|
|  | |
A French officer observes the besieged fortress, likening the defense exhibited by those trapped inside to “a Grand Guignol”, a sensationalistic play performed by the insane. With this scene, which makes up the novel’s beginning and end, the First World War finally reaches the exemplary German colony of Tola Land, thereby putting an end to an undertaking of quixotic eccentricity: the forestation of African grasslands with the help of German trees –firs, spruces and poplars.
Ever since Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, now a metaphor in its own right, literature has repeatedly cast Africa as a highly ambivalent vessel for human aspirations and fate. And since Uwe Timm’s Morenga German authors have also become increasingly interested in their own country’s colonial past. Born in 1977, Thomas von Steinaecker, a writer and journalist with a PhD in literature, has been drawn to how humans attempt to escape reality ever since his debut novel Wallner Begins to Fly [Wallner beginnt zu fliegen], experimenting with editing and montage techniques that culminate in his bricolage of traditional narration and comics that form his prize-winning novel Ghosts [Geister]. Now, in his latest effort, von Steinaecker conjures up the euphemistic parlance of Wilhemian colonial ambitions right from the start, titling his novel “Schutzgebiet” – colonial territories under Bismarck were known as “German protectorates”, or “Schutzgebiete” – yet at the same time he pointedly opts against pursuing anything resembling a historical narrative.
In Tola, von Steinacker parades before our eyes a motley group of characters. For starters there’s Ludwig Gerber, a wrongfully disinherited scion of a Bavarian logging dynasty who hasn’t the slightest knack for forestry. Then there’s Käthe, his sister who was swindled out of her dowry by an unfaithful husband. And finally there’s Henry Peters, a German-American with such a high-flying desire to become an architect that he assumes both the name and position of his drowned employer in order to create the architecture of the future in the African grasslands. The German inhabitants of the Benēsi fortress are rounded out by a doctor who’s a drug addict, an explorer who’s addlebrained (and who soon dies in the wilderness), and a commandant of the black security force who’s nothing if not über-Prussian.
In other words, we really do have a Guignol here. And even though von Steinaecker steers clear of any political critique of colonialism, through the way his colonists grotesquely deny reality he successfully deconstructs not only their plans of greening African grasslands with German trees, but also the hypertrophies of utopian thought as such. He paints a colonial panorama that is deeply saturated in fiction. The settlement Tola is only vaguely reminiscent of the historical Togoland, and we readers are confronted with an Africa that largely conforms to the clichés of our own making, including von Steinaecker’s brilliant concoction of an indigenous Tola-ese fauna – the jungle wolf sork.
Yet before the somewhat surreal scenes devolve into a string of trashy gags, von Steinaecker frames his novel around the plights of his protagonists’ lives. It’s no coincidence that the novel’s middle chapter, “Back then” [Damals], retraces Käthe’s aspirations during her wedding day and dwells on the daydreams of the young Henry. The design of von Steinaecker’s novel thus cleverly reveals the relationship between the individual and history since both small-time plans and large utopian dreams stem from what often prove to be the touching goals and dreams harbored by the colonists. The private is political and makes history!
This much is clear: with his novel Tola, Thomas von Steinaecker manages to create a fabulous amalgam. He dresses his work up as a colonial adventure novel in order to debunk the unbroken stereotypes of Africa precisely by taking them to their extreme. He affixes the images of the Other to the normalcy of fragile, precarious identities, as represented by the unbeloved son, the fleeing, foundering daughter, and the bilingual outsider. And he occasionally presents it all in such a staid Wilhelmian language that it’s hard not to assume that he’s also toying with our concepts of literature and the expectations we have as readers, subtly poking fun at literary fads and precepts. In any case, at the end of this exceptionally enjoyable novel, readers will find themselves coming to the same conclusion: we’re all nothing but clichés.
Michael Sellhoff
July 2010
[Translated by Franklin Bolsillo Mares]
|
