10 - On Disappearing: Reading Ulrike Almut Sandig with Sylvia Bovenschen

Summary

FLAMINGOS (FLAMINGOS), Ulrike Almut Sandig's first volume of short stories, came out in 2010. Sandig was already well known as the author of two volumes of poetry, Zunder (Tinder, 2005) and Streumen (Streumen, 2007), followed in 2011 by Dickicht (Thick of It, 2018). In 2015 a second collection of stories, Buch gegen das Verschwinden (Book against Disappearance), appeared, followed in 2016, by a fourth poetry collection, ich bin ein feld voller raps verstecke die Rehe und leuchte wie dreizehn Ölgemälde übereinandergelegt (I am a field full of oil-seed rape give cover to deer and shine like thirteen oil paintings laid one on top of the other). Her first novel, Monster wie wir (Monsters Like Us), came out in July 2020. Sandig's multimedial work also includes radio plays, audio books, and collaborations with musicians, DJs, and other poets and translators.

Sandig's prose collections, both subtitled Geschichten (stories), immediately call attention to the significance of storytelling: “Es gibt mich gar nicht. Aber es gibt diese Geschichte” (I don't exist. But this story exists). This paradoxical statement in “Über mich” (About Me), the first story in Flamingos, implies that the writing subject changes through time, but the stories are always present, brought back to life in reading. The echoing titles of Buch gegen das Verschwinden and of the first story, “Gegen das Verschwinden” (Against Disappearance), indicate a cycle of stories with a purpose. We invent or read stories so that past and present will not just disappear: we tell stories against disappearance. In this essay we focus on Sandig but also discuss Sylvia Bovenschen's experimental text Verschwunden (Disappeared; 2008), where the leitmotiv of disappearance runs through many disparate short texts. The comparison highlights different traditions: Bovenschen's Verschwunden is descended from modernist Kurzprosa, the short prose sketches that flourished in the early twentieth century; Sandig's fluid prose echoes nineteenth-century forms such as the fairy tale or the poetic-realist Erzählung (tale). Yet Sandig's stories constantly undermine any surface impression of harmonious reality. In the face of collapsing political ideologies after the fall of the Berlin Wall, her loosely connected stories reflect different facets of an unstable world.