Judith Hermann: Nothing But Ghosts
Are young Germans any different from young people elsewhere in the world? In Judith Hermann's stories, the characters are at first reading a global, or at least Western, type: detached, aimless, disillusioned about love, travelling to escape from themselves, only to find - in Gertrude Stein's words - there is no there there. Like the American slacker generation, they sit, smoke, drink, worry. As in the American television show Seinfeld, ``nothing happens''.
No wonder Hermann's two collections of short stories have been critically acclaimed bestsellers far beyond Germany. Now 35, she worked briefly as a journalist in New York before settling back in Berlin to write fiction and freelance journalism. The Summer House, Later was published in German in 1998, followed by editions in English and almost 20 other languages. Nothing But Ghosts came four years later and the English translation appeared in 2005.
Fans of the first book will welcome the second collection of seven stories: more of the same yet finely matured. Once again women are captured in moments of emotional flux. Perhaps they have moved on - are older, sometimes with partners and children. Yet they seem no more settled. While The Summer House, Later was subtitled ``a book about the moment before happiness'', this one might be about the moment after happiness.
In the title story, a bored young German couple find their lives changed - perhaps saved - by an encounter in a Nevada bar with an American redneck who tells them about the joy of buying tiny Nike sneakers for his son. This is perhaps the most neatly resolved of the stories, though they often end with a sharp, symbolic surprise: a blinding wall of fog, a crashed hang glider, the chillingly inevitable sentence, ``And he does leave, only not yet.''
Cold Blue is a delicate portrait of two couples who stay together in the snowy countryside of Iceland, where Jonina examines her marriage and falls in love with her husband's friend. Like most feelings in these stories, the love is unarticulated, evanescent and yet dangerously real. The narrator of Ruth (Girlfriends) goes further, risking everything as she edges towards an affair with her best friend's boyfriend.
In Acqua Alta, it is unspoken threat rather than love that disturbs the narrator's well-being. An anxious traveller, she is nevertheless keen to meet her parents on holiday in Venice. At ``the end of yet another relationship'' and turning 30, she convinces herself she is free and invulnerable - more concerned about her elderly parents' safety than her own. All that changes when she becomes the object of a stranger's sexual attention.
Plot summaries do no justice to Hermann's writing. Her skill and much of our pleasure is in the sensual language, the nuance of character and gesture. Internal states are mapped more precisely than physical places. People speak little and meaning is drawn, sometimes wrongly, from the silences and spaces. If there's a flaw it's that every story - most told in the first person - could be about the same, slightly melancholy woman.
Feelings might vascillate but they are expressed in crisp, unexpected, often perfect sentences. As an Australian reader, I saw a likeness to the early fiction of Helen Garner (who is, coincidentally, a fan of Hermann's work).
It is difficult to pick out a passage that fully illustrates Hermann's style but here is one example of her exquisite observation and oblique commentary. The intricate connections between the four characters in Cold-Blue are captured in a photograph:
"It is 10.47, and in that moment Jonina fell in love with Jonas as he slid back to his tripod with his arms spread. How is that possible? It's absurd to ask; it is the way it is, as though a useless layer of skin flaked off Jonas, and beneath it the man Jonina wanted to love became visible....Jonas yells, 'Now!' and they walk towards him, next to each other.''
Jonas and Irene, the German couple in that story, have come to Iceland fresh from other relationships and see the remote, snow-white country ``as a kind of miracle that will heal their broken hearts''. It's not that simple, of course.
The stories in The Summer House, Later were set in and around Berlin, whereas these take their characters on journeys - to Iceland, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Norway, America, or just to provincial Würzburg. It is here that Hermann applies another subtle layer to her picture of muddled youth.
Her men and women are specifically German: privileged, blase, members of the old world thrown headfirst into the new without history or guidance. No longer simply German, they are citizens of Europe, restlessly moving around the continent.
The Berlin they leave and return to, only ever a blurred backdrop, seems comfortable, bland, static, a city of expensive cars, car parks and outings to get drunk at hip joints called Cafe Burger and Luxusbar.
Yet the foreign scenes are no more distinguished: railway stations, outer suburbs, immigrant markets, shabby apartments, cold wastelands - places where they can make their psychic explorations, though rarely with satisfying results.
It would be wrong to leave the impression that this is a depressing book. Hermann captures moments of hope, joy and wry humour as lightly as she does disappointment. Her final story ends, as the characters unexpectedly watch the Northern Lights, with the lines: "And are you happy now?" Owen said breathlessly, and I said, "Very.'' What happens next is up to us.
The Book
Hermann, Judith: Nothing but Ghosts / transl. by Margot Bettauer Dembo. - London : Fourth Estate, 2005. - 262 pages ISBN 0-0071745-51 Original title.: Nichts als Gespenster (German)
