Emily Jeremiah

The Case of Helene Hegemann: Queerness, Failure, and the German Girl

Helene Hegemann’s 2010 novel Axolotl Roadkill, whose author was seventeen at the time of publication, provoked an instructive controversy. The debates the novel triggered tell us a great deal about contemporary German literary and cultural ideals, especially as far as girls and young women are concerned. Hegemann’s work in fact “queers” such ideals, evoking though its sixteen-year-old heroine Mifti a traumatized yet defiantly perverse subject. The novel’s content, however, has been overshadowed by media discussions of its author, a contested and provocative figure who herself challenges established models of femininity. In this article, I consequently begin by discussing the reception of Hegemann, concentrating on the questions of age, gender, and Germanness. I go on to examine Axolotl Roadkill, asking how the novel itself conceives of subjectivity, generationality, and nationality. In addition, I discuss the novel as a queer text. I suggest that Mifti – and the novel itself – illustrate what Judith Halberstam terms “the queer art of failure.”Mifti and Hegemann are triumphant failures as German girls. They thus ask us to consider critically what passes for normality and success in our times. Hegemann’s youth unsurprisingly attracted comment in media coverage of the author, but other factors contributed to the furore surrounding the publication of her novel. The autobiographical status of her work was the subject of speculation, with the prominence of the author’s father, the dramatist Carl Hegemann, serving only to add piquancy (see Marz). But Hegemann attracted even greater attention when it was revealed that her novel quotes passages from a blog by a writer known as Airen (now published as a book, see Airen), a revelation that led to a flurry of articles in the press about plagiarism and the internet, authorship and intertextuality, and to either condemnation or defence. Hegemann’s lack of repentance in the face of the revelation drew criticism. Some commentators, however, have situated the writer in a tradition of “borrowing” that goes back to Thomas Mann and Shakespeare (Graf).1 There is an interesting contradiction here: on the one hand, Hegemann’s work has widely been viewed as autobiographical; on the other, it has been seen as an example of derivativeness or even theft. This contradictoriness points to the unresolved status of literature in

The Hand that Rocks the Cradle: Maternity, Agency and Community in Women’s Writing in German of the 1970s and 1980s

This article puts forth the idea of ‘maternal performativity’ as a way of going beyond pre-existing feminist conceptions of maternal agency. ‘Agency’ is important because, as numerous feminists have pointed out, the mother in Western culture has traditionally been conceived as passive and mute. I argue that challenging the traditional public/private divide is vital to the project of developing and enacting this maternal performativity, as the novels in question demonstrate. Where this opposition is left unquestioned, the texts suggest, mothers are marginal to the point of abjection. I look firstly at three texts in which mothers are depicted as utterly abject (Elsner, Pedretti, Beutler), then at two in which the idea of maternal agency is approached but ultimately jettisoned in favour of a resigned kind of essentialism (Struck and Frischmuth), and finally at one in which the mother is active and performative, but is still shown as hampered by traditional structures (Schroeder). The novels, and my article, thus performatively reveal the need for a maternal performativity to be acknowledged and practised.