Abstract
This chapter argues that the most important work of European post-9/11 fiction may be the negotiation of European national identities and literary cultures rather than a reflection of the global consequences of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Beigbeder’s and Hettche’s post-9/11 novels serve as examples of how conceptions of (post-9/11) America are simultaneously rejected and embraced to construct European national and literary selves. Placing the analyses of Windows on the World and Woraus wir gemacht sind into three contexts—(1) the status of the Muslim minority in France and Germany; (2) intellectual Anti-Americanism; (3) and national literary paradigms—the chapter also engages French and German literary treatments of 9/11 more broadly.
All references to the novels in the body of the text refer to the original French and German editions, Frédéric Beigbeder, Windows on the World (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), tagged as WW, and Thomas Hettche, Woraus wir gemacht sind (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2006), tagged as Wwgs. English translations are provided in the notes; the editions used are Frédéric Beigbeder, Windows on the World (trans. Frank Wynne, London: Harper, 2004), tagged as WW-E and Thomas Hettche, What We Are Made Of (trans. Shaun Whiteside, London: Picador, 2008), tagged as WWAMO.
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Notes
- 1.
The headline, it should be noted, has become an emblem of European solidarity with the US in discussions of US-European relations after 9/11 and, in the process, has been detached from the content of the editorial. While clearly denouncing the terrorists, Colombani does not uncritically embrace the position of the US but also reflects on the role of the United States in creating the structures that eventually led to the attacks.
- 2.
Verslyus, “9/11 as a European Event: the Novels,” 77.
- 3.
Ibid., 77. Many points of Versluys’s essay are reiterated in his later booklength study, Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel, cf. chapter “‘Burning from the Inside Out’: Let the Great World Spin (2009)”, “Exorcising the Ghost.”
- 4.
Versluys, “9/11 as a European Event,” 68.
- 5.
Examples of collections that include discussions of European representations of 9/11 are Bauder-Begerow and Schäfer (eds), Learning 9/11: Teaching for Key Competences in Literary and Cultural Studies; Cilano (ed.), From Solidarity to Schisms: 9/11 and After in Fiction and Film from Outside the US; Hennigfeld (ed.), Poetiken des Terrors: Narrative des 11. September 2001 im interkulturellen Vergleich; Irsigler and Jürgensen (eds), Nine Eleven: Ästhetische Verarbeitungen des 11. September 2001; Mohr and Mayer (eds), 9/11 as Catalyst: American and British Cultural Responses, Poppe et al. (eds), 9/11 als kulturelle Zäsur. Repräsentationen des 11. September 2001 in kulturellen Diskursen, Literatur und visuellen Medien. Focusing on the novel exclusively, Birgit Däwes offers the most comprehensive bibliography of what she calls “international 9/11 and 9/12 novels” to date in Ground Zero Fiction: History, Memory, and Representation in the American 9/11 Novel. National specificities of 9/11 literature are discussed in an article by Porra in Poppe et al. (eds.), 9/11 als kulturelle Zäsur, which I draw on later; questions of national identity construction are, to my knowledge, not explicitly discussed in scholarship on representations of 9/11 at all. Jürgen Donnerstag touches on issues of German constructions of national identity in the past decade that are important for my argument yet looks at the way in which national identity is constructed through a specific mode of reception rather than production of (9/11) texts: he focuses on the German reception of Michael Moore’s documentaries, including Fahrenheit 9/11, “The Documentaries of Michael Moore and Their German Reception: Anti-Americanism and Intercultural Learning,” 142–160.
- 6.
Porra, “Risse in der Mimesis – Bemerkungen zur romanesken Darstellung des 11. September 2001 in der französischen Literatur.”
- 7.
Ursula Hennigfeld, for instance, suggests that the referencing of intertexts and prior historical caesuras are central aspects of 9/11 texts—in other words, national memory cultures may be another central context. As the contributions to her volume demonstrate, these textual and historical references may be nationally specific, even if texts of what may be called (Western) “world literature” and caesuras that have been attributed global importance may be cited across national literatures, such as Dante’s Inferno or the Shoa. Cf. Hennigfeld, “Vorwort,” 11.
- 8.
“Pour un nouveau nouveau roman” was first published in La Règle du jeu, vol. 23 (2003), 18–22; quoted from Beigbeder, “Pour un nouveau nouveau roman,” 48.
- 9.
Seen from a formal standpoint, this perspective is the perspective of the autodiegetic narrator “Beigbeder” rather than the author Beigbeder, and scholars have generally differentiated between the two, indicating the narrator by the use of quotation marks. When I am not commenting specifically on narrative structure, I conflate “Beigbeder” and Beigbeder in my discussion because I agree with Marie-Christine Clemente that the novel is structured as a panopticon that can be “read as having a central tower inhabited by the author” and that, “hiding behind the mirror of the text,” the author can be seen as “infiltrat[ing] the center of the narrative.” In other words, it can be argued that most statements made by “Beigbeder” and Carthew and David Yorston can be attributed directly to the author Beigbeder. Cf. Clemente, “Beigbeder’s Evil Personae in Windows on the World: Authorial Ethics and 9/11,” 121 and 123; on the same issue, cf. also Schehr, “Éffondrements: Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World,” 133; for an undifferentiated conflation of the author and narrator Beigbeder, cf. Harper, “Turning to Debris: Ethics of Violence in Wilkomirski’s Fragments and Beigbeder’s Windows on the World,” 237.
- 10.
“I am writing this book because I’m sick of bigoted anti-Americanism” (WW-E, 16f.). For discussions of this statement on anti-Americanism, see, for instance, Durham, “Daring to Imagine: Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World and Slimane Benaïssa’s La Dernière Nuit d’un damné,” here 171f. and Versluys, “9/11 as a European Event,” 74. Both Durham and Versluys take the statement as an indication of the author Beigbeder’s straightforward intentions and agree—wrongly to my mind—that the text is “unambiguous” in its “Americanophilia” (Versluys).
- 11.
Porra, “Risse in der Mimesis,” 174.
- 12.
Versluys, “9/11 as a European Event,” 74.
- 13.
For a detailed analysis of how the voices of “Beigbeder” and Yorston merge to an ever greater degree as the novel progresses, see Clemente, “Beigbeder’s Evil Personae,” 113–123.
- 14.
To my knowledge, Kozlowski’s brief discussion and Reinhäckel’s analyses, one in the context of a broader discussion of space and place in German 9/11 novels, are the only treatments to date, cf. Kozlowski, “Thomas Hettche”; Reinhäckel, Traumatische Texturen and “Literarische Schauplätze deutscher 9/11-Romane.” A brief comment can be found in König, “Literary Accounts of Terrorism in Recent German Literature: An Attempt at Marginalization?,” 163.
- 15.
Brandt, “Ein Schlaukopf haut rein.”
- 16.
Frances Fortier, quoted in Clemente, “Beigbeder’s Evil Personae,” 130.
- 17.
On Beigbeder’s affinities with Bret Easton Ellis, cf. Klohs, “Frédéric Beigbeder,” 303; see also Beigbeder’s mention of Ellis as one of his favourite authors (WW, 30), as the author of Less Than Zero (WW, 213), or his linking of Windows on the World to Glamorama via the image of confetti (WW, 358).
- 18.
Hettche was one of four German writers who, in 2005, published a much derided because rather full-mouthed manifesto on “What Is the Novel Supposed to Do?” The writer subscribing to “Relevant Realism,” they proclaim, “clothes […] his subject into fiction so skilfully that, when read superficially, this fiction could be taken to be a representation of reality: staged realism.” Moreover, the writer engages in a “tightrope walk between what has always been the only appropriate way of narrating from within the midst of lived experience itself and that which has been salvaged of virtuosity from the avant-garde” (Dean et al., “Was soll der Roman?” my translation), a balancing act that Gerrit Bartels has dubbed “contemporaneity plus aesthetic clout” (“Amerika, Blicke. Am Ende aller Gewissheiten und am Anfang der Liebe und der Diskurse: Thomas Hettches Roman Woraus wir gemacht sind,” my translation). On Woraus wir gemacht sind as a “test case of ‘Relevant Realism,’” see also Reinhäckel, Traumatische Texturen, 138; my translation.
- 19.
One might also read the novel’s insistence on citation—in line with Volker Mergenthaler’s recent argument—as a move against the critical demand to subordinate literariness to “authentic speech” after 9/11, cf. Mergenthaler, “Warum die Frage ‘Wie reagieren Schriftsteller auf die Terroranschläge?’ auf dem Feld der deutschsprachigen Literatur die falsche Frage ist,” here especially 186.
- 20.
The presence of Muslims in Germany, however, does not have its roots in a colonial past but is due to the mass hiring of foreign workers from Southern Europe in the 1960s and 1970s; hence the highest percentage of Muslims in Germany has a Turkish and not a Maghribian background.
- 21.
Porra, “Risse in der Mimesis,” 165–167.
- 22.
9/11 Commission Report (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, 2004), 160.
- 23.
For a concise overview and analysis of the ways in which these individuals were recruited by Al-Qaeda and were involved in planning the attacks from Germany, see Greiner, 9/11. Der Tag, die Angst, die Folgen, 31–46.
- 24.
For a discussion of Fremder Freund, see Hicks, “My Roommate the Terrorist: The Political Burden of September 11 in Elmar Fischer’s The Friend,” for a discussion of Schläfer, see Lehngut, “Sleepers, Informants, and the Everyday: Theorizing Terror and Ambiguity in Benjamin Heisenberg’s Schläfer.”
- 25.
On Peters’ novel see also Kaulen, “Vom Scheitern des Dialogs mit dem Täter: Überlegungen zu Christoph Peters’ Ein Zimmer im Haus des Krieges (2006),” Gansel, “Von der Primärerfahrung zur medialen Konstruktion? ‘Soldatisches Opfernarrativ,’ 9/11 und Terrorismusdarstellung in der deutschen (Gegenwarts)Literatur,” 172–174.
- 26.
In a highly negative appreciation of German post-9/11 or “terror” texts, Michael König has spoken of these four particular foci as “navel-gazing.” “Most recent German ‘terror’ texts do not deal with non-Western cultures; they neither seek to understand the differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’ nor do they ask for reasons for the increasing number of terrorist attacks. In my view, such inquiries are missing as much from recent German literature as they are from politics” (König, “Literary Accounts,” 171f.).
- 27.
Versluys, “9/11 as a European Event,” 74.
- 28.
Porra, “Risse in der Mimesis,” 174; my translation.
- 29.
Cf. Gulddal, Anti-Americanism in European Literature or Dehez, “Anti-Amerikanismus,” 151f.
- 30.
This has famously been noted by Hannah Arendt in her 1954 essay “Dream and Nightmare,” and “Europa und Amerika.” Cf. also, for instance, Dehez, “Anti-Amerikanismus,” 155; Diner, America in the Eyes of the Germans: An Essay on Anti-Americanism, 108; Gassert, Amerika im Dritten Reich: Ideologie, Propaganda und Volksmeinung, 1933–1945, 370; Markovitz, “Anti-Americanism and the Struggle for a West German Identity,” 37; Schwaabe, Antiamerikanismus: Wandlungen eines Feindbildes, 9.
- 31.
Simons, “‘Amerika gibt es nicht’: On the Semiotics of Literary America in the Twentieth Century,” 197.
- 32.
Porra, “Risse in der Mimesis,” 174; my translation.
- 33.
Cf. Porra, “Risse in der Mimesis,” 175; my translation. Donnerstag also uses the term “Janus-faced” (“The Documentaries of Michael Moore,” 143), as do Gassert and Leggewie (Gassert, “Was meint Amerikanisierung?” 795f.; Leggewie, Amerikas Welt: Die USA in unseren Köpfen); examples of other scholars who characterize the relationship between Germany or Europe and the United States as a bi-polar love-hate-relationship are Fraenkel, one of the earliest students of anti-Americanism in the 1950s and 1960s (Fraenkel, Ernst Fraenkel: Gesammelte Schriften Band 4, Amerikastudien), Gienow-Hecht (Gienow-Hecht, “Europäischer Anti-Amerikanismus im 20. Jahrhundert,” 33f.), Kreis, who speaks of the relationship as one oscillating between “rejection and fascination” (Kreis, Anti-Amerikanismus. Zum europäisch-amerikanischen Verhältnis zwischen Ablehnung und Faszination), and Schwark (Schwark, Zur Genealogie des modernen Anti-Amerikanismus in Deutschland). A volume by Lüdtke et al. borrows Hannah Arendt’s similarly doubled figure of “Traum and Alptraum” (“Dream and Nightmare”) to describe views of the phenomenon of “Americanization” in Germany, Lüdtke et al. (eds), Amerikanisierung: Traum und Alptraum im Deutschland des 20. Jahrhunderts; cf. Arendt, “Dream and Nightmare.” For a related argument on the function of the figures of the “good” and the “bad” American in German news media, see also Christ, “Michelle Obama, the Good American and Icon of Global Power Femininity: Gender Politics and National Boundary-Making in German News Coverage.”
- 34.
These arenas can be said to be interconnected because feelings of inferiority in one arena may be compensated by the need to prove superiority in another. For instance, as Fraenkel observes, the German relationship to the United States is characterized by a “strange mixture of an arrogant feeling of intellectual superiority […] and an almost despondent sense of economic inferiority”: in German constructions of national identity, the repeated affirmation of cultural or intellectual superiority serves as a compensation for economic inferiority, quoted in Buchstein and Kühn, “Vorwort,” 18.
- 35.
Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 33; my translation.
- 36.
The English translation adds a reflection on this form of mini-essays or “diary jottings or journal entries” in the Chapter “10:12” (Versluys, Out of the Blue, 141); this chapter is also devoted to an explanation of anti-Americanism: Beigbeder dubs the core of these mini-essays “ITNNOTs”: “It is at this point that I whip out another of my famous ITNNOTs (Instant Though Not Necessarily Original Theories)” (WW-E, 280).
- 37.
On the concept of “French exceptionalism,” see the collection by Emmanuel Godin and Tony Chafer (eds), The French Exception. Revel has noted that the discourse on “cultural exceptionalism” has been replaced by a discourse on “cultural diversity” in the late 1990s, but argues that it similarly reinforces French cultural protectionism, Revel, “The Anti-American Obsession,” cf. also Revel, L’obsession anti-américaine: Son fonctionnement, ses causes, ses inconséquences. Beigbeder links his thinking explicitly to Revel’s when he mentions him next to Huntington, Baudrillard, Adler, and Fukuyama as those theorists whom the reader may refer to in order to disentangle “le nœud géopolitique du terrorism”/ “the geopolitical tangle of terrorism” (WW, 145f./WW-E , 115).
- 38.
“Anti-Americanism is in large part jealousy and unrequited love. Deep down, the rest of the world admires American art […]” (WW-E, 18).
- 39.
See his story about Bernard Pivot, host of the “Bouillon de Culture,” that he uses as a “symbol éclatant”/”compelling example” of the French inferiority complex (WW, 31f./WW-E, 18).
- 40.
“France has the same relationship with the United States nowadays as the provinces do with Paris: a combination of admiration and contempt, a longing to be part of it and a pride at resisting. We want to know everything about them so that we can shrug our shoulders with a condescending air” (WW-E, 19).
- 41.
“On the same day, the same number of marchers are saying the same thing on the streets of New York” (WW-E, 96).
- 42.
“Everything, it seemed to him, was called by its proper name in English, and the prices in dollars gave everything its actual value. The police sirens and the car horns had the right sound, all lights their proper colours. Arriving at the center of the world, Kalf understood, meant that all the promises of the television world of his childhood longing were now redeemed, and he understood how terrible it had been as a child to find nothing of the world of the television series in his own world” (WWAMO, 73f.).
- 43.
Snowe’s statement is wrongly translated in the English version. It reads “They’re absolutely fascinated by the States” (WWAMO, 42) instead of “You are absolutely fascinated by the States,” thereby referring back to German immigrants of the early twentieth century who are mentioned in the previous passage. This interpretation of “Sie” does not make any sense either in the context of Snowe’s looking at Kalf curiously when making this statement or in the context of the conversation that follows.
- 44.
“Yes, of course [I’m fascinated]. When I saw Bush speaking at the UN today, not with a time delay or on some unreal night, but under the same sun, I began to understand the power of power” (WWAMO, 42).
- 45.
I agree here with Gerrit Bartels who stresses in his review of the novel that Hettche is not only writing the history of a generation but of a nation: “The ‘We’ that Thomas Hettche uses is not the banal ‘We’ of generations: […] No, this ‘We’ includes us all, not humanity in its entirety, but all of us who live in Germany in the 21st century,” Bartels, “Amerika, Blicke,” my translation; Rainer Moritz, however, implicitly disagrees and sees Kalf as trying to figure out “himself and his […] generation,” Moritz, “Marfa ist nicht Frankfurt am Main: Thomas Hettches Roman Woraus wir gemacht sind,” my translation.
- 46.
“Only now did Niklas Kalf fully realize that Liz had disappeared, and that knowledge flooded through him, cold and black it foamed through all the spaces of his memory and self-certainty, nothing but brackish, oily fear which paralysed him, and in which he drowned unresisting and silent, until that fine, gleaming point at the tip of his tongue, the one with which we say ‘I,’ was finally extinguished” (WWAMO, 22).
- 47.
Donnerstag, “The Documentaries of Michael Moore,” 143.
- 48.
Cf. Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order.
- 49.
“You’ve got to understand that we’re paying for your paradise! The United States, as my friend Kagan puts it, are patrolling outside your walls” (WWAMO, 170).
- 50.
“Even Auschwitz wouldn’t have meant anything here” (WWAMO, 147).
- 51.
“It always seemed as if something was missing. Could it be the eyes of the dead?” (WWAMO, 147).
- 52.
Hubert Spiegel, in a slating review after Hacker had received the recently established German Book Prize, complained exactly about this compounding of 9/11 and the Holocaust: “Anything of shock value is thrown into the mix: September 11, child abuse, drug abuse, Holocaust. Does the new boss of a latently homosexual and unhappily married young attorney, who is offered an attractive job in London only because a good friend of his dies in the World Trade Center, really have to be a homosexual Jew who was persecuted by the Nazis […]?” Spiegel, “Achtung, Kurve!,” my translation. One answer to Spiegel would be that the Holocaust has to figure in German 9/11 texts. While texts like Hettche’s and Hacker’s may thus at times seem to dwell on an excess of historical tragedies, it is the Holocaust that German literature needed to revisit after 9/11 to put an end to the supposed decade of the “holiday from history” in the wake of the end of the Cold War and, for Germans, in the wake of re-unification.
- 53.
Windows on the World also compares the attacks of September 11, 2001 to the Holocaust for a similar function, namely in order to—ironically—capture the event as one that defies representation or to “deny both events their respective singularity” (Clemente, “Beigbeder’s Evil Personae,” 113). Chapter “10:10,” the one preceding the announcement of David Yorston’s death, compares the restaurant “Windows on the World” directly to the gas chambers in Auschwitz, a comparison that is cut from the English translation. On the politics of such cuts, see Clemente, “Beigbeder’s Evil Personae,” 112f. More indirect comparisons, however, such as Beigbeder’s claim that he is not editing out the terror of the events as Spielberg did according to some critics in Schindler’s List (WW, 251), are present in the English translation.
- 54.
One example is Kalf spotting the headline of the New York Times announcing Imre Kertesz as the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. In this scene, the novel once more links 9/11 and its aftermath to the Holocaust and suggests that taking a position towards 9/11 means taking a position towards its own history: “NOBEL FOR HUNGARIAN WRITER WHO SURVIVED DEATH CAMPS. Vorsichtig beugte Kalf sich hinab und angelte sich die Zeitung mit den Fingerspitzen. New York, Friday, October 11, 2002. CONGRESS AUTHORIZES BUSH TO USE FORCE AGAINST IRAQ” (Wwgs, 111).
- 55.
“The Excelsior, an old immigrants’ hotel” (WWAMO, 16).
- 56.
The reader might wonder why, for example, no worrying family members try to track Kalf down through his credit card payments, or why Kalf, a freelance writer in the year 2002, does not have an email address which family members would expect him to use to stay in contact. In a highly unlikely dialogue Kalf tells Lavinia Sims that he cannot access his email account in the US, and when Lavinia asks him to set up an account in order to forward him pictures of Liz that she has received from the kidnappers, she even asks whether he knows how to do that (Wwgs, 89). Compare Steinfeld who criticizes these and other implausibilities, Steinfeld, “Der deutsche Dichter und sein Satan. Ein Liebling der Kritik: Thomas Hettches Roman Woraus wir gemacht sind.”
- 57.
Arendt, “We Refugees,” 271.
- 58.
Ibid., 271.
- 59.
“Writing this hyperrealist novel is made more difficult by reality itself. Since September 11, 2001, reality has not only outstripped fiction, it’s destroying it” (WW-E, 8).
- 60.
Porra, “Risse in der Mimesis,” 172; my translation.
- 61.
“Few things have excited you so much as the supposition that you can’t really tell what’s real and what’s imagined” (WWAMO, 167).
- 62.
“[…] he thought again of Dostoevsky and the fact that anything can happen when you don’t know what’s a dream and what’s real” (WWAMO, 167).
- 63.
Simons, “‘Amerika gibt es nicht,’” 197.
- 64.
Ibid., 196.
- 65.
Steffen Richter, in what I consider the most insightful review of the novel, notes that the title Woraus wir gemacht sind “sounds like Shakespeare’s The Tempest – which is also a story of shipwreck in the new world, and where Prospero suggests that we are made of ‘such stuff that dreams are made of,’” cf. “Utopie in der Prärie. Der Hauch des amerikanischen Imperiums: Thomas Hettches Roman Woraus wir gemacht sind,” my translation. Without commenting, Auffermann entitles her review “Der Stoff, aus dem der Westen ist” [The stuff that the West is made of] and Brandt summarizes major plot lines of the novel by punning “Das ist der Stoff Woraus wir gemacht sind” [That is the stuff that we are made of], cf. Auffermann, “Der Stoff, aus dem der Westen ist,” 50–52 and Brandt, “Ein Schlaukopf haut rein.”
- 66.
Thomas Steinfeld criticizes “the permanent outdoing” that characterizes plot and style: “This outdoing begins with Kalf’s partner, who is not only partner, but also pregnant. It continues in the representations of the United States […],” cf. Steinfeld, “Der deutsche Dichter,“ my translation.
- 67.
Examples of how Woraus wir gemacht sind takes up motifs from Simmel include that Simmel’s Roland, a journalist, wants to cover a story about a Czech refugee just like Kalf is covering the story of the refugee Eugen Meerkaz, he and his colleague Engelhardt witness how a pimp attempts to abduct a pregnant woman (and can, in contrast to Kalf, just prevent the abduction), that Engelhardt comes into the possession of sensitive material (which both CIA and KGB—rather than a Hollywood film producer, as in Hettche’s novel—are after), and that Engelhardt’s apartment is ransacked and he is killed, as Frank Holdt is for not delivering the sensitive material on Eugen Meerkaz.
- 68.
Steinfeld notes that Hettche tries to bridge the “high” and the “low” and is adamant about Hettche’s failure to do so, cf. Steinfeld, “Der deutsche Dichter.” For an ironic literary treatment of the expectation of the German novel to be as readable as the American model, cf. also Kristof Magnusson’s novel Das war ich nicht (2010).
- 69.
“American culture dominates the planet not for economic reasons, but because of its quality” (WW-E, 17).
- 70.
“American artists are constantly searching for something new, but something new which speaks to us of ourselves. They know how to reconcile imagination and accessibility, originality with the desire to seduce” (WW-E, 17f.).
- 71.
Cf. Martin, “Die unreifen Verehrer amerikanischer Helden.” The picture is complicated by Martin’s polemic contention that, with the exception of John Ford and Jonathan Franzen, the American authors that are embraced by the German public are those who represent a clichéd version of the United States that suits European tastes; however, this dynamic echoes the dynamic that I trace in Beigbeder’s and Hettche’s novels, namely that of using a specific image of the US for one’s own, narcissist purposes, on the level of readers and the book market.
- 72.
Däwes, “On Contested Ground (Zero): Literature and the Transnational Challenge of Remembering 9/11,” 528. Susana Araújo makes a similar point in passing, cf. “Images of Terror, Narratives of Captivity: The Visual Spectacle of 9/11 and Its Transatlantic Projections,” 30f.
- 73.
“jealousy and unrequited love” (WW-E, 18).
- 74.
“lightning rod” (WW-E, 28).
- 75.
On Beigbeder’s technique of anticipating “accusations of self-indulgence, cynicism, narcissism, trivialization, bad taste or exploitation” to the extent that the novel seems “almost hermetically sealed and, thus, resistant to criticism,” see Martin Randall’s excellent chapter on Beigbeder’s metafiction, cf. Randall, 9/11 and the Literature of Terror, 69 and 70.
- 76.
“American authors think of themselves as realists when in fact they are all Marxists! They’re hypercritical of their own country. No democracy in the world is as contested by its own literature” (WW-E, 18).
- 77.
“French literature is a long history of disobedience […] The singular interest of living in a democracy is to criticize it” (WW-E, 301).
- 78.
“We’ve all been there, thanks: good riddance, it only gets you into shit. America, with its youthful enthusiasm, still wants to see what it feels like to rule the world” (WW-E, 114).
- 79.
“America has entered the age of Descartes” (WW-E, 273).
- 80.
“France can still help, my country could be useful for something for once. France is not America’s mother – that’s England – but it could claim to be America’s godmother. You know, the crusty old aunt with the facial-hair problem whom you only see on big family occasions, her breath stinks, you’re a bit ashamed of her, more often than not you forget she exists but who reminds you of her existence from time to time by giving you a beautiful gift” (WW-E, 194).
- 81.
“In the nineteenth century, American poets spoke French” (WW-E, 16).
- 82.
“It was creepy, needing so desperately to be loved. It was at that moment, I think, that I decided to be famous” (WW-E, 83).
- 83.
“Perhaps they prefer to forget” (WW-E, 15).
- 84.
“From a strictly commercial viewpoint, they’re not wrong. But what’s the point in traveling if it’s to eat the same things you eat at home?” (WW-E, 51).
- 85.
“And Americans should stop trying to export their lifestyle to the entire planet” (WW-E, 51). By contrast, earlier visitors to Paris, American expat artists and writers like Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Ernest Hemingway, in whose footsteps Beigbeder rediscovers Paris, represent “good Americans” who do not export their lifestyle to France but appreciate Paris for what, in the eyes of Beigbeder, it really is and like the right things about it, which he identifies as “sexe, […] littérature et […] mort” (WW, 147); and Hemingway, though physically in Idaho, chooses to spend the last years of his life “mentalement” in Paris, writing A Moveable Feast (see WW, 168f.).
- 86.
“designed by a Frenchman (Christian Liaigre)” (WW-E, 289).
- 87.
“The left hindquarter seemed to be double, and the unnatural, slightly shorter leg had grown crookedly out of the other one” (WWAMO, 169).
- 88.
“as though there were teats” (WWAMO, 169).
- 89.
“Is that supposed to mean something? […] What’s that supposed to mean?” (WWAMO, 169).
- 90.
“But Kalf is Calf, right?” (my translation; not in the English translation by Shaun Whiteside). For the reader of the German original, the series of the words “Kalb-Kalf-Calf” immediately evokes “Calw,” the birth place of Hermann Hesse, which is, moreover, pronounced “Kalb” in regional dialect. Hettche thus suggests that Woraus wir gemacht sind must also be read as a novel of growing up, a Bildungsroman of the twenty-first century which takes as its protagonist a 40-year-old “child.”
- 91.
Shortly after the description of Kalf’s childlike physicality, Liz also explains to Al Snowe that her husband is a biographer and thus writing about other people’s lives because he is almost without agency with regard to his own: “Niklas ist etwas hilflos, was sein eigenes Leben angeht” (Wwgs, 10) / “Niklas is a bit awkward where his own life is concerned” (WWAMO, 4).
- 92.
“Staying here, he knew, would be the temptation. Always to be part of this country. And he knew that for that to happen, Liz’s life was what it would take” (WWAMO, 173).
- 93.
Daphne Abdela appears later in the novel and prompts Kalf’s second recitation from Ovid in person; a discussion of her complicated role would be leading too far away from my argument here. What should be noted, though, is that the Ovidian intertext and the reflections on metamorphoses vs. monstrosities are lost in the English translation: presumably because of legal issues, the historical Daphne Abdela is replaced by the fictional character of Imogen Engel; the quotations from Ovid are replaced by quotations from the Gospel of John and Goethe’s Faust, with rather different implications.
- 94.
“Nothing keeps its own shape, and Nature renews / By recycling one form into another. / Nothing dies, believe me, in the world as a whole / [But only changes its looks.]” Book XV, The Teachings of Pythagoras, l. 278–281. Not in the English translation by Shaun Whiteside; quoted from Ovid, Metamorphoses, 425. Hettche uses the classic translation by Johann Heinrich Voß.
- 95.
The novel suggests that as Parsons’s wife and Elsa Meerkaz were involved in the rituals, Parsons, Meerkaz, “Pinky,” and Hans Holdt engaged in heterosexual intercourse as part of the spiritual techniques of the higher orders Ordo Templi Orientis under Aleister Crowley.
- 96.
While the role of conspiracies and conspiracy theorizing in the novel cannot be discussed here in detail, my brief sketch of the outrageous turns of the plot may at least suggest the following: By making the German emigrants part of a conspiratorial sect and drawing Kalf into a grotesque, outlandish conspiracy plot that he needs to solve, the novel further undergirds the identity issues that these Germans, who have “become American,” are facing: they are lacking a stable core and pursue ways of drawing the boundaries of self that, from an outside perspective, must seem paranoid at best. On the function of conspiring and conspiracy theorizing as a strategy to deal with one’s own perceived “powerlessness,” which is one aspect of a lack of sense of self and identity, see Fenster, Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture, viii. For a comprehensive analysis of conspiracy theories in French and German culture and literature, cf. Jean-Philippe Mathy’s chapter “Seeing is Disbelieving: The Contested Visibility of 9/11 in France” in this volume.
- 97.
“Elsa Meerkaz smiled as if she was contemplating a decision that gave her pleasure” (my translation; not in the English translation by Shaun Whiteside).
- 98.
Brandt, “Ein Schlaukopf haut rein.”
- 99.
“You’re somehow a person of the Eighties, aren’t you? […] All for you! It’s just all for you, my son” (WWAMO, 173).
- 100.
“the late Empire, when the Caesars were roaming the borders like wolves, getting involved in persistent defensive battles against the barbarians, and being born and crowned in cities like Trier or Byzantium. They no longer knew Rome” (WWAMO, 43).
- 101.
The choice of this particular autograph that Müller composed during his stay at Villa Aurora in the hills of Pacific Palisades, as well as the text’s double play with “Asia,” the name of the woman Kalf is sexually drawn to at the same time that he is caught up and trying to escape Germany’s “past,” are as such highly evocative. Villa Aurora, today an artists’ residence, is the former home of Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger and was one of the central places where German emigrant writers and artists met. Elsa Meerkaz’ home is modelled after Villa Aurora where Hettche worked as a fellow in 2002, seven years after Heiner Müller.
- 102.
Müller’s first lines are given in the German original in Shaun Whiteside’s English translation, but may be paraphrased as follows: “The trees bow to / the wind from the Pacific that knows about / the permanence of the metropolis.”
- 103.
Mayer and Müller, Der Tod ist ein Irrtum. Bilder – Texte – Autografen, 122f.
- 104.
Going beyond the idea that empires are always doomed to self-destruct, the novel also suggests that aspirations to empire can never be benevolent and innocent. It comments on the aggressive nature of imperial expansionism in the figure of Jack Jackson. The producer not only wants to get hold of the formula for a revolutionary kind of rocket fuel in order to win a ten million dollar prize for privately sending a space ship into orbit, but thereby he eventually wants to push the frontier of the American empire further out into space in order to save white civilization before its extermination on Earth. Notions of empire, the novel suggests, are always coupled with supremacist ideology, not unlike the fascist ideology that Kalf has to come to terms with in his own history.
- 105.
On Windows on the World as a text that is dominated by fear of emasculation and struggles to defend “white middle-class masculinity,” see Araújo, “Images of Terror,” here 34; for a related consideration of masculinity after 9/11, see Christ, “Männer.”
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Michael Butter and our students at the German National Academic Foundation’s summer academy in Greifswald in 2011 for the discussions of Beigbeder’s Windows on the World and US American representations of 9/11, as well as Małgorzata Myk and our students for the discussions of Polish and German representations of 9/11 in a joint course held in November 2011 at the University of Łódź and January 2012 at the University of Gießen. I am indebted to many of their insights on European treatments of 9/11. A special thanks goes to my student Bruno Gehrts who tackled Woraus wir gemacht sind in his independent project.
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Christ, B. (2017). National Identity and Literary Culture After 9/11: Pro- and Anti-Americanism in Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World (2003) and Thomas Hettche’s Woraus wir gemacht sind (2006). In: Frank, S. (eds) 9/11 in European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64209-3_9
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