Review from Rain Taxi Review of Books (2000)

THE FANTASTIC ORDINARY WORLD OF LUTZ RATHENOW

by Lutz Rathenow

translated by Boria Sax and Imogen von Tannenberg

Edited with an afterward by Boria Sax

Preface by Karl Kivko

Xenos Books ($15)

Review by Justin Maxwell

In this fluid, genre-blurring collection. Lutz Rathenow takes the reader into the real-word-distopia of the GDR (Soviet-era East Germany), a breeding ground of literary dissidents. Rathenow’s texts are consistently dense, compressed and concealable as a handgun. Paranoia, fear, obstinate self-control, and the threat of violence are the threads binding the collection; the book shows a world, real and textual, of such pressure that the paradoxes of the title fuse together in logical cohesion. These are works of art which, by the very nature of their existence, are conscious and conscientious articles of resistance. - Rathenow worked in a culture that prized literature and under a government that micro-managed it with censorship and worse, which combined to produce a world where texts like Rathenow’s are simultaneously fantastic (in the true sense of the word) and realistic. Throughout the book, genres are pared down to minimalist constructions directly paralleling the stultification of personality and artistic license within the regime. Though many pieces are in a clear style, the best begin to merge into art-as-language, as opposed to being exclusively poetry, prose, or drama.

R.athenow’s poetry is tight, metamorphoric and powerfully surreptitious. His poems are full of borders and walls, with the impassible skv as the greatest image of limitation. Poetry is truly the heart of the fantastic for Rathenow. The poems written after the collapse of the GDR are still tightly prescient. In the last poem of this apparently chronological collection, “Rebellion,” there is a freedom so simple and beautiful that it expands the limits of reality: ”A bird has strayed into the room. / I push open the wails so it can fly out.” This is a freedom on which the ceiling will never collapse. Freedom after so much repression is an atomic thing in both size and potential.

That atomic freedom runs through the plays at a structural level—they are an obverse melding of dialogue stage direction, and narrative, a natural result of words and actions happening under constant scrutiny After all, the secret police were the largest employer in the country. “No Tragedy” sets up an endless loop of Stalinist revisionism where a monument is built, reduced piecemeal to dust, and then rebuilt again. The reduction is performed simultaneously with a similar dialogic device: the play’s central line is reduced until it is an off stage voice that says only the first phoneme of the line. “Now no one experiences anymore what’s there inside it — that is the true tragedy.” Eventually the “it” of personhood in the state is reduced to the sound “N,” and then there is only the clicking of a Geiger counter,

The psychological quality of the fiction makes it powerful as an oubliette; the characters are isolated and tense, yet never lose their feeling of reality. In “Friendly Reception;’ two people are conscientiously talking of trivialities. They have compressed all their subject matter into trifles so extensively that they have no significant internal world except for what’s necessary to maintain decorum, Calmness and politeness are specters haunting a reasonless duel: “I objected with all the friendliness at my disposal and shot, in order to commit no further breach of etiquette The dead man’s widow reacts to the murder of her husband with equal amorality: “Don’t worry about it, she interrupted my helplessly begun sentence, just a few spots?’

Rathenow’s most unique and talented work is a piece titled “The Knot;’ which the author loosely describes as “scenes in verse.” These scenes offer a truly multi-genre text, creating tension by coupling mundane language with curt line breaks. The dialogue and description have the same tight non-structural relationship that they share in prose. And the stage directions move the characters around with all the bleak puppetry of Beckett’s Happy Days. “The Call” is another excellent text of barely discernable genre, a fiction that could exist just as successfully within the artistic rubric of script.

Rathenow stays relevant long after the GDR because his works are microscopically human; he pertinently questions literature and culture at the end of the postmodern movement, giving us a hand book for surviving the most subtle of atrocities while simultaneously living out his own solution. In Rathenow’s own words, “Numbness can be opposed only by the capacity for fantasy:” The facts of his minimal Imprisonment and outlasting the GDR itself are testimonies to his successful beliefs. These are simultaneously the stories of people and the stories of a society, individuals and conglomerations. There is no fluff here, no distraction— only crucible.