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

Fifteen years after Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatisches Theater (1999), and almost ten after Erika Fischer-Lichte’s Ästhetik des Performativen (2004), it feels as if many of the most discussed German directors and playwrights are telling stories again. In German-language novels and films, categorized as pop lit or Berlin School, that have captured the attention of readers, audiences, and Feuilleton editors alike, characters (characters again!) recount events and give us access to their thoughts; often, we even can trust them a bit. Sometimes, these narrators have an almost Godlike access to their worlds. Are we now living after postmodernism? “[N]arrative—as a means of ordering and evaluating the world,” writes Claudia Breger in An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance, “might be back with a vengeance” (3).

Breger ambitiously works to tackle some of the most substantial questions of scholarship on contemporary theater, film, and literature, bringing together these disciplines to show the relationships between narrative and, broadly speaking, the diagnosed performative turn. Focusing on Germany (her specialty), but with a diverse and intercultural perspective from within that nation, she proposes a conceptual framework of “narrative performance”: “a set of techniques that develop narrative in performative and performance in narrative forms—widely different in many respects but also attesting to shared preoccupations” (267). Well-read across German studies, theater studies, gender studies, literary criticism, and performance studies, Breger engages many of the most influential scholars in these fields, from Gérard Genette (Narrative Discourse, 1980) and Paul Ricoeur (Time and Narrative, 1983–85) to Fischer-Lichte. She remains in constant dialogue with the existing literature throughout her book, incorporating many scholars’ ideas, but also criticizing them and making new insights into the works she discusses, all from the late 1990s and 2000s. Founding her case for such an aesthetics in the contemporary period on both theoretical and historical grounds, Breger’s argument encompasses internationally well-known works such as Good Bye, Lenin! (2003) and Doug Wright’s play I am My Own Wife (2003), as well as artists and writers famous in the German cultural scene including René Pollesch and Rainald Goetz, and some with Turkish backgrounds including Feridun Zaimoğlu and Emine Sevgi Özdamar.

In the most successful chapter of An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance, the chapter in which the application of her critical apparatus most clearly illuminates her chosen cultural objects, thereby making a case for her methods, Breger analyzes films made “around 2000”: Lola und Bilidikid (1999), Sonnenallee (1999), and Good Bye, Lenin! She persuasively argues that Sonnenallee, though a highly-popular “pop” film, does not merely engage in exercises of nostalgia, but rather use performative methods to open up politically subversive possibilities, with narrators and other meta techniques creating a “defiant countermemory” (90) of the German Democratic Republic. She also demonstrates how “the evoked image of Turkish masculinity” in Lola und Bilidikid “is situated in the realm of transnational media discourse and self-stylizing mimicry” (61). Throughout the book, the sections on gender, particularly Turkish masculinity, illustrate the potential of her interdisciplinary “narrative performance” model, neatly weaving together the insights of performance studies with literary analysis, showing the techniques through which narrators and characters construct and perform their ethnic and gender identities.

The structure of the book, unfortunately, considerably hampers Breger’s arguments. In each of the five chapters that follow the theoretical introduction, Breger analyzes three to four objects in three to four distinct sections, with an introduction and conclusion as well. The sections more or less stand alone as essays on the individual objects, and while Breger will occasionally refer to the other works included elsewhere in the book, she rarely puts them into deep conversation with one another. (Sonnenallee and Good Bye, Lenin! are a happy exception to this.) Though she chooses her objects well—with the exception of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close...