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Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) gilt als eine der wichtigsten Schriftstellerinnen des 20. Jahrhunderts. Während ihr umfangreiches Werk im angelsächsischen, lateinamerikanischen und französischsprachigen Raum mittlerweile im Kontext von Feminismus, Posthumanismus und postkolonialer Literatur diskutiert wird, ist die brasilianische Autorin im deutschsprachigen Raum nur Wenigen bekannt. Das mag vor allem an veralteten, vergriffenen, zuweilen schlicht mangelhaften Übersetzungen liegen. Doch auch die Literaturkritik hat dazu beigetragen: Eine vorrangig biographische Lektüre hat Lispectors Romane und Erzählungen einerseits viel zu lange in Richtung 'Frauenliteratur' gerückt, andererseits wurde sie vorschnell als zu komplex bzw. unverständlich abgetan oder als 'hermetisch' verklärt. Lispectors literarische Ausdrucksformen und ihr spezifischer Zugriff auf Sprache und Welt lassen sich mit derartigen Etiketten nicht fassen. Seit der Übersetzung der in den USA sehr erfolgreichen Biographie "Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector" von Benjamin Moser ins Deutsche ändert sich das. Einige ihrer Werke wurden neu übersetzt: 2016 erschien ihr Roman "Der große Augenblick" bei Schöffling & Co., 2019 und 2020 die beiden Bände ihrer "Sämtlichen Erzählungen" bei Penguin und 2022 unter dem Titel "Ich und Jimmy" eine weitere Auswahl von Kurzgeschichten bei Manesse. Alle diese Neuübersetzungen stammen von Luis Ruby, der auch für die Übersetzung und Herausgabe einer Sammlung ihrer "crônicas" verantwortlich ist, die nun erstmals auf Deutsch vorliegen und um die es im Folgenden gehen soll: Clarice Lispector: "Wofür ich mein Leben gebe. Kolumnen 1946-1977" (München: Penguin 2023).
Wer in Berlin das Wachstum und den Wandel der Quartiere außerhalb der historischen Kernstadt nachzeichnen will, der stößt für Zeiten, die länger als 150 Jahre zurückliegen, auf nichts als sandigen märkischen Ackerboden. Es ist nicht einfach, Dokumente zu finden, die Auskunft über die Nachbarschaften rund um das Gebäude ACHTUNDEINS in der Pariser Straße 1 geben, den neuen Standort der Verwaltung der Geisteswissenschaftlichen Zentren Berlin (GWZ), des Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) und des ZfL.
Die intellektuelle Ausbeute literarischer Jubiläen und Gedenkjahre fällt in der Regel mager aus. Viel Nippes wird zu solchen Anlässen auf den Markt geworfen. Runde Geburts- oder Todestage von Schriftsteller*innen zeugen so oft unfreiwillig von jenem vielfach beklagten Prestigeverlust der Literatur, gegen den ihre mediale Verwertung gerade anzurennen versucht. Große Namen sind für diese Schieflage besonders anfällig, nur selten erscheinen zu ihren Jahrestagen ambitionierte Neudeutungen ihrer Werke. Es dominiert die gediegene Traditionspflege und ein mitunter verschmitzter Respekt - der schlimmste von allen. Aus diesen Gründen haben Gedenkjahre aber stets eine seismographische Funktion, denn an ihnen lässt sich ablesen, wo ihre Jubilar*innen und deren - oder gar die - Literatur öffentlich gerade stehen. Das Kafka-Jahr 2024 macht hier keine Ausnahme. Anlässlich seines 100. Todestags am 3. Juni ist mit Kafka einem Autor wiederzubegegnen, der nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg zum Inbegriff moderner Literatur avanciert ist. Anders als etwa Thomas Mann, Robert Musil oder Marcel Proust hat Kafka unzählige Nachahmer*innen gefunden und im Gegensatz zu ihnen - im Gegensatz selbst zu Goethe - wurde Kafka kaum je ernsthaft vom Sockel gestoßen. Vermutlich wird er sogar mehr gelesen als sie alle zusammen. Außerhalb des deutschen Sprachraums ist das zweifelsohne der Fall und es dürfte nicht zuletzt an seiner guten Übersetzbarkeit liegen. Ausgerechnet Kafka, eine Art ewiger Sohn, wurde zum Heiligen Vater der neueren Literaturgeschichte.
Dear Remco van den Berg, Recently we received mail on the Boulevard, from my good friend Othillia G. in Amsterdam. It had taken quite a lot of thinking on her part, as she warned at the start of her letter. Revealing disgraceful matters in public tends to have negative effects when the culprit involved is an influential individual. To denounce their misconduct may prove, after all, that they matter. It will strengthen their conviction that their poisonous arrows have in fact hit their target. [...] Your book, honored with five stars in the newspapers, deals with the relationship between contemporary visual art and what you refer to as the European migration crisis. In your exposé, you praised several successful artists for making sublimely detached photographs or arthouse films of people on the move, often fleeing from some form of violence or bitter poverty. As of the turn of the century, but openly and visibly after 2015, they have therefore tried hard to reach the EU (and sometimes, later, the UK). They cross borders under the direst circumstances, in some desolate landscape or at sea, outside of the legal paths. Some of the artists discussed in your book, mostly men, notably, have purposely posted themselves in hideouts near such borders, using military thermal imaging cameras to make spectacular recordings of this phenomenon. As such they confront their audience with artistic images of persons who may recognize themselves in these pictures, or who may be identified by people who know them, say when they encounter these works within the context of an exhibition. Sure enough, there is a commercial market for these artworks and the subsequent coffee-table books. Many of those artists will earn quite a nice sum by callously representing the deep suffering of others. [...]
In 2015, author Merle Kröger located an entire novel on the Mediterranean: on a body of water that has had to be considered not only a highly frequented connective zone but at the same time a strictly observed border region. The events around which everything in this novel centers are the maritime distress of a refugee boat with a damaged motor off the Spanish coast; the boat's sighting by a cruise ship with the telling name 'Spirit of Europe'; and the encounter of both with a Spanish coast guard rescue vessel and with a container ship. The novel's original German title, "Havarie", whose literal English translation "average" fails to convey the word's complex meaning, is the nautical designation for malfunctions and accidents suffered by maritime vehicles; and it is also the older insurance-technical term for contributory distribution in the salvaging of a ship (above all through jettisoning of freight and the "sacrifice" of certain parts of the ship). The title of the 2017 English translation, "Collision", opens up a third dimension: the collision of different seascapes in a shipwreck's context. Correspondingly, both the polylogic contents and the multi-perspectivism of Kröger's novel attach a different relationship to the world and the environment to different kinds of boat: the "boat people" on their very basic water vehicles see their situation above all through the prism of circulating stories and rumors, myths and fables; on the cruiser, we find a temporally removed economy of consumeristic attentiveness that allows the sea to vanish beneath a "display" of the all-encompassing service and entertainment offerings; and the coast guard ship is fully oriented toward speedily detecting and approaching a target. [...] As the afterword itself underscores, the book, although a work of fiction, was based on documentary research. And its starting point was found footage - the jetsam of a data-ocean. Namely, by coincidence Kröger, together with her collaborator, the filmmaker Philipp Scheffner, came across a YouTube video recorded by the Northern Irishman Terry Diamond in 2012 off the Spanish coast, on board the "Adventure of the Seas". They researched the background, met Diamond, obtained the relevant radio recordings from the Spanish coast guard, and finally interviewed and filmed both the cruiser's personnel and a number of refugees. When in 2015 Mediterranean crossings from North Africa multiplied and the mass media issued alarmist reports of a "refugee crisis," Scheffner and Kröger wanted to do more than simply contribute their already-produced documentary film to the image flood. They decided on a new approach involving something like parallel literary and filmic action: Kröger shaped what had been researched into a possible scenario; and Scheffner worked with the video recordings as image material and with both the radio and interview recordings as sound material.
The following chapter will discuss Davide Enia's 2016 novel "Appunti per un naufragio" ("Notes on a Shipwreck"), a text with a very similar approach to "Fuocoammare". Just like the film, the book tries to depict the situation on Lampedusa, and just like the film, it does so by combining logged footage and deliberate storytelling, while almost fully omitting the perspective of the refugees. A novel by paratextual definition, Enia's book is a mixture between report, philosophical meditation, and memoir which intertwines documentary elements - mainly eyewitness accounts that he gathered from conversations with Lampedusa locals - with his own autobiographical story, namely that of his uncle's terminal cancer and his complicated relationship with his father. In the case of the Appunti, however, the (almost) complete lack of firsthand accounts by refugees is, I will argue, not merely a "positional error" but, on the contrary, a function of the novel's pondering on the structure and formation of a certain type of refugee discourse, the limits of (documentary) representation, "distant suffering," and the ethics of narrative position. It thus re-evaluates the Blumenbergian metaphoric constellation of shipwreck, shifting it further towards the moral implications for the spectator.
Photography, notably, constitutes the most pervasive medium through which migrations are daily brought to the forefront. Images of crowded bodies on boats, lying on beaches, and surveilled on decks, have progressively colonized screens and imageries, building up an immense collective archive frame by frame. In the following pages, I will attempt to reflect on the topography that these "visual events of place" construct, with particular emphasis on their ethical dimension. The regimes of spectatorship engendered by the photography of migration in the Mediterranean context are indeed imbued with profound ethical, political, and aesthetic ramifications. The aim of this intervention is to use the specter and its haunting force as a heuristic figure to reinterpret images of migration and their troubling effects on the viewer. In this respect, I draw inspiration from Jacques Derrida's hauntological approach, as articulated in his "Specters of Marx" and more recently adapted by scholars in the visual culture realm. In the first section, I will thus try to outline the theoretical framework of this analysis and its potentialities when applied to the photography of migration. Through this analytical prism, the focus then pivots towards the images of the Christmas shipwreck that occurred on December 26, 1996, to understand how visual practices, emotional politics, and ethical responsiveness can concretely interact.
Christian Kortmann's novel "Einhandsegeln" ("Single-Handed Sailing", 2021) tells the story of a voyage on the open sea by an anonymous sailor in the first person. Maneuvers, meal preparation, and the encounter with the maritime infinity fill the pages. Is it a sailing book? Is it a self-testimony or oceanography? Is it all in one? Yes and no. The novel indulges in sailing and maps the waters of the southern hemisphere. Against this backdrop, a man has become weary of a dubious way of life on land, reflecting on his personal existence. The novel contrasts the indulgence of being alone at sea and being social on land. Although the single-handed sailing trip sets the narrative pace until the last page, the book blends into a multifarious text that also puts the seafarer's morale to the test.
In a radical shift from Hans Blumenberg's account of the classical trope, "Shipwreck with Spectator", the existence of the spectator is no longer grounded in their safe detachment from shipwreck, but from their fearless involvement in it. In this article, I will shift focus once again, from those involved, lifesaving spectators of shipwreck to the immediate actors, or rather: the actor-network of sea travel, which includes shipping companies, crews, passengers, and ships. This actor-network, with the sailing crew at its core, has been subsumed into a binding code of behavior in distress ever since the 1852 foundering of the Royal Navy steam frigate HMS Birkenhead at Danger Point, off the Western Cape of Africa. The code's two key imperatives - "women and children first" and "captain goes down with the ship," henceforth known as the Birkenhead drill - were safely embedded in Victorian morals by popular life guides. [...] Based on this shift of attention, I will look at two different articulations of this dilemma, the "Jeddah incident" of July 1880 (a shipwreck that never happened), and the sinking of the Titanic of April 1912 (a shipwreck that has been happening ever since), and unfold the translation of each case in a modern novel: Joseph Conrad's "Lord Jim" for the former, and Franz Kafka's "Der Verschollene" ("The Man who Disappeared") for the latter. I will pay particular attention to the role of professional ethics as drivers of the narrative in both cases, and I will highlight how the two authors, while using an almost identical plot structure, pursue different strategies of fictionalizing the Birkenhead dilemma.
Scheerbart is already working on his cosmological project, the alteration of Earth-dwellers, in his early writing. The present essay will focus on a text of his that has hardly been examined until now, "Die Seeschlange. Ein See-Roman" ("The Sea-Serpent: A Sea-Novel", 1901), which can be considered an entrée to the wider project. On the one hand, Scheerbart here explores the relationship between Planet Earth and its human inhabitants, offering a critique of their bourgeois-humanistic manifestation. But in doing so, his starting point is neither the human being nor nature, hence the two ideal-typical poles of terrestrial causal connection; rather, it is the medium that draws up and regulates these poles. From Scheerbart's perspective, this medium is very clearly architecture, or technique in general. For this reason, also at stake in the novel, on the other hand, is exploring architecture's metaphysical and ethical potential. These two thematic strands are intertwined in the mythic sea-serpent, conceptualized in a tripartite manner: as the vehicle for pan-psychic cosmology; as a higher-order fiction; and as planetary architecture. All three of these conceptual levels have elements that suggest an understanding of this maritime creature as the figuration of a critique of humanism. The sea-novel thus reveals an important moment in Scheerbart's poetics - a moment we might describe as his posthuman turn.
