Der Schrei der Hyänen

Andrea Paluch / Robert Habeck:
Der Schrei der Hyänen
München: Piper, 2003
302 S.
ISBN 3-492-04611-8
Paperback Edition: Piper, 2005






Windhoek, German Southwest Africa in 1899: Young Arabella arrives as a recruited bride in the German colony Southwest Africa. But instead of living a dreamed of romantic and exotic life, she finds herself in a rough and all around hostile world of men. From then on, she lives together with her unmerciful husband Frank in the barren wasteland of the Namibian desert. After five years of marriage and during the summit of the Herero uprisings, Frank is murdered by the rebels in a violent revenge act and Arabella is abducted by their leader Assa Riarua. When she returns to Windhoek after two months, she discovers that she is expecting a child from the Herero man. To protect herself, Arabella decides to marry the German officer Paul von Kavea who truly loves her. Since he doubts that the child is his, the following months become a crucial test for the couple. "If the child is white, it's yours, if it's black, you throw it in the Atlantic", advises Paul's superior. Nele, a light-skinned girl, is born. This is the beginning of a proud German family story, which in truth is based on a lie.

Hamburg, Germany in 1954: Nele von Kavea, female Senator in Hamburg, is called to the hospital to be present during her daughter's Kriemhild delivery. On the childbed, she discovers that her grandchild is black. Nele imputes that her daughter has betrayed her husband, a wealthy and renowned ship-owner, with a "negro". To release the family from this shame, she decides to give her grandchild Hera to an orphanage. The Senator uses her influence and Kriemhild is told that her child was stillborn.

Windhoek, Namibia in 1990: Nele von Kavea visits her coloured great-grandchild Cosima and confesses her family lineage and wants to transfer the family inheritance, the farm Crewo in Namibia, to her. The two women fly, each of them on her own, to Windhoek and meet at the very place where everything had begun over 100 years ago. For one last time, this place becomes the scene of tragic events.

With "Schrei der Hyänen", Andrea Paluch and Robert Habeck wrote a remarkable novel which in about 300 pages tells an exciting family story spanning over the last 100 years. Conceptualised as a colonial novel, the story engages with German colonial history. However, through various parallel motifs and different time layers a new perspective emerges which repeatedly shows the ripple effects of history on present day times. Central to the story are the life and times of the Hamburg bourgeois merchant family von Kavea who can trace their roots to the former German colony of Southwest Africa. The narrative covers three generations, sketching the lives of four women full of suspense, through a surprising insight into the infinite possibilities of genetic diversity and destiny's curious cases of family roots, dealing with questions of belonging and exclusion in racial and racist terms.

The story begins in 1899 in German-Southwest Africa and tells in an unusually open and direct manner of the hard life of the first farmers in the young German colony. It shows in great detail how German immigrants cultivate the barren land or build up their livestock while failing miserably from time to time. The problems of German colonialism are not ignored in this relatively brief novel, but are described circumspectly and accurately without playing down anything. The story tells how Araballa, who had been recruited in Germany for the colony, travels to Windhoek to marry a man she had never met before. "The women didn't know that their destinies were prearranged. The men had played a card game the evening before in order to determine the sequence according to which they could choose their new wives." The reader is able to share the young women's resignation and feels the contrast between their romantic-exotic dreams and the hard and often brutal reality of the Southwest African everyday life. Framed by the historical events of the Herero uprisings in 1904, the novel features insights into people's lives and furthermore exposes the brutality of German warfare. But the picture is not one-sided because the revenge acts and attacks from the tortured Herero men, who defended themselves against the German occupiers, are described in an equally open and unsparing manner. Furthermore, the authors tell about the historic and inhumane battle of the German Schutztruppe at the Waterberg, at which almost the entire Herero nation was killed. Although events depicted in the novel "Schrei der Hyänen" are fiction, historic events are the foundation for the novel within the parameters of the colonial narrative level.

The story of the Hamburg bourgeois merchant family von Kavea spans over generations. It begins in colonial Africa, moves to Hamburg in the 1950s right up to the present in the year 1990, when Southwest Africa became independent to be called Namibia from now on. The three narrative levels of the novel, however, do not follow a linear but rather a simultaneous timeline, providing the reader with a narrative structure that draws on the principle of parallel motifs.  This sometimes confuses even the most attentive reader who struggles to differentiate between the characters in the simultaneously narrated levels. Both Paul von Kavea and his daughter Nele are characters who have play an important role in all time lines.

Home, violence, guilt and atonement are themes that within the superimposed developmental cycle characterize the life of Nele von Kavea.  Daughter of Arabella and Paul von Kavea, she leaves together with her parents her home country after the end of the First World War and grows up in Hamburg having all privileges of a merchant family. Her life, told in three parts (childhood, adulthood and life as an old woman), tells the underlying truth of the novel, namely that guilt and atonement supersede the banality of a successful life and that happiness and satisfaction can not be the results of a manipulated life.

"Schrei der Hyänen" is worth reading and an interesting and entertaining novel that makes the reader think by exposing common racist attitudes, thereby allowing the reader to reach his own opinion while looking back on more than 100 years of shared German-African history.