3 - Disorientations: Queer, East German Nomadism in the Work of Antje Rávic Strubel

Summary

Will there be a place for my life?

— Judith Butler, Undoing Gender

Who knows where we might turn[?]

— Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology

Queer, East German Nomadism

We have seen how nomadism involves a challenge to masculinist ways of knowing and to arrogant humanism. In this chapter, I introduce the idea of queer nomadism, which opposes both nationalism and heterosexism. Drawing on Sara Ahmed' ideas concerning orientation to read the work of Antje Rávic Strubel, I argue that Strubel' works practice an aesthetics of disorientation. This disorientation is bound up with and expressive of a specifically post-Wende, East German form of trouble, as we will see.

Antje Strubel was born in Potsdam in 1974, and grew up in Lud-wigsfelde in the GDR. After leaving school in 1992, she trained to be a bookseller. From 1994, Strubel studied American studies, psychology, and literature at Potsdam University and at New York University. She worked as a lighting technician at Wings Theater in New York. She gained her master' degree in 2001, and is now based in Potsdam, spending much time in Sweden, where she owned a house for a while. Offene Blende (Aperture), her first novel, appeared in 2001 and attracted praise. It was followed by six further novels and a guidebook to Sweden. Strubel has also translated into German Joan Didion' memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, and other writings by Didion. I view Strubel' work as both “queer” and “nomadic,” and discuss these terms now, exploring their possible convergences as well as how they interlock with the question of (East) Germanness.