Speaking Anomalies: Subjunctive Narration in Kathrin Röggla’s “die ansprechbare” and “Der Wiedereintritt in die Geschichte I”

In recent years, the work of Kathrin Röggla has been the object of considerable attention. This interest has focused largely on a theme that can be identified in many of her literary essays, as well as in her lectures and texts on poetics: impending disaster—which is to say, a sudden interruption of normality.¹ At the same time, reference has also been made to Röggla’s original narrative procedures, which foreground the theme of the “state of exception” (Ausnahmezustand) by giving rise to aporetic speaker positions, thus structurally suspending the “normal case” of narration.² A central role is played here by the grammatical mood of the German subjunctive (Konjunktiv), which Röggla configures as narrative mood in the publications wir schlafen nicht (2004), die alarmbereiten (2010), and Nachtsendung: Unheimliche Geschichten (2016).³ This “subjunctive narration” is in need of clarification, and should not be prematurely identified as “indirect speech.”⁴ Röggla’s narrative deployment of the subjunctive is not fully covered by contemporary descriptive grammars. Poetic practice makes such an original use possible, and is also able to establish the validity of new forms. Nevertheless, Röggla’s deployment of the subjunctive differs substantially from the way it is commonly used, and thus constitutes an anomaly, one that first needs to be described, as well as to be analyzed in relation to its usefulness for narration: not only as an anomaly of speech but also as a “speaking anomaly.” In what follows, anomaly will therefore stand for a manifest deviation from grammatical norm and narrative convention, a double irregularity that disturbs the production of meaning without entirely destroying it. In Röggla’s writing, anomaly orients meaning in the direction of something unsaid, or even unsayable. While Röggla’s anomaly of grammatical and narrative form may well never establish a new collective norm, it is convincing as a form sui generis—at least within the space of literature.

This essay takes two works by Röggla, “die ansprechbare” (from die alarmbereiten) and “Der Wiedereintritt in die Geschichte I” (from Nachtsendung), as its case studies. The primary focus is on Röggla’s grammatical-narrative strategy, which I summarize with the notions of “escalating subjunctive” (for “die ansprechbare”) and “unloosened ends” (for “Wiedereintritt in die Geschichte I” and Nachtsendung in general).

I. Escalating Subjunctive: “die ansprechbare” from die alarmbereiten

Betting on Reality

The state of exception has infected Röggla’s writing at least since her witnessing of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, in New York. This “Ernstfall des Schreibens” (Morgenroth 199) immediately shaped her work: first in the articles that she published in the German newspaper die tageszeitung, then in the prose collection really ground zero (2001).⁵ Within her explicitly literary work, the notion of potential threat has received the most notable treatment in die alarmbereiten. As is already evident in the book’s title, die alarmbereiten deals with disasters and crisis situations, or more specifically with the constant presence in the Western media of different forms of threat: with forest fires and flooding, deadly pathogens and epidemics, nuclear accidents and environmental pollution, ice ages and climate change, speculative bubbles, banking and global financial crises, mass unemployment and riots, as well as famine, military conflict, genocide, nuclear war, and terrorism. Common to these different forms of destruction is the way in which they are presented in Western societies either as media events (because they take place in “other” countries) or as a future threat (because even “here” they are possible—or, in the future, even probable). These modes of presentation then become part of the ubiquity of the theme. What spreads is a “state of alert,” the sense of a threat whose scale and significance cannot be named clearly. The disquiet resulting from current or proleptic scenarios of threat is not the responsibility of the media alone; it has been an essential part of modern Western societies since the start of the twentieth century—for these are “risk societies” (Beck).⁶ Advanced industrial societies...