Narratives of Femininity in Judith Hermann's Summerhouse, Later

Narratives of Femininity in Judith Hermann’s Summerhouse,
   Later

   Esther K. Bauer

   Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature & Culture,
   Volume 25, 2009, pp. 50-75 (Article)

   Published by University of Nebraska Press

       For additional information about this article
       https://muse.jhu.edu/article/363357

Access provided at 24 Mar 2020 21:08 GMT with no institutional affiliation

Narratives of Femininity in Judith Hermann’s
                 Summerhouse, Later
                             Esther K. Bauer

Reading Judith Hermann’s Summerhouse, Later through the lens of New
Feminism reveals, hidden underneath the stories’ apolitical surface, a
provocative analysis of heterosexual relationships in the Berlin Republic.
The stories propose that patriarchal structures continue to determine
women’s lives, and suggest that the formation of feminine subjectivity
requires women to take control of and create their own narratives of
femininity. Hermann’s stories reflect New Feminists’ focus on the private
sphere and their demand for women’s freedom to choose any image of
femininity, including traditional roles. Following today’s feminists, these
texts show the paralyzing effect of prescribed narratives, and conse-
quently do not put forth alternative images that could become equally
confining. Instead, they advocate a cultural-historical perspective for
contemporary feminist efforts, emphasizing that feminism, even while
seeking women’s autonomy, is a process within history that requires
women to acknowledge the continuing relevance of past narratives of
femininity. (EKB)

     Compared to authors who openly challenge contemporary notions of
masculinity and femininity and sexual politics, such as Karen Duve, Inka
Parei, Julia Franck, or Charlotte Roche, Judith Hermann creates
characters who appear to follow much more closely traditional gender
roles and views of appropriate sexual behavior. As a result, her stories
seem to lack the obvious feminist concerns these other authors’ works
convey. However, a reading of her 1998 short story collection Summer-
house, Later (Sommerhaus, später) through the lens of so-called “New
Feminism” reveals that underneath the private, apolitical surface of her
stories Hermann shows how despite the achievements of Second Wave
feminism, women’s lives in post-unification Germany continue to be

Women in German Yearbook 25 (2009)

Esther K. Bauer                               51
oriented by traditional bourgeois social roles. Often considered the author
of only a small œuvre—three volumes of short stories to date—whose
major talent is her ability to catch her generation’s mood, Hermann
nevertheless has a perceptive eye for the gender dynamics of her time,
and she skillfully challenges her readers’ views. Compared to other
feminist writers, her strategies are, however, more subtle, and rely less on
open provocation.
     In recent years, so-called “new,” “third wave,” or “Neo-Feminism”
has begun to counter antifeminist tendencies and the widespread yet false
perception that gender equality has been achieved to a large extent—a
view that has developed since the 1990s and that has been fostered by the
decreased public visibility of feminist efforts. During the last decade of
the twentieth century, feminism in Germany presented itself as less
ideological and often more pragmatic, as women tried increasingly to
work with and within patriarchal structures (Holland-Cunz 161–73; “Jana
Hensel”). Most practical feminist work of this period was done through
equal opportunity offices, while the theoretical debate moved into
academia, leading, in turn, to the depoliticization of the movement.1
     Especially to the women who grew up during those years, the second
wave feminism that began in the 1970s appeared “dusty,” its representa-
tives unattractive and bitter. Benefiting from the very achievements of
those “old” feminists from the 1970s, many belonging to this younger
generation saw no need to continue the fight for gender equality. Growing
individuation and a new pluralism furthered a general unwillingness to
organize. However, once in their twenties and thirties, these young
women began to see a sharp discrepancy between the legally guaranteed
rights and opportunities their predecessors had won for women and their
individual experiences in the workplace and their relationships.2 These
“New Feminists” refuse, however, to see themselves as victims of
patriarchal structures, an idea that had guided feminism from its very
beginnings. Recognizing that their apolitical stance has harmed their
careers, they take responsibility for developing new images of masculin-
ity and femininity, and they expect men to collaborate with them on these
efforts. Ultimately, they do not strive to define prescriptive social roles,
but instead want all possible roles to be equally acceptable. Considering
the private a political sphere and recognizing that “today the private is as
political as never before,”3 they see their personal relationships with men
as the first feminist “frontier” (Bruns; Haaf et al.; Hensel and Raether;
Holland-Cunz; Hornung; “Jana Hensel”).4
     In her acceptance speech for the Bremer Literaturpreis/Förderpreis
(Literature Prize/Most Promising Award of the City of Bremen) in 1999,
Hermann pinpoints how narratives or stories inform subjectivity, as she

52               Judith Hermann’s Summerhouse, Later
speaks of “writing to be able to step out of and to leave myself, writing to
destroy one’s own story. Things end when one names them. They start,
but they also end.”5 This article explores which role narratives of
femininity that transgress stereotypical gender roles play in the formation
of subjectivity in Hermann’s Summerhouse, Later. I propose that the
author highlights the importance of cultural-historical awareness for the
formation of female subjectivity at the expense of offering genuinely new
images of femininity. But this allows her to emphasize that feminism,
even while seeking autonomy, is a process within history and that
feminists have to acknowledge the continuing relevance of past narratives
for this process to move forward. Such a claim contests the idea that
authentic subjectivity presupposes a wholesale rejection of past structures.
Instead, Hermann’s stories illustrate how awareness of oppressive
paradigms as well as of the battles against them can help women discover
similar structures today and can enable them to continue (as opposed to
re-invent) the feminist project. At the same time, her stories reflect the
demands made by New Feminists for a more differentiated view of
women’s needs and for greater acceptance of all images of femininity.
     My inquiry into the ways in which Summerhouse, Later reflects key
ideas of contemporary feminism starts with an analysis of the opening
story “The Red Coral Bracelet” (“Rote Korallen”). As its female first-
person narrator tells stories hoping to find a narrative that provides sense
and coherence for her life, “The Red Coral Bracelet” explores contempo-
rary gender dynamics within their historical contexts, showing that female
images continue to be determined by patriarchal structures. The story
promotes the idea that women, while aware of their historical context,
have to reclaim control of images of femininity by creating their own
narratives, yet does not itself develop those new narratives. In an
interview, Hermann said this story had almost “the function of a motto for
the book” (Geiger 49). Following her comment, the second part of my
analysis explores the degree to which the “program” laid out in the first
story is developed further in the rest of Summerhouse, Later and what the
absence of genuinely new images of femininity that characterizes the
entire volume means for a feminist project.
     Initial reactions to Summerhouse, Later were dominated by the
author’s persona and by descriptions of her tone as the “sound of a new
generation”6 and an expression of a general “Tristesse globale”
(Radisch).7 In contrast, several recent analyses read Hermann’s stories
within the context of literary traditions and cultural phenomena such as
globalization (Biendarra, “Globalization”), Neoromanticism (Borgstedt),
a postmodern “poetics of undecidedness” (Blamberger, “Poetik”), or the
figure of the flaneur (Ganeva). They succeed in showing that Hermann’s

Esther K. Bauer                                 53
works offer more than a mere reflection of the mood of Germans in their
twenties and thirties around the turn of the millennium. This view is
confirmed by several publications contesting the idea of contemporary
German literature, including Hermann’s prose, as apolitical, which had
been a commonplace since the mid-1990s (“Der Anfang”; Dreier 31;
Fitzgerald; Ganeva 265–66; Stuhr 38; Taberner 15; Ujma). Several of
these studies focus on the role of gender politics. They maintain that
contemporary female writers no longer present women as victims of a
patriarchal society, as did their predecessors in the 1970s and 1980s, but
instead discuss problems that cross gender lines (Nagelschmidt; Mingels).
Similarly, Stuart Taberner locates a “New Feminism” as part of a general
struggle to achieve authentic subjectivity in a global consumer culture,
and Lynn Marven describes techniques young female authors use to
distance themselves from traditional women’s literature. Anke Biendarra
sees relationships in Hermann’s stories as following the stereotypes of
weak women and strong men, yet concurrently as questioning traditional
gender roles by revealing them “as linguistically prefigured societal and
cultural constructs” (“Gen(d)eration” 228–29), and Inge Stephan
maintains that “The Red Coral Bracelet” undermines the literary
convention of linking femininity, water, eros, and death in the image of
the water woman (“Undine” 547–52). Brigitte Weingart highlights the
importance of the motif of “woman as image” (“Frau als Bild” 157) and
of female stereotypes in Hermann’s works, analyzing the ways in which
the author employs and modifies such clichés in her texts to test societal
boundaries without crossing them. This article continues these recent
explorations into images of femininity and questions of gender in
Hermann’s work.
     In “The Red Coral Bracelet,” Hermann evokes three narratives of
femininity central to Western cultures in order to lay out a historical-
mythological context—the figures of the mermaid, the “mad” or “sick”
woman, and the dichotomy of the housewife and mother as opposed to the
femme fatale that was a pillar of the turn-of-the-century bourgeois gender
matrix. All these narratives come together in the character of the
narrator’s great-grandmother, whose life story, and with it these images of
femininity, the narrator has adopted. In the course of “The Red Coral
Bracelet,” the young woman comes to understand the restrictive effect
these narratives have on her life and eventually frees herself from their
oppression. This process is reflected in her telling three stories: that of her
great-grandmother’s life, that of her relationship with her lover, and that
of her visit to a therapist—each marking important steps in her becoming
the author of her own story.8

54               Judith Hermann’s Summerhouse, Later
     The first part of “The Red Coral Bracelet” relates the story of the
narrator’s great-grandparents, who move to St. Petersburg at the
beginning of the twentieth century. While the great-grandfather travels
Russia on business, his wife has various affairs. When one of her lovers
gives her a red coral bracelet, her husband challenges him to a duel in
which the great-grandfather is killed.9 Soon after, his widow gives birth to
her lover’s daughter and returns to Germany on the last train to leave
Russia before the October Revolution. These great-grandparents are turn-
of-the-century figures, and their lives are organized along the gender
dichotomies that determined bourgeois existence at the time, “My great-
grandmother was beautiful. [ … ] [M]y great-grandfather was building
furnaces [ … ] for the Russian people” (1).10 Initially, the great-
grandmother appears to be a model woman and wife of this period. She
marries, follows her husband abroad, and although very unhappy there,
awaits his return from his travels. Caught in a marriage that leaves her
feeling neglected and alienated from her husband, and confined to the
space of their apartment, this figure brings to mind some of the great
nineteenth-century literary heroines, especially Anna Karenina, who also
lives in St. Petersburg, as well as Effi Briest and Emma Bovary.11
     The great-grandmother reacts to the traumatic experience of losing
her familiar environment and being alone in a foreign country with
extramarital affairs and with behavior that suggests mental illness, most
likely severe depression. Her speech reflects her inability to accept her
loss and her need to identify with the lost object, and is reminiscent of
Julia Kristeva’s description of the speech of depressed persons: “A
repetitive rhythm, a monotonous melody emerge and dominate the broken
logical sequences, changing them into recurring, obsessive litanies” (33).
Thus the great-grandmother repeats the name of a place where she and
her husband had felt connected “like a children’s song, like a lullaby,”
desperately trying to preserve a positive memory of the lost past—“Blome
Wildnis, Blome Wildnis” (3).12
     During her time, the great-grandmother’s behavior would have been
diagnosed as a nervous disorder or hysteria, so-called “women’s diseases”
that were closely related to the sharp distinction between male and female
social roles. Seen as “inherently sick” (Ehrenreich and English 12) and
fragile, nineteenth-century women were limited to the narrowly defined
roles of wives, mothers, and daughters. Any deviation from this restricted
existence was considered “sick” or “hysterical.” Initially explained as a
treatable disorder of the reproductive system (Ehrenreich and English 30–
38), hysteria was redefined by Sigmund Freud as a mental disease that
could be “cured” by bringing the patient to accept her female role through
talking. Thus women’s attempts to communicate their discontent in a

Esther K. Bauer                                55
language other than that of the dominant male discourse were doomed to
fail because male scientists successfully mastered these “abnormal acts,”
subsuming them under the male/female dualism as expressions of the
“sick other” (Chesler 140–41; Braun, “Frauenkrankheiten”).13 The great-
grandmother in Hermann’s story does not confront doctors or psychoana-
lysts trying to “cure her back” into patriarchal structures. However, the
reaction of the Russian intellectuals and artists who visit her seems
motivated by a similar need to integrate her deviating behavior into the
existing order. Her admirers embrace the great-grandmother’s depressed
mood as part of their own “Russian” mentality, and as a result, these men
do not have to acknowledge her “disease” or recognize it as an attempt to
question or escape the gendered social structures that organize their
society and make possible their affairs.
     While mental illness can be a retreat from social expectations into a
world of one’s own, adultery presents an open rejection of the female role
of wife and mother and thus constitutes a more direct attack on the
patriarchal order.14 The adulteress, whose sexuality escapes social
regulation, is closely related to the femme fatale, another female figure
with a deviant sexuality. At first glance, adultery seems incompatible with
the standard bourgeois repertoire of female social roles and may thus
appear as a rebellious act. Yet in reality, the figure of the adulteress is so
deeply inscribed in male fantasy (and part of the “silent” organization of a
society that condones a double moral standard) that her subversive
potential has been diffused through her appropriation by men. Not
surprisingly, Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Effi Briest are all
creations of male fantasy. The adulteress merely adopts a different female
role that is as deeply rooted in “Victorian” structures as are those of
mother or wife and that is considered just another expression of female
“sickness.”
     The same holds true for the figure of the mermaid, who belongs to a
long tradition of images of deviating, sexualized female “Others” who
threaten the existing order. She, too, is a creation of male fantasy, and
Hermann’s depiction of the great-grandmother as a mermaid figure
underlines further the futility of her attempts to escape her social role.
Though the notion of water as a female element goes as far back as
ancient Greek and Roman mythology, it is Romantic water women who
serve as the main intertextual reference for Hermann’s story, especially
Undine, Melusine, Loreley, and the Little Mermaid. Usually centered
around the encounter between a water woman and a human male, these
works negotiate gender roles and relations. The water woman’s split
body, half human and half fish, represents perfectly the two opposing
images of femininity dominating the nineteenth century, femme fatale and

56               Judith Hermann’s Summerhouse, Later
desexualized saint. It reflects men’s fears that underneath—or below—the
saint, the deadly monster’s fish tail may lurk (Stuby 68–69). The mermaid
embodied men’s ambivalent attitudes towards untamed female sexuality:
on the one hand their desire for eroticism untainted by rational thought
(Stephan, “Weiblichkeit” 239), and on the other hand their fear of losing
themselves in this experience.15
     The great-grandmother is depicted as the quietly suffering “good”
woman who turns into the adulterous femme fatale, thus representing the
two images that are joined in the figure of the water woman. Hermann’s
text leaves no doubt that her Russian lovers stylize her as a mermaid
figure, “the beautiful pale one with the fair hair who was said to live up
on Maly Prospekt, almost always by herself and in rooms as dark, soft,
and cool as the sea” (4). The visiting “artists and scholars sat down on the
deep, soft sofas and chairs, sinking into the heavy, dark materials” as if
they were drowning (4).16 Corals are the jewelry of mermaids and
nymphs, and it is a lover who gives the title’s red coral bracelet to the
great-grandmother, underlining this role and the attraction it has for him.
The night her husband returns home, the great-grandmother is shown with
a mirror, comb, and jewelry, evoking Heine’s famous “Loreley”-poem.
The equanimity with which she puts on the red coral bracelet recalls the
image of the cold, manipulative, and destructive Loreley figure.
     As the classical love token known from nineteenth-century romances,
the bracelet is part of the bourgeois “code” and thus unequivocally
communicates the great-grandmother’s adultery to her husband. However,
hidden underneath the surface of this seemingly successful non-verbal
exchange between the great-grandparents is a failed attempt to communi-
cate. Whereas for the great-grandmother the bracelet is a means to
“voice” her pain and anger, her husband, instead of perceiving the
bracelet as an expression of her feelings and desires, only understands it
as proof of her adultery and hence as a symbol of an attack on his honor.
Shoshana Felman describes this male perception of women, as she writes,
“‘Woman’ [ … ] is the exact metaphorical measure of the narcissism of
man” (34); she exists only as she fills a role within his system. The great-
grandmother’s attempt to use the bracelet, a well established symbol
within the bourgeois, male-dominated order, to undermine this very order,
is bound to fail. The coral bracelet of the mermaid myth and the image of
femininity it symbolizes have been appropriated by bourgeois patriarchal
thought, and the only rebellion it can represent is one within this system.
The story’s setting supports this reading: the great-grandmother’s watery
realm and all of her rebellions are placed within the apartment her
husband rents for her.

Esther K. Bauer                                 57
     The narrator identifies with her great-grandmother, and, wearing the
coral bracelet, the young woman imagines partaking in what she falsely
considers her forebear’s successful revolt. In reality, the bracelet
symbolizes the two women’s “confinement” in structures drawn by
(male) others, which the younger inherited with her great-grandmother’s
story. In the second part of “The Red Coral Bracelet,” Hermann places
the narrator in an environment where male and female roles and other
dichotomies often perceived as gendered are no longer organized along
lines as clear-cut as in the Russian part. At the same time, her lover
questions the validity of the narrator’s inherited story, disappointing her
hope that this great-grandson of a friend of the great-grandmother from
Russia would tell the St. Petersburg stories with her and thus keep her
“inherited” story alive. Deprived of her great-grandmother’s story and
placed in a gender-transgressive environment that does not offer sufficient
guidance regarding distinct social roles, the young woman has to face her
lack of a story and the threat this lack poses to her self-understanding.
This experience causes an existential crisis that eventually allows her to
free herself from the old, male-dominated (hi)story.
     This second part of the narrative is set in the lover’s apartment. De-
picted as a water world under male rule, the lover’s realm breaks with the
tradition of depicting water as a female element. Paradoxically, in
Hermann’s redescription, this new water realm is devoid of any erotic
dimension and instead appears desiccated. The lover himself is compared
to a dying, grey, cold, mute fish.17 Similar to the great-grandmother, he
seems to suffer from the “women’s disease” of depression,18 and his
sphere’s closeness to death—the apartment also overlooks the cemetery—
and his extremely passive stance and “madness” are seen traditionally as
feminine qualities (Chesler 100; Braun, “Frauenkrankheiten” 110). As an
argument with the narrator shows, he also fights “like a girl”: pulling hair,
biting, and scratching are considered typically female techniques of
physical defense. In addition, the lover’s sphere breaks with gender
conventions when elements from fairy-tales or myths appear in this male
world that more ordinarily would be informed by rational categories.
Thus the number “seven,” which is considered a perfect or magical
number in many cultures and religions and in astrology, and plays a
central role in biblical stories, fairy-tales, and folk superstition, rules the
lover’s genealogy,19 his environment mirrors his moods, and the long-
dead great-grandmother appears at his door. At the end of the story, the
surreal image of the dead lover, “drifting [ … ] on his watery bed, his pale
belly turned to the ceiling, [ … ] dust balls [ … ] caught in his hair,
trembling softly” (21),20 reads like a parody of Romantic depictions of
Ophelia floating “mermaid-like” on the water on a bed of flowers

58                Judith Hermann’s Summerhouse, Later
(Shakespeare 1064).21 The lover’s scientific, demystifying view of the
coral beads as skeleton pieces rather than jewelry or love tokens, is,
however, in accordance with the conventional male role, and, further-
more, with his sphere’s proximity to standstill and death.
     Losing her inherited life narrative, the narrator starts to think about
her own story, yet only to realize that there is nothing she can refer to:
“But where was my story without my great-grandmother? I didn’t know”
(14).22 Her body perception reflects this experience of loss: “I felt slender
and skinny, even though I wasn’t” (12).23 The use of the German word
“mager” points to anorexia, often considered the modern expression of
women’s ill-adjustment to gender constraints, as a subtext to her crisis.24
The anorexic woman strives to escape the images that define the female
body and femininity and to gain autonomy as a “form of self-definition”
(Braun, “Das Kloster” 228). Both female protagonists’ diseases indicate
their desire to escape restrictive “man-made” narratives of femininity, yet
in the narrator’s case this requires overcoming the idealized image of her
great-grandmother because that image is conditioned by patriarchal
structures. Hermann visualizes this struggle in an image reminiscent of
fairy-tales or dreams: repeatedly, the great-grandmother appears at the
apartment door to take her great-granddaughter home, but the latter
refuses to come, thus taking the first step to live her life and create her
story.25 This is confirmed when for the last time she asks her lover to let
her tell the old stories, “I want to tell them to you so I can leave them all
behind and move on” (16)—articulating the same desire that drives Judith
Hermann’s own writing.26
     Psychoanalysis has played a key role in “curing” both hysteria and
anorexia, these diseases of female protest (Braun, “Frauenkrankheiten”
121). Yet many feminist scholars have criticized analysts for their
phallocentric approaches to female patients and their technique’s
significant role in consolidating the patriarchal order. The therapist’s
practice in “The Red Coral Bracelet” reflects these power structures: “The
room really was very large, almost empty except for that desk, the
therapist behind it, and a little chair in front of it” (17).27 The analyst’s
tapping his desk with a pencil, the classic phallic symbol, highlights
further the gender dynamics at play. The floor of the therapist’s office is
covered with a “soft, sea-blue, deep-blue carpet” (17),28 indicating that he
has “domesticated” the female water world into a commodity he “walks
on.” In view of these gendered power structures, it seems only consistent
that the narrator’s liberation from the constraints of traditional role
expectations would result in her therapist’s symbolic death.
     Unable to communicate with the therapist verbally, the narrator
follows her great-grandmother’s example and uses the coral bracelet to

Esther K. Bauer                                 59
express herself, “I tugged at the silken thread of the red coral bracelet and
the silk thread broke and the six hundred seventy-five red-as-rage little
coral beads burst in glittering splendor from my thin, slender wrist”
(18).29 The coral beads represent all the narratives of femininity that were
passed down for generations, and by ripping the bracelet the narrator
liberates herself from the constraints these male-dominated stories
imposed on women. Once the aquatic coral beads are no longer tied into
the shape of the bracelet, i.e., into a form that represents women’s
oppression, they come alive: “I poured the red coral beads from my left
hand into my right. They made a lovely, tender sound, almost like small,
gentle laughter” (20).30 This gesture must be read as a symbolic act of
liberation, an effect reinforced when one considers that the sentence ends
with “laughter”—in Irigaray’s words “the first form of liberation from a
secular oppression” (163), and, as such, a way for women to express their
desires in a mode undammed by the dominant, male-oriented discourse.31
     Hurling the coral beads at the therapist, the narrator throws the old
stories and their female oppression at him, and at the same time releases a
flood of water that washes away the existing order, represented by the
therapist and his practice. The story leaves it open what will happen in the
future. The therapist’s fate and the narrator’s deep breath, which marks
the ripping of the bracelet as the “birth” of a self-determined subject or
perhaps the author’s preparedness to get down to work, suggest, however,
that the narrator—and other women—will be able to write their own
stories and create a society with room for female subjectivity. Inge
Stephan reads the scene at the therapist’s practice as the water woman’s
overcoming of her watery existence and as her step out of the water onto
dry land: “She conquered a new element all by herself and suspended the
old dichotomies between land and water and the gender images associated
with them” (“Undine” 552).32 While the hurling of the beads supports
Stephan’s conclusion that gender images are suspended, Hermann’s story
does not tell whether the narrator will indeed use her freedom “to conquer
a new element” or rather take control of her own. After all, the final
scenes all take place in the water, and there may never be dry land again.
     “The Red Coral Bracelet” offers a critical view of contemporary
gender roles and relations within their historical context from a feminine
perspective. It presents the act of narrating stories as performative, i.e., as
constituting identity, and proposes that the success of women’s emancipa-
tion is intricately linked to their ability to take control of and create new
narratives of femininity. In accordance with current trends in third-wave
feminism, Hermann’s story focuses on the private sphere of heterosexual
romantic relationships, revealing the narrator’s ensnarement in traditional
role expectations. As the heroine breaks free from this restraining

60               Judith Hermann’s Summerhouse, Later
“corset,” the story’s open ending together with Hermann’s claim that
“The Red Coral Bracelet” is “a bit programmatic” (Lenz and Pütz 231),
raise the reader’s expectation that the other stories in Summerhouse, Later
develop new images of femininity.
     Yet instead of presenting stories that show how feminine images
conceived by women differ from those created by men, the following
pieces offer merely additional analyses of the status quo of contemporary
gender relations in the private sphere as dominated by men. Although
diseases such as hysteria or anorexia are not evoked as directly as in “The
Red Coral Bracelet,” Hermann’s unhappy, reactive female figures stand
in the tradition of hysteria as the illness of women caught in male-
oriented structures. At the same time, these stories show women enacting
male desires, i.e., performing for men in order to be desired—a pattern
that is most obvious in “Sonja,” “Bali Woman” (“Bali-Frau”), and
“Camera Obscura.” Desiring the Other’s desire, these figures can be
understood as hysterics in the Lacanian sense, as Weingart suggests for
the character of Sonja (149). The following analysis will show that these
paradigms of hysterical behavior underlie, in fact, most of the relation-
ships in Summerhouse, Later, as these female characters’ main concern is
how men might perceive them and how they may manipulate male
perception. Thus Hermann’s story collection suggests that despite the
significant achievements of the women’s movement, women’s lives and
self-perception continue to be shaped by men.
     Following the nineteenth-century tradition, Hermann’s stories juxta-
pose “modernized” versions of bourgeois female images: a sexualized
variation of the traditional housewife and mother, and a disillusioned,
vulnerable kind of femme fatale who smokes, drinks, and uses drugs, has
casual sexual relationships, and seems unwilling to commit. Critics have
claimed that the femme fatale type captures the non-conformist attitude of
today’s twenty- and thirty-somethings. Yet as Ina Hartwig has pointed
out, such deliberately non-bourgeois behavior no longer appears
rebellious, but has instead entered mainstream ideology as the lifestyle of
the modern woman. Hermann shows women torn between these two
images or pits them against each other in potentially adulterous constella-
tions. Male and female characters’ ambivalent attitudes toward the femme
fatale-type emphasize the continued power the images of mother and wife
have on the (self-)perception of women.
     Hermann’s modern femmes fatales are torn between the desire to
protect their alleged independence and a genuine longing for motherhood
and the security of monogamous marriage—they dream of the conven-
tional role their lifestyle defies. Thus the futures Nora and Christine
imagine for each other in “Hurricane (Something Farewell)” (“Hurrikan

Esther K. Bauer                               61
(Something farewell)”) revolve around husbands, children, and small
houses in the Caribbean, i.e., away from their Berlin home where they
feel the pressure of leading modern lives. In “Bali Woman,” at the
moment she sees his wife taking care of their children, Christiane knows
that she can no longer pursue her plan of seducing a famous director.
Hermann’s female characters consider marriage and motherhood
inviolable institutions guaranteeing happiness, and the male figures seem
to agree as they eventually all choose the security and comfort of a
bourgeois existence. Accordingly, the wives and fiancées in Hermann’s
stories appear more confident and generally happier than their single
female counterparts. The discrepancy between the image of the non-
traditional woman that the female characters emulate and men appear to
covet, and the male and female figures’ true desires, becomes most
obvious in the title story. The taxi driver Stein is attracted to the female
narrator and her bohemian lifestyle yet dreams of living with her in his
country house. When she refuses to give up her non-committed lifestyle
that attracted him in the first place, Stein sets the house on fire and
disappears. Her final thought, “Later” (205), suggesting that she was not
prepared to give up one image of femininity for the other, captures
perfectly Hermann’s characters’ dilemma.
     Yet Hermann’s subversion of the non-bourgeois female image goes
even further, when she reveals it as an expression of women enacting
male fantasies and hence as male-determined. Female characters
repeatedly act as agents of male objectification, often role-playing to
attract male interest. The male narrator of “Sonja” describes these
dynamics, explaining that the heroine “fit into any projection I imposed
on her” (51).33 Weingart shows that Sonja comes to stand for a whole
range of well-established images of femininity, “muse, stranger, beauty,
girl, [ … ] child woman, [ … ] Madonna, and femme fatale. Sonja has
many facets, indeed—and this quality, in turn, lets her mutate into the
metafigure of the enigmatic Sphinx” (157).34 Sonja “stages” herself for
the narrator as an independent woman, well-versed in the calculating
games of heterosexual relationships, yet in reality she serves merely as a
“screen” (Blamberger, “Rede” 8) for his desires. When the narrator learns
that Sonja has, in fact, genuine desires, namely marriage and children, and
that these may eventually interfere with her role as screen of his desires,
he rushes to propose to his girlfriend Verena. He stylizes Verena as the
sexualized nurturing mother type and marrying her is in accordance with
this image. Marrying Sonja, on the other hand, would require the narrator
to correct his image of her and to adjust his desires—a scenario he avoids
by taking the radical step of proposing to one woman in order to retain his
idealized image of the other. In “Bali Woman,” the description of

62                Judith Hermann’s Summerhouse, Later
Christiane trying to seduce a theater director with her dance, begins with
the announcement, “Christiane appeared” (103), emphasizing that
Christiane’s dance is less self-expression than a performance intended to
meet the director’s expectations. Christiane stages herself as the object of
a male gaze.
     “Camera Obscura” is structured entirely around this notion of the
desiring male gaze and provides a striking image of its dynamics, as
Hermann’s perceptive play with gender clichés reveals the traditional
power structures organizing the relationship between a modern day femme
fatale and a video artist. Thriving on male admiration, attractive, self-
confident Marie is offended when a video artist, whom she desires for his
fame, does not show sexual interest in her. Attempting to retaliate, Marie
humiliates him by mentioning his physical shortcomings. As she makes
him the object of her gaze, she violates the traditional gendered visual
economy that defines the female body as object of the male gaze. Seeking
to reestablish the dominance of his gaze, the artist arranges for them to
have intercourse in front of the “eye” of his camera, which displays the
image on a computer screen in “real time.” Forcing Marie to see herself
with his gaze, the artist takes complete visual control of their encounter.
Marie’s confusion about the discrepancy between what she sees on the
screen and the manner in which she had imagined herself to appear
reveals the alienating effect of women’s orienting their images toward
male expectations exclusively.35 Stories like “Sonja,” “Bali Woman,” and
“Camera Obscura” reveal that the allegedly independent modern lifestyle
embraced by many women is as male-determined as the traditional roles
of housewife and mother or of the turn-of-the-century femme fatale.
     As Hermann’s stories trace traditional structures in contemporary
gender relations, they pinpoint concurrently a significant shift in the part
sexuality plays in female role expectations. Christine, Christiane, and
Sonja each play the role of the “other woman” in potentially adulterous
constellations. With these narratives of adultery Hermann draws on a long
tradition that was particularly fruitful in the nineteenth century. Reflecting
the notion of an allegedly stronger male sex drive, those earlier literary
depictions of adulterous men show these affairs as driven by passionate
love as opposed to the dispassionate, everyday monotony of married
lives. Hermann, however, alters this pattern in a significant fashion: in her
stories, the legitimate partners offer the male protagonists sexual
relationships, whereas the “intruders’” physical contacts are very limited.
The sexualization and corporealization of the wives and girlfriends is
explicitly established, as, for instance, when Christiane’s carefully staged
dance performance is completely overshadowed by the exotic, uninhibi-
ted, very sensual dance of the director’s wife from Bali.36 Equally obvious

Esther K. Bauer                                63
is the role reversal in “Sonja,” where the narrator’s beautiful, sexy
girlfriend Verena is always ready to have sex with him, whereas “not at
all beautiful” Sonja wants to engage in sex merely for procreation (52).
Hermann sexualizes the legitimate and desexualizes the adulterous
relationship. On the one hand, this shift reflects the social development
since the nineteenth century toward love matches over marriages of
convenience. In the contemporary version, however, the male characters
are as torn between different roles as are their female counterparts,
seeking to escape any limitation to one role. Thus two of the stories in
Summerhouse, Later are told from the perspective of men in committed
relationships, “This Side of the Oder” (“Diesseits der Oder”) and “Sonja,”
and in both cases the male protagonists experience marriage with a
“feeling of capitulation” (172; “Kapitulationsgefühl”; 178). Their fear that
they might have foregone opportunities to find happiness in exchange for
comfort and security provokes a “sense of irritation” (84; “Gefühl der
Irritation”; 84). These male figures seem to struggle with role expecta-
tions just as much as their female counterparts.
     However, reactions to such attempts to escape one’s role differ sig-
nificantly for male and female figures. Despite the shifts and modifica-
tions female gender roles have undergone, notions of deviation and
mental illness continue to characterize the perception of female role
(non)conformity. Thus the narrator in “Sonja” believes that “something
wasn’t quite right” (52)37 with the heroine and that she is “out of (her)
mind” (76) because she wants to marry and have children, i.e., because
she longs for a role other than the one he has “assigned” her. At the same
time, the stories offer no analogous notion of male nonconformity or
deviation that could categorize the male characters’ behavior as sick.
Even Stein’s arson and Cat’s depressed mood (“Hurricane”) are perceived
as typical reactions to women’s refusal to meet men’s expectations.38
     Besides “The Red Coral Bracelet,” “Sonja” is the only other story in
Summerhouse, Later that ends with a revolt against male dominance as
the heroine throws out the narrator and disappears for good. Although
more subtle than in the opening piece, the image of the water woman
appears in “Sonja,” too. Here, the water world is represented by the
heroine’s best friend, a mermaid figure in a “seaweed-green dress” (62),
who in the narrator’s imagination stands for the sphere where Sonja
originates. The fact that the two stories displaying such a historical-
mythological dimension are the only ones that depict women who revolt
highlights the importance of women’s historical awareness in their
struggle for genuine feminine images. The significance of such a
historical perspective is illustrated, for instance, by the role of laughter,
which throughout (male-dominated) literary history has been associated

64                Judith Hermann’s Summerhouse, Later
with water women and has attracted men and, as they cannot control it,
has frightened them as well. Thus the old male fantasies of water women
themselves point to a genuinely feminine mode of expression and hence
to a way for women to escape these very narratives. The continuous
presence of the water and mermaid imagery throughout “The Red Coral
Bracelet” and “Sonja” suggests that the “old” images will inform the
heroines’ new stories. Yet at the same time, the narrator’s ripping of the
bracelet and Sonja’s complete withdrawal without a trace symbolize the
notion that the past must not dominate their present. Thus Hermann’s
stories suggest that women have to liberate themselves from the old
restrictive narratives without losing their history as an important resource
in their struggle.
     It is such consciousness of the historicity of images of femininity that
allows us to see that the modern, seemingly independent women in
Hermann’s stories represent the achievements of the first and second
waves of the women’s movement yet are still bound by patriarchal
structures. Thus at a time when many New Feminists tend to disregard
older female images and want to focus on their present situation
exclusively, Hermann’s texts promote a much wider perspective for the
current feminist project that would allow young feminists to understand
better the structures that bind women and to build on their predecessors’
work. Alice Schwarzer, one of the most eminent representatives of second
wave feminism in Germany, reflected on this very subject in her
acceptance speech for the Ludwig Börne-Preis (Ludwig Börne-Prize) in
2008 explaining, “[W]e women have not only our own immediate
experiences. In us, our mothers’ and grandmothers’ experiences are
handed down, too [ … ].”39 At the same time, Hermann’s stories reflect
New Feminists’ focus on the private sphere as well as their demand for a
new openness regarding “acceptable” images of femininity. The author
shows marriage and motherhood as valuable female life choices that can
ensure happiness and that many young women find attractive. This
positive perception of the traditional female role is in accordance with the
view of many contemporary feminists who reject the idea that women
have to give up this (or any other) role in order to liberate themselves
from patriarchal dominance, as was promoted often by second wave
feminism. Today’s feminists defend women’s right to choose their roles
but avoid developing exemplary female images in order to give every
woman as much freedom as possible, including the choice of traditional
female roles. Hermann’s stories reflect these goals as they show the
paralyzing effect of prescribed narratives yet do not put forth alternative
images and stories that could become equally confining. “The Red Coral
Bracelet” depicts the writing of one’s own feminine narrative as an

Esther K. Bauer                                65
ongoing emancipatory process that requires constant alertness to the
structures that might bind women against their will—the narrator warns at
the end of the story that “coral turns black when it lies too long at the
bottom of the sea” (21)40—and Hermann’s perceptive “stock-taking” of
the current state of relationships in the Berlin Republic in Summerhouse,
Later draws her readers’ attention to such “hysterical” structures in
contemporary heterosexual relationships.

                                   Notes

I thank Evelyne Ender, Marc Lucht, Sabine Mödersheim, and the two
anonymous readers of the Women in German Yearbook for their time and
thought-provoking comments. With the exception of translations from
Judith Hermann’s Summerhouse, Later, which follow Margot Bettauer
Dembo, all translations are my own.

    1
       Many of the women active in the 1970s and 1980s feminist move-
ments gave up, disappointed by what, in their eyes, were only moderate
successes and by their inability to win the next generation for active
feminist engagement (Holland-Cunz 157–73; Bruns 671). This is not to
say that feminism was completely “suspended,” but merely that its
achievements no longer attracted the kind of media and public attention
feminists provoked in the 1970s and 1980s. Topics such as the reunifica-
tion, right-wing radicalism, racism, and a reunited Germany’s role in the
global arena dominated German politics and the public sphere during this
period. At the same time, feminists were quite successful on the
international stage. Immediately after the fall of the Wall, East German
feminists were very engaged in the restructuring of the former GDR, but
their efforts soon declined. In popular culture, attempts to contest the role
and treatment of women often found themselves commercialized, as did
the Riot Grrrl movement that turned into the Girly Girl fashion, or they
were disarmed, being reduced by a label, which happened, for example, to
the so-called Fräuleinwunder (Girl Wonder) authors of whom Hermann
was considered an important representative. For a summary of develop-
ments in feminism during the 1990s, see Holland-Cunz 155–61.
     2
       Since “new” feminism has adopted many of the goals of those
fighting in the 1970s and 1980s while rejecting their forms of political
expression, it is often considered a continuation of the earlier wave as
opposed to a distinctly new movement (Holland-Cunz; Schwarzer).

66               Judith Hermann’s Summerhouse, Later
     3
       “Heute ist das Private so politisch wie nie” (Jana Hensel in “Jana
Hensel”).
     4
       Some second wave feminists, as is evidenced, for example, in Alice
Schwarzer’s acceptance speech for the Ludwig Börne-Preis in May 2008,
distance themselves from the younger generation whose efforts they
consider naïve and egocentric, accusing them of ignoring or belittling the
suffering of women beyond their own cultural and social sphere, of being
interested only in their professional careers and men (see Hornung 696–
97 on this “generational conflict”). Schwarzer’s speech came at a time
when the idea of a “New Feminism” had again become the topic of public
discussions beyond explicitly feminist or academic circles: two popular
and widely discussed books entitled Neue deutsche Mädchen (New
German Girls) and Wir Alpha-Mädchen: Warum Feminismus das Leben
schöner macht (We Alpha-Girls: Why Feminism Makes Life More
Beautiful) came out in spring 2008, Tagesschau, one of the most
recognized German news programs, held an online chat with the authors
of Neue deutsche Mädchen in April of the same year, and the Süddeutsche
Zeitung ran a series of articles under the heading “Der neue Feminismus”
(“The New Feminism”) from 7 May to 19 June 2008. Already in August
2006, Die Zeit had published fifteen interviews with women under the
title “Wir brauchen einen neuen Feminismus” (“We Need a New
Feminism).
     5
       “Schreiben [ … ] um aus mir heraus und fortgehen zu können,
Schreiben, um die eigene Geschichte zu vernichten. Die Dinge hören auf,
wenn man sie benennt. Sie beginnen neu, aber sie hören auch auf.”
     6
       “[D]er Sound einer neuen Generation” (Hellmuth Karasek qtd. in
Hermann, Sommerhaus: back cover).
     7
       Many reviews and discussions adopted this view, for instance,
Böttiger “Und immer” and “Nichts als Gespenster”; Brandt; Bucheli;
Hartwig; Mensing and Messmer; Pollak; Prangel; and Stopka. Photos
showing Hermann as a melancholic, shy femme fragile type and her
willingness to compare herself and her environment to the figures in her
texts played an important role in this approach (Böttiger, “Nichts als
Gespenster”; Bucheli; Geiger 50–54; Hage, “Ganz schön abgedreht” 245;
Mensing and Messmer; Prangel; Weingart 151–53; Voigt). In turn, this
interest in the author herself led to a critical look at the dynamics ruling
the German literary market; for instance, Peter Graves points to the need
to overcome such catchy yet limiting categorizations as Fräuleinwunder,
Brigitte Weingart examines the impact of the author’s photo on the
reception of her first book, and Jörg Döring analyzes the entire paratext of
Summerhouse, Later.

Esther K. Bauer                                67
    8
        The text marks this progression by the question, “Is this the story I
want to tell?” (1; “Ist das die Geschichte, die ich erzählen will?”; 11),
which accompanies each of her three stories. In the last instance, the
question lacks a question mark and has switched from present to past
tense, suggesting that the narrator has come closer to her own story.
Unfortunately, the English translation added a question mark.
     9
        Although the great-grandmother’s lover is the narrator’s actual
great-grandfather, I am following the narrator in calling her great-
grandmother’s husband “great-grandfather.”
     10
         “Meine Urgroßmutter war schön. [ … ] Mein Urgroßvater [ … ]
baute Öfen für das russische Volk” (11–12). This role division is
reminiscent of the opening sentence of Katia Mann’s memoirs, “My
father was a professor of mathematics at the University in Munich, and
my mother was a very beautiful woman” (“Mein Vater war Professor der
Mathematik an der Universität in München, und meine Mutter war eine
sehr schöne Frau”; 9).
     11
         Margaret Littler calls the great-grandmother “an emancipated Effi
Briest figure” (190). However, as this article shows, her emancipation is
very limited.
     12
         “wie ein Kinderlied, [ … ] wie ein Schlaflied” (13); “Blomesche
Wildnis, Blomesche Wildnis” (13). Chesler writes, “Traditionally,
depression has been conceived of as the response to—or expression of—
loss, either of an ambivalently loved one, of the ‘ideal’ self, or of
‘meaning’ in one’s life. [ … ] ‘Depression’ rather than ‘aggression’ is the
female response to disappointment or loss” (102).
     13
         Luce Irigaray, who formulates the need for a feminine language
that goes beyond the current gender dualism, explains the dilemma of
hysteric discourse as being caught between a “gestural system, that desire
paralyzed and enclosed within its body, and a language that it [hysteric
discourse] has learned in the family, in school, in society, which is in no
way continuous with—nor certainly a metaphor for—the ‘movements’ of
its desire. [ … ] [O]ne may raise the question whether psychoanalysis has
not superimposed on the hysterical symptom a code, a system of
interpretation(s) which fails to correspond to the desire fixed in somatiza-
tion and in silence. In other words, does psychoanalysis offer any ‘cure’
to hysterics beyond a surfeit of suggestions intended to adapt them, if
only a little better, to masculine society?” (137).
     14
         The notion of the great-grandmother’s leaving her position in
society through depression and adultery is underlined by the fact that
these “deviant” acts take place in Russia, in the East, which, in contrast to
her native Germany, the West, the nineteenth century considered the
realm of emotions, irrationality, and questionable morals—an image that

68                Judith Hermann’s Summerhouse, Later
has been epitomized in the figure of another turn-of-the-century
adulteress, Clawdia Chauchat in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.
At the same time, the great-grandmother’s adulterous adventures also lead
her out of her social sphere: while her husband pursues a very practical
profession, she has affairs with artists and scholars, outsiders to bourgeois
society, looking, ironically enough, for the warmth with which her
furnace building husband cannot provide her (Stephan, “Undine” 549).
     15
        For a more detailed discussion of the history of water women in
literature, see Bessler; Schmeling; Schmitz-Emans; Stuby; and Stephan,
“Weiblichkeit.”
     16
         “Es blieb nicht aus, daß diese von der Deutschen hörten, der
Schönen, Blassen mit dem hellen Haar, die dort oben im Malyj-Prospekt
wohnen sollte, fast immer allein und in Zimmern, so dunkel, weich und
kühl wie das Meer” (13); “Licht wie auf dem Grunde des Meeres” (12);
“Künstler und Gelehrten nahmen Platz auf den tiefen, weichen Sofas und
Sesseln, sie sanken ein in die schweren und dunklen Stoffe” (13).
     17
        Borgstedt maintains that whereas the sphere of water was consid-
ered feminine during the Romantic period, in “The Red Coral Bracelet” it
has become a realm that is no longer gender specific, as it can be
inhabited by male and female characters (226). However, the story’s
ending that finds all male characters drowned undermines this claim.
     18
        Inge Stephan suggests the Holocaust as a subtext to Hermann’s
story that enables a more nuanced understanding of this male figure. She
argues that Hermann evokes the Holocaust when she presents the
narrator’s lover as the last survivor of Isaak Baruw’s many descendants
(“Undine” 553). Most likely, the lover’s parents were Holocaust
survivors, whose traumatic experiences overshadowed their own and their
son’s lives, which may explain his decision for an uninvolved life, i.e., an
existence without emotional strain.
     19
        “Isaak Baruw [ … ] fathered seven children [ … ], and these seven
children blessed him with seven grandchildren, and one of these
grandchildren presented him with his only great-grandson—my lover”
(11; “Isaak Baruw [ … ] zeugte [ … ] sieben Kinder, und diese sieben
Kinder schenkten ihm sieben Enkelkinder, und eines dieser Enkelkinder
schenkte ihm einen einzigen Urenkel—meinen Geliebten”; 19). At the
same time, numerology is a central element of the Jewish Kabbalah,
whose study is limited to men.
     20
        “Der trieb [ … ] mit dem bleichen Bauch nach oben auf dem was-
sernassen Bett [ … ] in seinem Haar hatten sich die Staubflocken
verfangen, sie zitterten sachte” (29).
     21
        For a discussion of the image of the dead woman in the water, see
Berger and Stephan.