embodied by the characters in Die Habenichtse. Within this framework, the analysis focusses in particular on three related issues: first the protagonists...

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