Historiographische Metafiktionen: Ransmayr, Sebald, Kracht, Beyer by Robin Hauenstein (review)

Robin Hauenstein’s study revisits the discussion of postmodern historiography, not only to stake a claim to Linda Hutcheon’s now over thirty-year-old designation of a new genre of “historiographic metafiction” for the German-language authors she examines but also in an attempt to identify a unique variant of the genre exemplified by these very writers. To this end, she analyzes texts by four authors whose works span a thirty-year time period: Christoph Ransmayr, W. G. Sebald, Christian Kracht, and Marcel Beyer. The novels examined in the study were selected for their “thematische wie formale Diversität” as well as for their “hochstehende Qualität and Komplexität” (21). The results of the analysis confirm these assertions, for the study convincingly identifies continuities among the works while at the same time doing justice to what is specific to each author and text. A chapter of approximately thirty pages is dedicated to the Ransmayr’s Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis (1988) and Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001)—read alongside Die Ringe des Saturn (1995), Kracht’s Imperium (2012), and Beyer’s Spione (2000).

An expository chapter briefly reviews other examples of German-language historiographic metafiction, and before proceeding to close readings of the aforementioned novels, Hauenstein positions postmodern historiography in relation to the dominant historiography of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which claimed sole proprietorship of historical truth based on ostensible facticity, objectivity, and an unproblematic relationship between texts and their material referents. The novelists examined share, according to Hauenstein, the conviction of Hayden White, Louis Minsk, and others that narrative form is a means not merely to represent transparently a series of events or causalities; instead, narrative produces a kind of knowledge that is always subject to revision, rewriting, re-narration, as it were. The multiple temporal layers, the multiplicity of voices and intertextual and transtextual references of these novels, reflect the “doubleness” claimed by Hutcheon to be the identifying feature of postmodern historiographic metafiction, which must always avail itself of a priori textual significations in order to challenge their claims to absolute veracity.

Hauenstein’s concise summary of the contributions of White, Hutcheon, McHale, Genette, and Nünning to the discourse sets clear parameters for the analysis that follows. In particular, her application of Genette’s narratological theories is both insightful and innovative, bringing much-needed attention to the implications of form and structure for an assessment of the critical potential of these texts. Contrary to how they have sometimes been received by German critics, these novels are not, according to Hauenstein, irresponsible transgressions of the boundary between truth and fiction. Rather, they should be read as deliberate challenges not only to the hegemony of univocal historical representations but also to the notion that one might ever consistently forego the textual representation of certain historical phenomena that are claimed to be unrepresentable.

Hauenstein persuasively argues that Ransmayr, in his treatment of the Peyer-Weyprecht polar expedition, not only subversively parodies the nineteenth-century omnipotent realist narrator (significantly, also the implied narrator of realist historiography) but also writes an engaging story that is “zuweilen bedrückend realistisch” (60). Further, Ransmayr’s attention to individual and marginal perspectives offers for Hauenstein a revision to hegemonic Austrian historical narratives that have served to legitimize European expansionism. In addition, Hauenstein finds Ransmayr’s use of historical documents such as journal excerpts and photographs to be an early example of a strategy specific to German-language historical metafiction.

For Hauenstein, Sebald shares with Ransmayr the deconstruction of the West’s blind belief in progress and the technique of deconstructing the claim to mastery of grand historical narratives. Sebald’s use of photographs further attests to the specificity of German-language historiographic metafiction, which with its unique emphasis on material traces of the past seeks to spark the narrative imagination rather than assert strong claims to facticity. In Bayer’s Spione (2000), the ostensible function of the material trace remains present, but the resulting narratives...