1 - Seeing Strangely: Birgit Vanderbeke's Ways of Knowing

Summary

What can she know?

— Lorraine Code

Being is not only itself, it escapes itself.

— Emmanuel Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow”

Nomadic Knowing

Postmodernism is widely understood to privilege disunity over coherence, leaving morality an uncertain business. If the subject is joyously free and nomadic, how can attachments to others emerge and persist? The “strange subjects” this study explores all in fact assert ethical behaviors alongside, or within, mobility. As the work of Sara Ahmed and Rosi Braidotti implies, a refusal to be fixed and bounded is indeed a prerequisite for an openness to engage with others. The subject's performances are in any case always relational. This insight comes to the fore in the work of Birgit Vanderbeke, a writer who also challenges Germanness and gender. As we will see, her work practices and encourages a strange way of knowing.

Vanderbeke was born in 1956 in Dahme/Mark in the GDR, and moved with her family to West Germany in 1961. She was brought up in Frankfurt am Main, where she later studied law and French. Her first novella, Das Muschelessen (1990; The Mussel Feast, 2013) received the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize. In 1993, Vanderbeke moved to the south of France. She is the author of eleven subsequent novellas, a cookbook, and a travel guide. A volume of essays, interviews, and reviews concerned with Vanderbeke appeared in Germany in 2001. In Anglo-American German studies, however, her work has received little attention.