Kaltenburg by Marcel Beyer

I" Viktor Pelevin's I unreal storymade real. Fiction, page 69 G?ven Turan's poetry of incandescence. Verse, page 74 Aboriginal Literature | ina groundbreaking anthology. = Miscellaneous, page 78 | 3 Fiction Marcel Beyer. Kaltenburg. Frankfurt am Main. Suhrkamp. 2008. 395 pages. 19.80. isbn978-3-518-41920-5 With his recent novel Kaltenburg, Marcel Beyer reinforces and hones his reputation as an author forboth the formerEast andWest Germany. Hailed by theNew Yorker magazine as one of the best young novelists in theworld and recipient of the most prestigious literaryawards in Germany, such as theUwe Johnson and Heinrich Boll awards, Beyer the matizes German history and its role in contemporary society inhis liter ary works, which are characterized by their intricate, indeed complex narratives. Kaltenburg, a challenging read due to its ever-changing narrative chronology and time frames, focus es on the internationally acclaimed zoologist and animal behaviorist, Ludwig Kaltenburg, as told by the first-person narrator, Herman Funk, to a young interpreter. The work is set in the context of the last years of theThird Reich and theGerman Democratic Republic in the 1950s. Kaltenburg's and Funk's histories are elaborately intertwinedyet shroud ed in mystery.As a young boy, Funk and his family had contact with Kaltenburg inPosen, before theyfled to Dresden to escape the advance of the Russian army. In Dresden, Funk's family was killed during the English firebombing of the city in 1945; the orphaned boy reunited with Kaltenburg when he arrived in Dresden afterhaving spent years on theEastern Front and in a Russian camp. They experience the rise of theSoviet-backed state in theGDR, the return of German prisoners of war throughout the 1950s, Stalin's death, collectivization of farms and industry,and, finally,thebuilding of theBerlinWall. Despite theirfather son relationship,Kaltenburg secretly flees to the West and resettles inhis hometown of Vienna. Though criticshave pointed out similarities between the fictitious character Kaltenburg and Konrad Lorenz, a zoologist in theGDR, as E well as similarities between other E literary and historical characters, E Kaltenburg should not be reduced E to a historical novel chronicling the E life and times of certain figures or E an analysis ofNazi or East German E oppression. With his crafty style, E Beyer raises questions about memo- E ry,one's personal history, and how E to come to termswith thepast and E memory, ifthatiseven possible. Fur- E thermore, these overarching quesE tionsare posed within thecontextof E a unified Germany, whose tumultu- E ous history has become even more E complex since unification. As soon E as Funk attempts tonarrate another E person's history?namely, Kalten- E burg's?he (and the reader) begin to E realize how difficult itis toconstruct E and interpretthisnarrative.Whose E perspective of the past should be E accepted? How does one juggle per- E sonal career, ambition, and politiE cal activity?Kaltenburg adapted to E both regimes, prospered politically E and academically, yet ultimately E recognized how political ideology E impeded scientific inquiry and thus E fled the country.Reminiscent of the E recent controversies of G?nter Grass E and his SS past, Kaltenburg hides E his Nazi past afterhis emigration to E Austria. E Kaltenburg is a compelling E novel because it refuses to answer E every last question, instead leav- E ing the reader to reflectand assign E Marcel Beyer Kaltenburg Roman Suhrkamp ^^^^1 H^H January February 2009 i61 H > w 2 w H W H D O iiiiiiiiiiiiiiinii meaning and cause to events?and thus reflectinghow individuals con struct historical narratives about their lives. Gregory H. Wolf North CentralCollege Merlinda Bobis. Banana Heart Sum mer. New York. Bantam Dell. 2008. 257 pages. $12. isbn978-0-385-34112-7 In her inventive novel Banana Heart Summer, Merlinda Bobis draws the reader into the world of her young protagonist, Nenita, through the senses, imparting a rich idea of place, characters, and culture. Sights, sounds, and smells are translated into taste in a narrative ripe with synesthetic metaphors, and we are encouraged to understand relation ships between people like theblend ingof ingredients ina recipe. Nenita, her family, and her neighbors see starvation all around them,and so food takes on a

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