Melancholy in Wilhelm Genazino's Novels and Its Construction as Other

Summary

ONE OF THE MOST PROFOUND explorations of sadness, melancholy, and boredom in the landscape of contemporary German literature is evident in the works of Wilhelm Genazino (1943–), a prolific writer based in Frankfurt am Main who won the Georg Büchner Prize in 2004. Genazino's breakthrough work was the trilogy Abschaffel (1977), which tells the story of the eponymous protagonist, Abschaffel, a bored and melancholy man who despises his job as a bureaucrat in a transportation company, cannot forge lasting relationships with women, has hypochondriac tendencies, and ends up in the final part of the trilogy being treated in a clinic for his various physical and mental ills. Most of Genazino's novels since then follow a similar pattern. They feature a normally middle-aged — and with one exception — male protagonist who works in a job well below his qualifications and education. This figure entertains relationships with different women, and his accounts often focus on the emotional and sexual aspects of these relationships. Genazino's protagonist would thus seem to be manifestation of the prototypical everyman if it were not for his compulsive reflections and long walks, as epigonal flaneur, through the city. The protagonist's internal focalization is the common thread uniting these uneventful novels; except in some of the earlier works, he usually also functions as the narrator. His observations constantly shift between aesthetic stylization of the meaningful minutiae of everyday life that acquire the appearance of still lifes, and contemplation of his inner self.