An Invisible Land
Family saga

S. Fischer Verlag
Frankfurt a. M. 2003
ISBN: 3-10-091055-9
286 pages

In 1993 a camera, which had gone missing more than five decades earlier and long been forgotten, turns up again like a “message in a bottle”, which “quite unexpectedly now reaches its goal after all” - what a terrific prelude to a historical novel about Germany in the 20th century, what a topic for a story-teller searching for his own past, for his own true family history!

The No.1A Pocket Kodak Camera, which has been found again, belonged to Stephan Wackwitz’s father. As a 17 year-old in 1939 he had been forced to hand it over to the Royal Navy, when the latter seized the steamer “Adolph Woermann” in the South Atlantic shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War. The ship was actually supposed to bring the young Gustav Wackwitz, his parents and siblings from Southwest Africa to Bremerhaven. Instead they became prisoners - and the lost camera was forgotten. Until the day Stephan Wackwitz’s elderly father is informed by “The Office for Notification of the Families of Former Soldiers of the Wehrmacht”, that the camera, with a loaded film, still exists and can be returned to him.

Wackwitz, father and son, now have great hopes, that the images on the still undeveloped film may have been miraculously preserved, like that young miner in Johan Peter Hebel’s famous almanac story Unexpected Reunion, buried and then conserved in vitriol in all the beauty of his youth. In contrast, however, to the incredible occurrence related in Hebel’s early 19th century anecdote, there is “no dramatic moment of recognition”, “no surprising historical turn”, because in the course of half a century the film has decomposed, and there is nothing but blackness to be seen on it.

Nevertheless, for the author, Stephan Wackwitz, this empty film takes on a deeper meaning: as an unexpected memento it triggers an equally unanticipated curiosity in the past and thus becomes the “invisible centre of the bewildering, hidden and twisted turns of a family novel”. It becomes quite concretely the start of a journey of discovery into the Invisible Land of Wackwitz’s forefathers.

Probably very few German writers of the post Second World War period have such a rich and well-documented family history as Stephan Wackwitz: From the 1950's his grandfather, Andreas Wackwitz wrote down his memoirs for his descendants on countless “onion skin-thin pages”. They became the “novel of a life and a country”, revealing a man, who is simultaneously both profoundly Protestant and German nationalist, and whose “curious, almost capricious, obsessively disagreeable racist remarks, outbursts and silences” repel grandson and reader equally. At the same time these volumes of memoirs are also fascinating, because in them the “peculiar talent” of Andreas Wackwitz “to somehow turn up in the background [...] at various historically significant places of the last century and at various historically significant moments” becomes tangible.

Thus he took part in the First World War from beginning to end, was present during the Kapp Putsch in Berlin in 1920, and from 1921 to 1933 was a young pastor in the village of Anhalt in Poland, only a few miles from Auschwitz, living in a parsonage, in which in turn quite by chance one of the most important German philosophers of the 19th century, Friedrich Schleiermacher grew up. That is not all: Andreas Wackwitz saw Hitler at close quarters, served as minister to a German-speaking congregation in Southwest Africa after the end of German colonial rule, and after the Second World War was church superintendent (dean) in Luckenwalde in Brandenburg, where he also had charge of “a religious and athletic youth called Rudi Dutschke”. One way or another this man was present at many of the “focal points” of German history in the 20th century.

The narrator justifiably feels this concentration of coincidences and the great number of intersections between personal and general history to be “spooky” and “weird”, and the repeated words become something of a leitmotif. Indeed the theme of the uncanny characterises not only the life narrated, but also the text itself. The uncanny aspect results on the one hand from the conspicuous, in fact almost novelistic and fantastic role of fate in the grandfather’s life. On the other it develops out of the repressive mechanisms, which seem to determine the grandfather’s remembering or more precisely non-remembering: for example, when it comes to the horrors, which in the further course of German history are linked with the name of the once tranquil little town of Auschwitz. The externally evident symptom of this repression is no more than a “stony silence”, a “play dead reflex” in the face of the questions and demands for explanation of the grandson, a radical left-winger in the 1970's.

Wackwitz’s portrait of three very different generations of a single family cleverly and entertainingly combines the exploration of his own family history with the examination of the historical and political dislocations of the 20th century. His grandfather’s chronological notes are inserted in the discontinuous work of memory of the narrator, and hence are broken up and thrown into new relief by different contexts. In this way Wackwitz makes up for the discussion with the cold and taciturn grandfather, that was never possible during the latter’s lifetime. Family history, the description of German topographies and the author’s intellectual biography merge almost seamlessly in the part documentary, part fictional montage and the layering of time levels.

Consequently the text as a whole is neither a family novel, nor even a novel in the classic sense at all, but more a mixed form of novel and essay. The central theme of the search for an identity, for the Invisible Land follows this boundary between fiction and historical search. The search is portrayed as a painful process of failed attempts at identification. Wackwitz’s novel of the development of a German intellectual nevertheless comes to a happy end, allowing the narrator to admit, “how similar my life has meanwhile become to that of a man, whom, when he was still alive and I was young, I wanted to be as unlike as could possibly be.”

Anne-Bitt Gerecke

[Translated by Martin Chalmers]

January 2004