Housebound: Selfhood and Domestic Space in Contemporary German Fiction by Monika Shafi (review)

Since the term non-place appeared in Marc Augé’s anthropology of supermodernity, studies of space and architecture in contemporary German culture have often invoked it to describe the contemporary construction and representation of space (see, for instance, Alexandra Merley Hill’s Playing House: Motherhood, Intimacy, and Domestic Space in Julia Franck’s Fiction). For Augé, it is not the places we inhabit that characterize our worldviews but rather our transit through non-places, that is, places that are everywhere and nowhere at once. The title of Monika Shafi’s study of contemporary German fiction suggests, in contrast, that there are places in which identities can develop, even flourish—houses. Coupling identity with domestic space, her title recalls gendered, nineteenth-century notions of the house, yet her introduction soon adjusts any such simple associations with a nuanced and substantive view of interdisciplinary scholarship on the topic. Citing work from diverse fields such as sociology and critical theory as well as literary, cultural, and architectural studies, Shafi acknowledges the historical and cultural significance of the house in bourgeois cultures, describes the traditions of the house (in particular its gendered status), and establishes its connection to the fraught concepts of Heimat in German culture. This framework places her study deftly and expertly within the context of non-places in order to embark on a study of over ten works of contemporary fiction. Housebound reveals how authors negotiate and depict the house in order to reinforce and challenge concepts of self and space in the age of the non-place.

Shafi’s stated goal is “to take readers on a house tour,” and readers are given access to houses in fictional works that have gained popular critical attention. Hers is a tour that emphasizes historical and theoretical foundations but ultimately highlights the uniqueness of each structure. In order to present such a diverse array of texts and houses, she organizes the study by theme and covers at least two works in each of her six chapters. She begins with two novels, each of which focuses on a singular interior and in doing so traces national and personal histories—Jenny Erpenbeck’s Heimsuchung and Katharina Hacker’s Der Bademeister. In her second chapter, Shafi focuses on family homes and memory with a comparative study of two family novels, Arno Geiger’s Es geht uns gut and Katharina Hagena’s Der Geschmack von Apfelkernen. This personal attachment to houses continues in the third chapter, in which Shafi explores two narratives of countryside retreat with Walter Kappacher’s Selina oder das andere Leben and Monika Maron’s Endmoränen.

While readers will not be surprised to see works like Es geht uns gut or Heimsuchung, whose narratives are driven by the history of a house, the appearance of others are more unusual, for instance, the three works selected from each of Hermann’s short story collections. As Shafi notes, Hermann’s oeuvre is known for its depiction of isolated and restless young Germans embracing nomadic lifestyles or traveling. Nonetheless, in the stories discussed—“Sommerhaus, später,” “Zuhälter,” and “Micha”—Shafi’s attention to the house exposes a more ambivalent relationship to travel. Hermann’s protagonists, she discovers, do find homes unsettling, indeed uncanny, but homes are also a part of their utopian visions of a future life. Hermann’s protagonists reveal a deep-seated connection between the house and bourgeois ideals in the contemporary German cultural imagination, one that threads through the first four chapters of Housebound.

In the final two chapters, Shafi turns to works that highlight different cultural perspectives and national contexts. Shafi’s choice to include the work of Emine Sevgi Özdamar challenges constructions of the domestic in a most creative way. Her protagonists uncover many of the German bourgeois assumptions of the house at the same time that they illuminate modes of creativity and openness still available to individuals in their relationships to these homes and domestic structures. Özdamar’s “Der Hof...