5 - The Critique of Instrumental Reason: Max Frisch's Homo faber and Christa Wolf's Störfall

Summary

WHILE MAX FRISCH'S 1964 NOVEL Mein Name sei Gantenbein reveals the continuing investment of the bourgeois male author/subject in a form of subjectivity based on phallic control and (self-) mastery, a rather earlier work by Frisch, the 1957 novel Homo faber, adopts a more critical and more effectively ironic stance on the fantasies of mastery — both of self and of the natural world — underpinning the Enlightenment construction of the de facto male/masculine subject. This chapter looks at Frisch's Homo faber alongside a later work, Christa Wolf's 1987 novel Störfall, written in response to the nuclear reactor explosion at Chernobyl in 1986, in order to examine the way in which gender functions symbolically in the critique of Enlightenment instrumental rationality in these texts. The readings of Frisch and Wolf are preceded by a brief consideration of the tradition of critical ambivalence vis-à-vis the achievements of modernity in German culture, in order to illuminate the way in which gender maps symbolically onto the negative assessment of modern scientific and technological endeavor in these texts.

Enlightenment and Its Shadow: The Ambivalence of Modernity

The privileging of the human faculty of reason and of the notion that humankind could, through reason, achieve mastery over the forces of nature to which it had hitherto been subject lay at the heart of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinking in which the self-understanding of Western modernity has its roots. The hero of enlightened modernity was — and in many respects still is — the human subject who, through the active submission of the forces of nature within and outside of himself to rational control, aims to wrest freedom from the realm of necessity.