An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance: Transnational Theater, Literature, and Film in Contemporary Germany by Claudia Breger (review)

An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance is an ambitious journey through the theoretical history and present of performance and narrative. In analyzing various recent texts (from literature, film, and theater) produced at ‘location Germany,’ Claudia Breger unfolds in six chapters her theoretical conception of “narrative performance.” Breger begins her discussions by stating that the traditional opposition of narrative vs. performance in theory and criticism is neither productive nor timely. She reminds us, for example, that this opposition has been racialized in the modern European imaginary, where the European has been associated with (written) narrative and the non-European with pre-modern and oral performance (5). Looking specifically at turn-of-the-21^st-century aesthetics of narrative performance, Breger insists on the transnational dimensions of aesthetic production (39–40). She stresses that “aesthetic theory needs to incorporate the cultural embeddedness of its objects” (40), and that we need to “study the productive interplay, and overlap, of different narrative and performative forms,” to “outline an aesthetic of narrative performance” (7). In her book, Breger scrutinizes the “aesthetic configurations of narrative performance in contemporary culture.” Her objects of analysis engage in several ways with one of three major contemporary themes: the German-German reunification, cultures of migration, and the (international) War on Terror. Ultimately, her book is an analysis of an “aesthetic of the contemporary moment” (7).

Breger’s first chapter discusses the theoretical framework for her project in more detail. She lays out various performance and narrative theories before elaborating more on the conceptualization of narrative performance. Discussing performance theories, Breger informs us, for example, that, “[a]ccording to most of its theorists and practitioners, what makes performance interesting is precisely its radical break with narrative” (24). Especially more experimental performance supporters such as Antonin Artaud attack “Western theater habits” (92) and prefer non-Western forms as models that present new forms based in “a new bodily language” and not on words (95). Yet, it is precisely such clear-cut oppositions that Breger undoes with her critical interventions.

In her second chapter, Breger begins her analyses by discussing narrative performance in film. She looks at exemplary “theatrical narratives in film” produced in Germany (49). Her focus is on the Turkish-German production Lola und Bilidikid and two films on the GDR, Sonnenallee and Good Bye, Lenin! Breger uses, for example, the death scene of Lola in Lola und Bilidikid to illustrate how “narrative proceeds precisely through spectacle” (56). She states that the “heightened artificiality of the corpse image indicates the ways in which the film theatricalizes [ . . . ] its liberated designs of gender” (56). Ultimately, Breger’s analyses lead her to conclude that the film displays “images and counterimages, dialogically configuring them into a complex commentary on contemporary Turkish-German identity politics” (66). Moving to Sonnenenallee and Good Bye Lenin!, Breger states that these films “develop a highly theatrical game of narration” (68). They displace Ostalgie through their conceptualization of “GDR spectacle within their plots,” and thereby “interrupt Ostalgia” (69). Sonnenallee, for example, “resists hegemonic notions of history in postunification Germany” and presents a “playful narration” that “explores notions of subversive performance” (69). Breger concludes that Sonnenallee and Good Bye, Lenin! are both “more interested in the (playful) making than in the deconstructive unmaking of histories and thus develop their techniques of narrative performance in the service of an imaginatively rich, layered storytelling” (89f.).

In Chapter Three, Breger moves to literary examples of narrative performance. She discusses, among others, pieces by Feridun Zaimoğlu and Emine Sevgi Özdamar. About Zaimoğlu she states that his “Kanakstas read as complex acts of internal dialogism” (106). Aesthetically, Zaimoğlu produces a minority presence in his narrative through “performative speech” (a “ ‘free-style-sermon’ of ‘Rap’ ”) (107). Breger explains that the “theatricality of speech” is achieved through the lack of capitalization in the text (107). Through her analysis of Özdamar’s Seltsame Sterne...