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Chapter 2
Disgust and the Gendered Body
This chapter sets out to analyse the ways in which bodies can be presented
as objects of disgust both for other characters and for readers, in dif ferent
ways and with dif ferent ef fects. Taking as its examples the debut novella
Geschichte vom alten Kind [The Old Child] (1999) by Jenny Erpenbeck
and three novels spanning the career of Amélie Nothomb – Hygiène de
l’assassin [Hygiene and the Assassin] (1992), Attentat [Attack] (1997) and
Journal d’Hirondelle [Swallow’s Diary] (2006) – the analysis will focus in
particular on the two authors’ presentation firstly of the obese body and
secondly of the adult, sexual female body.1 The selected texts demonstrate
the potency of ‘body language’, and especially of disgust, as rhetorical tools
which may be used to engage in aesthetic, social and political discourses.
They also offer insights into the structure of disgust and its role in protecting
social and psychological boundaries, which will be of central importance
to the analysis of all the primary texts covered in this study.
Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin in 1967 and is a member of an
established GDR literary family, notably including her grandparents Fritz
Erpenbeck and Hedda Zinner. In addition to her prose fiction, Erpenbeck
writes and directs for the theatre and her first play, Katzen haben sieben
1 Jenny Erpenbeck, Geschichte vom alten Kind (Frankfurt am Main: btb, 2001).
First published in Berlin by Eichborn, 1999. Eng. trans. as The Old Child, tr. Susan
Bernofsky (London: Portobello, 2006). Subsequent references will be given in the
text, with the abbreviation G. Amélie Nothomb, Hygiène de l’assassin (Paris: Points,
1995). First published in Paris by Albin Michel, 1992. Eng. trans. as Hygiene and the
Assassin, tr. Alison Anderson (New York: Europa, 2010). Attentat (Paris: Le Livre
de Poche, 2004). First published by Albin Michel, 1997. Journal d’Hirondelle (Paris:
Albin Michel, 2006). Subsequent references to these editions are given in the text
as HA, A and JH respectively.
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Leben [Cats Have Seven Lives],2 was performed in Graz in 2000, just one
year after the publication of Geschichte, her prose fiction debut. She has
since published four novels, which have been well-received critically both
in Germany and abroad. Although relatively little has been written about
her to date,3 she is starting to attract critical attention both in German-
speaking countries and internationally, with academic criticism tending to
focus on the themes of German history and the concept of Heimat [home
or belonging];4 she has been awarded several literary prizes since 2001 and
her writing has been translated into various languages including English.
Her work deals with political themes including the German past, but her
literary style is characterized by a certain level of abstraction and a close
focus on individual psychology. For example, Geschichte may be considered
as an example of political allegory referring to recent German history and
the demise of the GDR, but also, as the following analysis will demonstrate,
as a portrait of the psychology of its protagonist and the role of disgust
in structuring her worldview and the boundaries of the small, enclosed
society she lives in. Physicality also plays a key role in Erpenbeck’s writing,
2 Erpenbeck, Katzen haben sieben Leben (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren,
2000).
3 Academic articles include: Nancy Nobile, ‘“So morgen wie heut”: Time and Context
in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Geschichte vom alten Kind,’ in Paul Michael Lützeler, ed.,
Gegenwartsliteratur II (Tübingen: Stauf fenburg, 2003), 283–310; Katie Jones, ‘“Ganz
gewöhnlicher Ekel”? Disgust and Body Motifs in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Geschichte vom
alten Kind ’ in Heike Bartel & Elizabeth Boa, eds, Pushing at Boundaries: Approaches
to Contemporary German Women Writers from Karen Duve to Jenny Erpenbeck,
German Monitor 64 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 119–33.
4 On these topics, see in particular Petra Bagley, ‘Granny Knows Best: The Voice of the
Granddaughter in “Grossmütterliteratur”’, in Bartel & Boa, 151–65; Mary Cosgrove,
‘Heimat as Nonplace and Terrain Vague in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Heimsuchung and
Julia Schoch’s Mit der Geschwindigkeit des Sommers’, New German Critique: An
Interdisciplinary Journal of German Studies, 116 (Summer 2012), 63–86; Friederike
Eigler, ‘Critical Approaches to Heimat and the “Spatial Turn”’, New German Critique,
115 (Winter 2012), 27–48; Katharina Gerstenberger, ‘Fictionalizations: Holocaust
Memory and the Generational Construct in the Works of Contemporary Women
Writers’, in Laurel Cohen-Pfister & Susanne Vees-Gulani, eds, Generational Shifts
in Contemporary German Culture (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), 95–114.
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with individual bodies – such as that of the shapeless, f leshy protagonist of
Geschichte – and body parts taking on huge symbolic significance. For this
reason, disgust provides a useful approach to reading her work, since the
emotion of disgust involves an immediate personal response to a physical
stimulus which carries broader cultural connotations. In the analysis of
Geschichte, it is the meanings assigned to bodies, their emissions and their
behaviour which can be shown to elicit disgust for the protagonist and
other characters, demonstrating the inter-relation of bodies and discourse.
Amélie Nothomb, also born in 1967, is the author of twenty-one novels
published since 1992, all of which focus to some extent on bodies, beauty
and literature. My interest in this chapter will be on disgusting physicality,
as it is opposed to ideals of beauty, and its relation to reading and writing. In
addition to her prolific literary output – she publishes a book each rentrée
littéraire [the annual French publishing season] – Nothomb’s status as a
celebrity author has attracted critical attention to her public persona and to
the autobiographical and autofictional aspects of her oeuvre.5 Elsewhere
her work has been discussed in terms of the contrast between beauty and
ugliness,6 and various commentators remark on her repeated focus on the
viscerally disgusting, in the form of monstrous, excessive bodies, vomiting,
excrement and other bodily emissions. Indeed, to borrow a phrase from a
character in her first novel Hygiène de l’assassin describing the literary work
of the protagonist Prétextat Tach, Nothomb’s work can be characterized
in terms of an ‘esthétique du vomissement’ [emetic esthetic] (HA, 47/46).
However, despite a recent revival of theoretical interest in disgust in vari-
ous fields, her work has not yet been analysed in detail in terms of these
5 Full-length studies in this category include Laureline Amanieux, Amélie Nothomb:
L’éternelle af famée (Paris: Albin Michel, 2005); Michel David, Amélie Nothomb: Le
Symptôme graphomane (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006).
6 See for example Lenaïk Le Garrec, ‘Beastly Beauties and Beautiful Beasts’, in Susan
Bainbrigge & Jeanette den Toonder, eds, Amélie Nothomb: Authorship, Identity
and Narrative Practice (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), 64–70; Catherine Rodgers,
‘Nothomb’s Anorexic Beauties’, ibid., 50–63.
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theories.7 The second section of this chapter takes Hygiène as its main
example, analysing Nothomb’s presentation of the disgusting body of her
protagonist, before introducing a comparison with two later novels in
order to analyse the relationship she presents between disgust and aesthet-
ics, and also to consider how her depiction of gender roles has developed
over the course of her career. These texts in particular lend themselves to
comparison due to their thematic focus on disgust and similarities in plot
structure: all three deal with male protagonists who murder their young
female love-object before going on to re-create her in the form of a written
text. They also invite comparison with Erpenbeck’s Geschichte due to the
depiction of physically disgusting protagonists in Hygiène and Attentat,
and the valorization of the asexual child’s body over the sexualized adult
woman in all three texts. However, in contrast to Erpenbeck’s treatment
of these themes in terms of individual psychology and broader political
allegory, Nothomb’s novels present them as primarily aesthetic questions,
which allows for a fruitful comparison of their dif ferent approaches.
Disgust of fers a particularly appropriate model to analyse interactions
between literature and bodies in the work of the two authors, due to its
status as both a corporeal rejection of physical objects, and as a complex
emotion whose content is largely imaginary. As noted in Chapter 1, com-
mentators such as Susan Miller associate physical disgust with the pro-
tection of psychological boundaries. According to Miller, ‘as we develop
beyond the earliest infancy, the body in many ways becomes a symbol of
the self ’. Disgust, she claims, operates to define our concepts of self and
body and to establish relationships between them. Despite its strong asso-
ciation with the senses, especially smell, taste and touch, disgust is more
inf luenced by the meaning and context of the sensory information than
by the physical experience itself:
7 An exception is Frédérique Chevillot’s article ‘De l’humour à l’abject au risque du
vrai: le cas Nothomb’, Nouvelles études francophones 20:1 (2005), 99–109, which
draws on Kristeva’s model of the abject. However, though Chevillot notes the use
of disgusting imagery, her main focus is on the gendered power relations in the texts
she analyses.
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Disgust does not primarily contemn the taste itself, the skin sensation itself, the
visual image itself. It shares with other emotions the habit of responding primar-
ily to the meaning of things, yet it is unique in its heightened tendency to clothe
these meanings in sense imagery, which suggests physical contact in the encounter
between self and Other.
She goes on to argue that ‘disgust’s unique emphasis on the material world
also accounts for its defensive utility in that it diverts our attention from
a core disturbing idea to a material event.’8 When it comes to literary
analysis, Miller’s account helps to explain how images of the physically
disgusting can come to serve as particularly rich metaphors, often relating
back to these disturbing ideas. Nothomb’s and Erpenbeck’s texts – as well
as the other works to be considered later – bring out this relationship,
demonstrating how specific physical objects may stand for larger psycho-
logical threats, and are thus rendered disgusting to the characters who feel
threatened. In the case of Geschichte and Hygiène, menstrual blood fulfils
this role as a focal point for disgust at a range of other threats, from the
immediacy of sex and adulthood, to more complex notions of aesthetic
limitations or political responsibility.
A Disgusting Disguise:
Body Language and Boundary Protection in
Jenny Erpenbeck’s Geschichte vom alten Kind (1999)
Jenny Erpenbeck’s novella Geschichte vom alten Kind can be seen as part of
a trend among East German writers in the 1990s, such as Monika Maron
and Thomas Brussig, of using physical motifs in the allegorical expression of
post-unification concerns.9 However, in contrast to Brussig’s overt political
8 S. Miller, 7, 25, 25.
9 Monika Maron, Stille Zeile Sechs (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1993), first published
1991. Maron’s novel will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 4. Thomas Brussig,
Helden wie wir (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1998).
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satire in Helden wie wir [Heroes Like Us] (1995), Erpenbeck’s satirical project
remains rather more understated. Based on a real incident, in which her
grandmother, writer Hedda Zinner, befriended a teenage hospital patient,
only to learn later that the ‘girl’ was in fact a 31-year-old woman, Geschichte
vom alten Kind tells the story of a mysterious child who is not what she
seems.10 Discovered standing in the street holding an empty bucket, and
unable to give the police any information other than her age – fourteen
years – the protagonist is placed in a children’s home, a fenced-in institu-
tion on the outskirts of an unspecified city. The girl, whom the third-person
narrator never refers to by name, but only ever as ‘das Mädchen’ [the girl]
or by the neuter pronoun ‘es’, is large, fat and formless.11 Unlike the other
children who long for the freedom of the outside world, the girl is drawn
to the security of fered by the home’s authoritarian structure, its rigid rules,
and guarded gate. In fact, as becomes increasingly apparent and as the title
hints, the girl is not a child at all, but an adult woman, whose shapeless
body functions as a disguise. She uses her appearance and lack of physi-
cal abilities to manipulate her teachers and carers, although ambiguities
in the narration leave open the question of whether this is deliberate or
unconscious. The other children, initially less easily fooled by the girl’s
attempts to integrate herself by copying their behaviour, sense that they
have an impostor in their midst. Gradually, however, the girl wins their
confidence and attains the position she covets in the classroom hierarchy:
the lowest position, the only one which does not have to be defended.
Apparently loyal and stupid, the girl is tolerated by her classmates who use
her to carry messages or stand guard while they experiment with adolescent
sexuality. While they are beginning to grow up, the girl becomes increas-
ingly childlike. However, her attempt to remain a child ultimately fails, as
10 Tobias Dennehy, ‘Weise Einfältigkeit vom unteren Ende der Hierarchieleiter’,
Literaturkritik, 2 (2000), accessed 9 August 2005.
11 The noun ‘Mädchen’, meaning girl, is neuter in German, allowing Erpenbeck to
exploit this grammatical quirk in order to emphasize her protagonist’s apparent
gender neutrality by referring to her using the neuter pronoun ‘es’ [it]. In the pub-
lished English translation, Susan Bernofsky opts for the more natural-sounding ‘she’.
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the more involved she becomes in the lives of the other children, the more
the simple, comforting rules of the institution are replaced with complex
and often contradictory sets of expectations. Trying to please everyone
at once proves too complicated and she finds herself incapable of doing
anything at all, becoming slower and slower until she cannot move. After
being transferred to a hospital outside the home, she is put on a strict diet
and loses weight. Over a period of two weeks, her body sheds its disguise,
and she is recognized as an adult woman.
In the post-unification context, this brief outline already evokes GDR
themes, for example the enclosed physical space of the children’s home, or
the protagonist’s attachment to an authoritarian system. However, as uses
of disgust in political critique will be discussed in more detail in Chapter
4, which deals with Maron’s 1991 novel Stille Zeile sechs [Silent Close No.
6], the analysis of Erpenbeck’s novella here is intended, rather, as an initial
exploration of the ways that disgust can function as a symbol for social
structures in general, rather than considering specific moral and political
implications of the use of disgust in political critique. After brief ly plac-
ing Geschichte in a context of post-unification GDR writing, this section
will focus on the way that physical images, especially of disgust, are used
throughout to represent social structures. The next section, dealing with
Nothomb’s novels, will then draw out similarities and contrasts between the
two authors’ use of similar bodily motifs. Thematic parallels between the
two authors’ works, especially their concern with physicality and disgust,
suggest that in addition to interpretations focusing on national or aesthetic
issues, they might also be seen as representative of wider trends, especially
in the questions they raise regarding the gendered representation of disgust.
My intention here is thus not to attempt an exhaustive ‘decoding’ of
the novella’s political symbolism, although certain examples will be dis-
cussed, but to explore the type of – predominantly physical – images used,
the way they function as metaphors for the GDR, and their particular
suitability for representing social structures of any kind. Indeed, as Nancy
Nobile points out, although the GDR references are often so obvious as
to verge on caricature, the allegory is more complex than it may initially
seem and reviewers have interpreted the novella in dif ferent ways, seeing
it both as primarily a ref lection on the GDR past and as an expression of
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fears for the future.12 The allusions to the GDR take two main forms.
The girl herself can be taken as a metaphorical representation of a society
which, like her body, is both resistant to change, and yet constantly push-
ing at its boundaries and not always consciously controllable. Furthermore,
the enclosed children’s home of fers a spatial representation of the GDR
and its rules concerning social conduct all aim at maintaining a collective,
rather than individualized, corporeality. For example, the lack of mirrors
is justified as a means to prevent individualistic vanity. Moreover, while
the home’s ethos of ‘kamaradschaftliche[s] Zusammenleben’ [a communal
spirit] (G, 13/7) is encouraged by the absence of locks on the children’s
cupboards, frequent thefts mean the children have secret hiding-places, so
that ownership of private possessions becomes illicit, and the adults’ aim
of creating a trusting atmosphere fails. Perhaps the most extreme – and
grotesque – physical metaphor for social cohesion, however, is the home’s
regulation concerning underwear: although each child is assigned his or her
own set of clothing, clean underwear is distributed weekly from a central
pool. Thus ‘die Leibwäsche ist gleichsam die Wäsche für einen einzigen
großen Kollektivleib’ [the underwear is, as it were, intended to clothe a
single collective body] (G, 15/9).13
The fantasy of a collective body appeals strongly to the protagonist,
and is ref lected in aspects of her own body, with its absorbency and lack of
clearly defined boundaries, although, as I shall argue, this contributes – para-
doxically – to her exclusion from the group. According to Julia Hell, GDR
ideology was partly built on a similar fantasy of the sublime Communist
body, conceptualized as asexual. In the GDR novels Hell analyses, ‘sexu-
ality is defined as that part of subjectivity which links the subject to its
fascist past, and the new subject comes about as the result of the erasure
12 Nobile, 284. Nobile considers some of the GDR metaphors, as well as the protagonist’s
suitability for her allegorical function; however, her main interest is in intertextual
links between Geschichte vom alten Kind and Ludwig Tieck’s Der blonde Eckbert,
which of fer an extremely illuminating approach.
13 For a further analysis of the ways in which physical and spatial aspects of the narra-
tive ref lect GDR ideology, see Nobile, 292–3.
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of its material body, its sexual body’.14 The post-fascist body, Hell argues,
is based on identification with an idealized Communist father-figure, the
leader. If the non-sexual Communist body belonged to the father, it is
perhaps appropriate that in this post-Wende novella, the body in question
becomes that of an orphaned child, whose asexual body now reacts with
disgusted rejection to the pollution represented by Western capitalism.
Whereas the sublime Communist body represented a new beginning in
a post-fascist era, the (post-GDR) girl’s attempt to stave of f puberty is
doomed to failure, and her disgust at sexuality appears – in spite of the
‘ganz neuen Anfang’ [New Beginning] (G, 13/7) the orphanage claims to
of fer – as self-deception and an anachronistic refusal to move on.
Physical disgust is one of the most prominent ways in which the pro-
tagonist expresses her need for clear social boundaries. Childhood, as
represented by the confines of the home, provides security, and therefore
anything evoking the outside – adult – world must be rejected. The model
of disgust used here is therefore one based on psychological and psycho-
analytic accounts, in which disgust functions as a defence mechanism, safe-
guarding physical and psychical boundaries. In her anthropological study
Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas argues that concepts of pollution arise
from societies’ need for order. Dirt is defined as anything that is perceived
as out of place, since this threatens good order, but most threatening of all
is dirt whose origins are still recognizable, such as bodily waste products:
‘[t]his is the stage at which they are dangerous; their half-identity still clings
to them and the clarity of the scene in which they obtrude is impaired by
their presence.’15 This half-identity of the rejected object is a key charac-
teristic of the disgusting, seen for example in bodily emissions which are
neither part of the body nor entirely separate, and which therefore blur the
boundaries between the categories of ‘self ’ and ‘other’. According to Miller,
‘moments of sharp disgust reinforce the sense of self-other boundary, of
14 Julia Hell, Post-fascist Fantasies. Psychoanalysis, History, and the Literature of East
Germany (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 19.
15 Douglas, 161.
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inside and outside, of body under the protective watch of consciousness’.16
Both Miller and Douglas thus imply that disgust for a particular object
depends on its context; disgust is a complex emotion, rather than a simple
physical impulse. However, disgust is considered to be more visceral than
other emotions, such as love or contempt; it is triggered by either the actual
or the imagined presence of a physical object perceived as a contaminant,
and is associated with nausea and spontaneous physical rejection.17
In line with the model outlined above, the protagonist of Geschichte
vom alten Kind is obsessed with maintaining order and perceives disorder
as a disgust-inducing existential threat:
Jegliche Unordnung ist feindlich, das fängt bei diesen Dingen an, welche, eben weil
sie unordentlich in einem Schrank angehäuft sind, einem entgegenfallen, sobald man
den Schrank öf fnet, aber es endet in Fäulnis, Tod und Verwirrung.
[Disorder of every sort is hostile, this begins with those objects that, precisely because
they weren’t stacked neatly in a cupboard, fall out at you when you open the door,
but it ends in putrefaction, death and confusion.] (G, 46/41)
However, her own body is characterized by elements of disorder, and may
itself be perceived as disgusting. Before considering the girl’s boundary-
protecting reactions of disgust, I wish to explore the ways in which her
body provokes disgust in other characters, and perhaps even the reader.18
Her potential to disgust originates in her status as a marginal figure, one
who cannot be assimilated into any familiar system of categorization. She
is presented from the outset as external – and unnecessary – to existing
social systems, the police eventually deciding that ‘das Mädchen war übrig’
(G, 8).19 This lack of social belonging is ref lected in her body, whose form-
lessness and nondescript quality prevent categorization. Her hair is ‘weder
16 S. Miller, 6.
17 For a similar definition of disgust see Menninghaus, 7.
18 I do not, however, presume to speak for all readers here, and the novella does not
depend upon readers’ disgust for its ef fect.
19 Literally meaning, ‘the girl was left over’, or ‘spare’, this sentence is omitted from
the published English translation, though it is significant for an analysis in terms
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lang noch kurz […], und weder ist es braun, noch auch wirklich schwarz’
[neither long nor short […] and is neither brown nor genuinely black] (G,
9/3). Similarly, the girl’s f lesh refuses to fit itself into an acceptable shape;
she is at various points likened to a shapeless ‘Holzkloben’ [block of wood]
(G, 14/8), a ‘bleiches Stück Teig mit Kopf ’ [pale lump of dough with a
head] (G, 40/35), and a ‘verkommene Masse’ [rotten mass], which seems
‘zwar lebendig, weil ja ein Körper zwangsläufig lebendig ist, aber eben doch
auch irgendwie tot’ [alive, to be sure, for a body must necessarily be alive,
but at the same time somehow dead] (G, 59/54; translation modified). The
use of ‘verkommen’ [rotten] extends the description of the physically dis-
gusting into the moral domain, suggesting moral decay. Indeed, if readers
do share the characters’ disgust at the girl, it is more likely to be triggered
by her deceptive moral conduct, which is ref lected in the ambiguous body
that disgusts them.
The analogy of the dead body, which recurs when the girl perceives
her own body as a ‘riesigen atmenden Kadaver’ [massive breathing cadaver]
(G, 118/115), also suggests a further element of the disgusting. The signifi-
cance of death in relation to disgust is widely accepted amongst theorists;
indeed, Menninghaus even claims that ‘[e]very book about disgust is not
least a book about the rotting corpse’.20 Writing in the eighteenth cen-
tury, Herder uses the analogy of death to describe the disgust provoked by
protruding knuckles and veins, which for him resemble crawling worms:
‘It is as if they do not belong to the one and integral whole of the body;
they are extra-essential accretions, or detached parts […] like […] an early
death.’21 As noted in Chapter 1, recent theory in cognitive psychology and
in psychoanalysis also suggests that disgust develops as a reaction against
the inevitability of death and decay.22 Susan Miller sees the primary func-
tion of disgust as being the protection of self-boundaries:
of disgust, as it invites the reader to see the girl as an unwanted by-product of social
life.
20 Menninghaus, 1.
21 Herder, cited in Menninghaus, 53.
22 See S. Miller, 188–9; Nussbaum, 89–91.
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Disgust toward the waxy-skinned corpse or the dry skeleton is the ef fort to refuse
this monumental change of state, to reject it as a possibility. In this context, the idea
of life outside normal boundary is expressed […] through the sudden meaningless-
ness of the human body as a container for life.23
Thus Erpenbeck’s protagonist can be related to the experience of disgust
at death in two senses. In metaphorical terms, attached to and yet separate
from the social body formed by her classmates, she might be described as
an ‘extra-essential accretion’ like the protruding veins that evoked the idea
of death for Herder. She also blurs the boundaries between life and death
in a physical sense, as her amorphous, leaky body, which constantly drips
snot, is perceived as having characteristics of both the living and the dead
body. This ambiguous position on the borderline between life and death
is particularly disturbing, as it threatens the boundaries which, according
to Miller, the disgust reaction aims to protect.
The ambiguity with regard to boundaries also extends to gender, as the
girl evades sexual as well as aesthetic categorization. Referred to in gram-
matically neuter terms, her neutrality is also represented through the physi-
cal location she comes to occupy by about the middle of the story. While
her fourteen-year-old classmates stand secretly smoking in sex-segregated
groups in opposite corners of the playground, the protagonist plays with
the younger children in the middle, thus occupying a space in between
the gendered groups. It is at this point too that her increasing ‘physische
Neutralität’ [physical neutrality] (G, 82/78) becomes apparent to her class-
mates. Whereas previously the girl had, due to her size, been the target of
practical jokes, ‘die […] nie ganz unschuldig waren’ [which were […] never
quite innocent] (G, 81/78), such as a group of boys stealing her knickers, it
now becomes evident to the boys in her class that such jokes are pointless:
Dieser Körper ist gar keine Provokation, stellt sich heraus, und es hätte wenig Sinn,
ihn hart anzufassen, weil er einem von innem her keinen Widerstand entgegensetzt,
all das auf ihn gerichtete, mit Ekel vermischte Begehren versinkt in ihm wie in einem
Filz, es wird einfach geschluckt, es versackt, es erstickt.
23 S. Miller, 189.
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[This body, it appears, is not provocative at all, and there would be little point getting
rough with it, as it is sure to of fer no resistance whatever, and so any lust directed
toward it – lust tempered with disgust – will sink into it as if it were made of felt, it will
simply be swallowed up, absorbed, suf focated.] (G, 82/78–9; translation modified)
The adolescent boys’ nascent sexuality, with its combined elements of dis-
gust and desire, is swallowed up by the sexual neutrality of the girl’s body.
This neutrality is itself, however, described in terms which evoke disgust,
rather than being neutral in a clinical, aseptic sense. Furthermore, despite
the stated sexual neutrality, the terms in which it is described nonetheless
evoke another stereotype of femininity: that of a disgustingly inert, absor-
bent body, whose felt-like texture soaks up the emotions directed at it.
Indeed, although the children eventually come to accept the girl as part
of their group, they never quite overcome feelings of ambivalence towards
her. Thus, when she finally leaves the home due to illness, her classmates’
main reaction is one of relief. Intending to visit the girl in the hospital, but
continually putting it of f, her room-mate Nicole eventually realizes ‘daß
sie eine Abneigung, ja sogar eine heftige Abneigung dagegen empfand, das
Mädchen zu besuchen’ [that she felt a certain aversion – quite a strong one,
in fact – to the idea of visiting the girl] (G, 118–19/116), and for the class
in general, ‘eine ungeheure Hof fnung blüht, es möge nicht zurückkehren’
[a great, monstrous hope [blossoms within them]: that she might never
return] (G, 119/117). Furthermore, the children’s reluctance to mention the
girl following her departure testifies to a more fundamental rejection than
one occasioned by mere dislike, suggesting, rather, the need to distance
themselves from the girl’s disturbing otherness and unwanted proximity.24
The girl’s physical appearance and resistance to categorization is also
ref lected in aspects of the narrative form. For example, Nobile draws par-
allels between the repetition of fairly cumbersome words and the pro-
tagonist’s unchanging appearance, and between Erpenbeck’s block-like,
individually independent clauses and the girl’s shape, that of a ‘block of
24 cf. Menninghaus, 1: ‘The fundamental schema of disgust is the experience of a near-
ness that is not wanted.’
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f lesh, hermetically sealed of f ’.25 This analogy between specific elements
of Erpenbeck’s style and her protagonist may be extended even further, as
more general stylistic aspects also ref lect the subject-matter. Erpenbeck’s
very obvious use of devices such as the GDR allusions, presented in a way
which draws attention to them, is comparable to the girl’s very definite
physical presence, in that her huge bulk is dif ficult for the other charac-
ters to ignore. However, like the girl, the text evades easy definition, due
to strategies of understatement and concealment. For example, although
the narrator provides often somewhat heavy-handed explanations of the
girl’s mode of reasoning, we are only of fered occasional glimpses of her
background and underlying motivations within the world of the text.
Indeed, the narrator serves as a distancing barrier between the reader
and the protagonist, preventing identification. The narrator’s privileged
knowledge and external, ref lecting position are repeatedly underlined.
Often interpretations are provided of characters’ behaviour that they would
not themselves be in a position to make:
Ein wenig erinnert das Verhalten des Mädchens an die Art und Weise, mit welcher es
immer das viele Essen in sich hineinfrißt, auch hier zeigt es diese stille Gefräßigkeit,
die alles in sich aufnimmt, um es niemals wieder herauszurücken, aber dieser
Zusammenhang fällt den anderen nicht auf.
[The girl’s behaviour might remind one a little of the way she stuf fs herself with
large quantities of food, for here, too, one can behold a silent gluttony which takes
in everything, never to release it again, but this similarity does not occur to the others.]
(G, 89/85; emphases added)
Here, the verb ‘erinnern’ [to remind] draws the reader’s attention to the
presence of the narrator, as the person being reminded cannot in this case
be any of the other children, who do not make the connection. We are
thus invited to observe the girl and analyse her behaviour, rather than sym-
pathizing with her. Indeed, the reader’s attitude towards the girl is most
likely to ref lect the ambivalence of the children, who eventually befriend
her, but are ‘angewidert von [ihrer] Minderwertigkeit’ [repelled by [her
25 Nobile, 290; Erpenbeck, cited in Nobile, 291 (my translation).
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inferiority]] (G, 36/30; translation modified). For the reader, who is aware
of her deliberate assumption of inferiority, whilst she and her story are
compelling in their strangeness, it is the girl’s manipulative behaviour and
collusion with authority that make her simultaneously rather repellent.
Communication between the protagonist and other characters often
takes the form of ‘body language’. The girl’s attempts at verbal commu-
nication, appropriating the language of the other children, are relatively
unsuccessful, and her weak, unconvincing voice proves more ef fective as
part of the general impression of physical inferiority she projects. Further
extending the author’s use of body metaphors – in particular, the figure of
the protagonist – to convey meaning, the character of the girl makes use
of her own body as a means of manipulation. The most obvious instance is
her success in convincing others that she is a child, so that her body func-
tions as a disguise, although the extent to which this is deliberate remains
unclear. When questioned by the police about her background, we learn
that the girl ‘konnte sich einfach nicht daran erinnern’ [simply could not
remember] (G, 7/1), the use of the indicative in the original German rather
than the subjunctive for reported speech suggesting that the masquerade is
not a conscious deception. However, shortly afterwards a more calculating
attitude is suggested when the girl deliberately avoids attracting the atten-
tion of potential adoptive parents, in order to stay in the home (G, 11/15).
The physical deceptions the girl practises on her teachers are presented
less ambiguously as strategic displays of helpless incapacity. For example, in
a German lesson, she tricks her teacher into questioning her by adopting
the posture of a student trying to evade attention, but exaggerating this
posture to a suspicious degree: ‘[Das Mädchen] zwingt die Lehrerin gera-
dezu, es aufzurufen, seine Demutshaltung ist wie ein Sog, der den bösen
Willen der anderen, den der Lehrerin eingeschlossen, auf sich zieht’ [She
is all but forcing the teacher to call on her, her submissive posture produces
a sort of suction that attracts the ill will of others, including the teacher]
(G, 27/21–2). Having been tricked into humiliating the girl, the teacher
is made to feel ashamed of her own cruelty, and subsequently leaves the
girl in peace. A similar strategy is also practised on the more sympathetic
English teacher, as the girl controls his attention and sympathy by raising
her hand. The hierarchical positions of teacher and pupil are reversed, as
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the teacher falls victim to his exaggerated feelings of guilt and pity at the
girl’s apparent stupidity:
von Furcht und Mitleid geschüttelt sieht der Englischlehrer den Meldungen des
Mädchens entgegen, und biegt sich dann dessen f leischiger Arm in die Höhe, wird
er schleppenden Gangs an den Tisch des Mädchens treten.
[fear and pity make this English teacher tremble as he awaits the girl’s signal, and
each time her f leshy arm rises above his head, he will betake himself wearily to her
side.] (G, 30/25)
Although the teacher is in a position of authority, he is controlled by the
girl’s raised arm and his duty to respond to it. Furthermore, in both exam-
ples, the narrator insists on the coercive intention behind the girl’s gestures
and on both teachers’ failure to notice it, describing the encounters in
terms of force:
So entgeht ihm der durchaus zwingende Charackter dieses in die Höhe gereckten
Mädchenarmes, es entgeht ihm, daß er diesem Ruf nicht nur folgt, sondern folgen
muß, daß er von dieser mit Recht an ihn gestellten Forderung, Hilfe zu leisten, und
dem gleichzeitigen Unvermögen, diese Hilfe leisten zu können, ganz zerrissen, daß
heißt also beherrscht ist.
[Thus he fails to understand the power of this raised female arm to compel, fails to
understand that not only does he respond to her call, he has to respond to it, he is
being torn apart – in other words governed – by the perfectly legitimate expectation
that he will provide help where it is needed, coupled with his inability to provide
it.] (G, 31/25–6; emphasis added)
The girl’s use of her physical appearance to manipulate other people’s per-
ceptions of and behaviour towards her appears here at its most calculating,
in stark contrast with the image of helplessness she projects to the teachers
and students. The exaggerated weakness she displays to authority figures
enables her to retain her position at the bottom of the classroom hierarchy,
as the teachers come to the conclusion that she is unteachable, and she is
not expected to make progress. This voluntary assumption of a position of
powerlessness also ref lects the element of Mitläufertum [fellow-travelling]
on the part of ordinary people which helped to maintain the authoritarian
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regime of the GDR. Erpenbeck’s insistence on her protagonist’s deliber-
ately deceitful behaviour may thus be seen as a scathing critique of this type
of af fected passivity, which, she suggests, aims to protect the status quo.
Despite the girl’s success in manipulating her teachers, however, she
is less successful in her interactions with the other children. Listening to
conversations between some of her classmates, she tries to integrate herself
into the group by stealing words and phrases, which she can then repeat to
other children. However, the ordinary phrases – observations about the
cafeteria food – become unconvincing when spoken by the girl, and the
children do not respond (G, 39/33). Although this is a failure in verbal,
rather than physical communication, the girl’s inability to speak in a way
that convinces even herself still appears to be triggered by the inadequacy
of her body. The words she speaks are described as though they were visible,
physical objects: ‘alles, was aus seinem Mund herauskommt, sieht immer
wie eine Lüge aus, auch wenn es gar keine Lüge ist’ [everything that comes
out of her mouth always looks like a lie, even if it isn’t one] (G, 34/28).
Furthermore, her body appears to exert a contaminating inf luence over
the words and ideas that pass through it:
als würde alles, was durch seine Person hindurch muß, von diesem Durchgang
beschmutzt oder erschöpft. Als Beschmutztes oder Erschöpftes tritt es dann wieder
hervor, und macht einen ganz fremden Eindruck.
[as if everything filtered through her person is either sullied or exhausted in the
process. It then reappears as a sullied or exhausted entity, and gives quite a dif ferent
impression than before.] (G, 34/29)
Abstract words and ideas are often described as though they were mate-
rial objects, in line with the use of other physical images in the novella.
The reference here to ideas passing through the girl’s ‘person’, which could
refer to her whole body, rather than simply her head, evokes the image of
a digestive process, with the contaminated ideas emerging as soiled waste
products. But descriptions of eating and metaphors of digestion, prominent
throughout Geschichte vom alten Kind, initially also have a more positive
meaning as communal eating together. Before the turning-point, when
the girl proves her usefulness to her classmates by guarding some stolen
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money, and begins to be accepted (G, 72/68), mealtimes represent one of
the few occasions when she manages to integrate herself into the group of
children. This success is demonstrated by the children’s behaviour at the
table; although they are disgusted by the way she eats, they do not ques-
tion her right to sit at their table:
So erregt das Mädchen zwar den Unwillen und den Ekel derer, vor deren Blicken es so
unmäßig viel ißt, hat aber auch teil an der allgemeinen Geselligkeit, und der Unwillen
und der Ekel sind ganz gewöhnlicher Unwillen und Ekel, sind ganz alltäglich.
[Thus while the girl arouses the displeasure and disgust of those before whose eyes
she is eating so immoderately, she is nonetheless partaking in the general convivial-
ity, and this displeasure and this disgust are quite ordinary displeasure and disgust,
they are perfectly quotidian.] (G, 64/59)
Although the children also try to put the girl of f her food by describing
disgusting events, such as the dissection of pigs’ eyes in biology classes, or
showing her a festering cold-sore, this teasing also implies ‘die schwarze
Variante der Anerkennung’ [a negative sort of recognition] (G, 63/58), and
the girl appreciates it as such.
The girl also experiences a sense of integration on a more profound
level, as sharing her classmates’ food becomes spiritually significant:
an manchen Tagen entblödet es sich nicht einmal zu fragen, ob es von ihren Tellern
die Reste abessen dürfe, falls etwas übrigbleibe, die Knochen abnagen, die Soße able-
cken, die Puddingnäpfe mit dem Finger ausputzen, aus abgestandenen Büchsen die
letzten Tropfen saugen. Von äußerstem Verlangen gepeinigt, ergattert es an glück
lichen Tagen solcherlei Überbleibsel der Achtkläßler, ißt, wovon diese gegessen
haben, trinkt, wovon diese getrunken haben, das reinigt sein Blut.
[on some days she even goes so far as to ask whether she may finish of f the scraps
remaining on their plates should something be left over, gnaw the bones, lick up the
sauces, clean out the pudding bowls with her finger, suck the last f lat drops from their
drink cartons. Tormented by the most intense cravings, she is able, on lucky days, to
come by these eighth-grade leftovers, she eats that of which the others have eaten,
drinks that of which the others have drunk, this purifies her blood.] (G, 63/58–9)
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Eating the children’s leftovers is presented as degrading; the reference to
gnawing on bones, in particular, suggests the behaviour of a pet dog, rather
than a child on equal terms with the others. However, the girl experiences
it as a ritual of purification: by eating the same food as the children, she
will become like them. The shared food and drink, here explicitly linked
to blood and the concept of purity, also evoke the Last Supper, with the
girl’s desire for everlasting childhood in place of the eternal life promised
by Christ: ‘Whoso eateth my f lesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal
life.’26 Her longing for physical integration into the group of children
thus leads to a travesty of a religious communion, in which her behaviour
both brings her closer – in her own eyes – to the children, and distances
her from them as inferior.
This scene in the dining room is referred to in a later passage, in which
the girl listens to her roommates’ stories with the same ‘stille Gefräßigkeit’
[silent gluttony] with which she eats (G, 89/85). The children’s verbal
storytelling is here consumed by the protagonist as though it were food,
in a manner reminiscent of her ‘digestion’ of the stolen phrases earlier in
the story. This scene also has echoes of the earlier religious theme, as the
stories of the children’s awakening sexuality are presented as ‘Beichte’ [con-
fessions]; this time, however, it is the protagonist’s own regained sexual
innocence and purity that she hopes will protect the others from the con-
sequences of their impure, contaminating thoughts:
In diesen Momenten vermag es seine Augen nicht länger vor der Tatsache zu verschlie-
ßen, daß seine Gefährtinnen sich gerade aus der Kindheit verabschieden. Seine eigene
Reinheit ist das einzige, was den Verfall jener noch eine kurze Zeit wird auf halten
können, darauf setzt es in blinder Hof fnung, und erteilt Absolution.
[At such moments she can no longer close her eyes to the fact that her companions
are just in the process of leaving childhood behind them. Her own purity is the only
thing that will be able to postpone its decay a short while longer, in this she trusts
with the blindness of hope and grants them absolution.] (G, 91/87–8)
26 John, 6:54.
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The girl’s consumption is thus presented as a swallowing up and contain-
ment of the threatening sexual thoughts, comparable to the way she eats,
in that the huge bulk of her body gives the impression that the food is
simply piling up and being contained inside, rather than passing through
her digestive system: ‘als häufe dieser Körper ohne jeden Sinn und Verstand
alles, was in ihn hineingegeben wird, einfach an, [wie] ein Materiallager’
[it appears this body is simply accumulating without rhyme or reason all
that has ever been introduced into it [like] a stockpile] (G, 58/54). The
metaphor of containment also applies to her wish to delay her roommates’
‘Verfall’ [decay], as this will lead to their departure from the idealized realm
of childhood enclosed by the fence of the children’s home.
In contrast to her classmates’ developing interest in sex, the protagonist
thus experiences anything sexual as an existential threat, as her continued
existence as a child ‘geradezu davon abhängt, derlei Verunreinigungen
niemals in einen Zusammenhang mit sich selbst zu bringen’ [virtually
depends on her ability to keep all contamination of this sort far from her
own person] (G, 91/87). The sexual innocence with which she absorbs her
roommates’ confessions takes the form of a willed ignorance or repression
of any sexual knowledge, a ‘Vorhang, den das Mädchen selbst zugenäht
hat’ [curtain the girl [has] sewn shut before her] (G, 91/87). However,
when faced with visible or tangible evidence of adult sexuality, of whose
nature she cannot simply remain ignorant, the girl reacts with spontane-
ous physical rejection of the contaminant. A first instance occurs towards
the start of the girl’s time at the orphanage, when she accidentally comes
across a couple kissing, and experiences an attack of hysterical blindness:
Da steht auf dem Treppenabsatz ein Paar, das sich küßt, ein Wust von Haaren, Händen
und Hosen. Plötzlich sieht [das Mädchen] nichts mehr, es schaut hin, aber es kann
nichts mehr sehen, nicht nur das Paar nicht, sondern auch sonst nichts, nicht das
Treppenhaus, nicht die hölzernen Stufen, nichts vor sich, nichts hinter sich, nichts.
Es reißt die Augen auf, aber es sieht nichts.
[There on the landing a couple is kissing, a tangle of hair and hands and trousers.
Suddenly she is unable to see, she looks but sees nothing, it is not only the couple she
cannot see, she sees nothing at all, not the stairwell, not the wooden steps, nothing
in front of her and nothing behind, nothing. She opens her eyes as wide as she can
but she sees nothing.] (G, 29/23)
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The blindness can also be seen as a physical symptom of the girl’s desire for
ignorance and, by actively not seeing, of her wish to maintain her illusions
regarding children’s innocence. When standing guard for teenagers having
sex in the dormitories, the girl does not react in the same way to the cries
she hears, since, not actually being faced with incontrovertible evidence of
sexual activity, she can choose not to understand them: ‘es […] fragt nicht
danach, was das für Schmerzen sein mögen’ [she does not wonder about
what sort of pain this is] (G, 83/80; translation modified).
Similarly, in two further episodes, when, faced with evidence of adult
sexual activity or potential, the girl is disgusted to the point of vomiting,
an element of unavoidable understanding appears to be central to her reac-
tion of disgust. The first such incident occurs when the girl is menstruating.
Initially, she only suffers from the usual type of cramps and mild discomfort;
it is only when her roommate Nicole asks ‘was das eigentlich für ein Gefühl
wäre, wenn das Blut unten so aus einem rausläuft, also, wenn man sozusa-
gen eine richtige Frau sei’ [what it felt like anyhow to have blood running
out of you like that, in other words what it felt like to be a real woman]
that the girl is suddenly overwhelmed by nausea and vomits into Nicole’s
lap (G, 93/89). This sudden physical reaction suggests that the definition
of menstruation as evidence of being a ‘real woman’ has made it disgusting
in a way that the menstrual blood itself would not otherwise have been,
ref lecting the idea that disgust depends on the cultural context of its object.
The second occasion on which the girl is moved to extreme physical
disgust is more complex and occurs shortly before the paralysis that leads
to her being removed from the home. On entering a storeroom used by
her classmates as a meeting-place, the girl sees two boys, one of whom is
masturbating the other, while pretending to be Nicole:
Der Hockende reibt das Glied seines Freundes heftiger. Er lispelt: Ich zeige dir meine
Brüste, Dennis, ich bin Nicole, deine Nicole, faß mich an, faß mir zwischen die Beine,
ich bin schon ganz naß, Dennis, Dennis, ich will, daß du ihn mir reinsteckst, steck
ihn mir rein, Dennis, steck ihn mir rein.
[The one who is squatting rubs his friend’s penis harder. He lisps: Let me show you
my breasts, Dennis, it’s Nicole, your Nicole, touch me, touch me between my legs,
I’m already all wet, Dennis, Dennis, I want you to put it in me, put in me Dennis,
put it in me.] (G, 105/102)
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After Dennis ejaculates, the girl leaves the storeroom and ‘übergibt sich
gründlich’ [vomits up everything she has inside her] (G, 106/102). However,
unlike her disgust at her own menstrual blood, with its unambiguous rejec-
tion of her female sexual potential, here it is unclear whether the trigger
for the girl’s vomiting is the sight of semen,27 the homosexual element of
the scene, the boy’s fantasy of being Nicole, the encounter with any type
of sexual activity, or a combination of these factors. It seems likely, though,
that the increased complexity of the scene, especially when contrasted with
her earlier reaction to the relatively innocent kissing couple, contributes to
the girl’s disgust as well as to her eventual paralysis, as it ref lects her growing
awareness of the complexity of social life within the home. The narration
of the boys’ activities in the storeroom is followed by an account of the
girl’s realization that there is no common consensus upon which she can
base her behaviour, so that she cannot escape making her own decisions:
‘das Mädchen […] will das, was alle wollen, aber das gibt es nicht. Und in
dem Moment, da ihm das klar wird, wird ihm auch klar, daß seine Kräfte es
verlassen’ [She wants what all the others want, but there is no such thing.
And the moment she realizes this, she realizes also that her strength is
waning] (G, 108/105).
The disgusted rejection of sex and, in particular, of the knowledge
and understanding of it, can be seen as a further reference to biblical
themes, as, in the book of Genesis, it is when Adam and Eve eat from the
tree of knowledge of good and evil that they learn to be ashamed of their
bodies, and are banished from the garden of Eden. Indeed, in Geschichte,
bodily shame is also presented as a learned response, albeit one which is
based more on cultural constructions of shame than on essential concepts
of good and evil. During one of her frequent visits to the sick bay of the
home, the girl ref lects on the comforting way the medical personnel seem
to understand the functioning of her body, treating it as though it were
a machine: ‘ungefragt wird in den Körper des Mädchens hineingegrif fen
27 On the contaminating and disgust-inducing properties of semen, see W. Miller,
105–7. In contrast to most other theorists of disgust, Miller considers semen to be
the most disgusting body f luid.
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