Plugging the hole – On “The Appointment” by Katharina Volckmer

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• Julia Christ 
• 10 November 2021

The Appointment, the first novel by Katharina Volckmer, a German writer exiled in London, has dazzled critics and English-speaking audiences^[1]. The book, which tells the story of a woman’s attempt to change her sex, questions the possibility of such a gesture, not in the absolute, but for the German woman who is performing it. Resolutely provocative, mixing sexual fantasies about Hitler and sharp insights into our contemporary society. Julia Christ gives us her reading of Katharina Volckmer’s provocative and satirical parable, over which the shadow of Philip Roth, Woody Allen and Thomas Bernhardt hovers.

Why You Should Read W. G. Sebald

 

W. G. Sebald
Photograph by Ulf Andersen

Why You Should Read W. G. Sebald

By Mark O’Connell

December 14, 2011

Today marks the tenth anniversary of the death of one of contemporary literature’s most transformative figures. On December 14, 2001, the German writer W. G. Sebald suffered a heart attack while driving and was killed instantly in a head-on collision with a truck. He was fifty-seven years old, having lived and worked as a university lecturer in England since his mid-twenties, and had only in the previous five years come to be widely recognized for his extraordinary contribution to world literature. Earlier that year, his book “Austerlitz” (about a Jewish man sent to England as a child through the Kindertransporte in 1939, the memory of whose past has been lost) was published to universal acclaim, and the prospect of a Nobel prize was already beginning to seem inevitable.

An Interview with W. G. Sebald

WG Sebald

An Interview with W. G. Sebald

---

JAMES WOOD

This conversation was part of a series called The Writer, The Work, hosted by the PEN American Center. It took place in New York City on July 10, 1997, when the only book of W. G. Sebald’s in English was The Emigrants.

 

The German writer Winfried George Maximilian Sebald (1944-2001) in Paris, September 8, 1999.ULF ANDERSEN 

Invented memories: From psychiatric disorder to tricks for writing novels

There is a type of amnesia that prevents the formation of new memories, its place taken by confabulations. The writer W. G. Sebald used this illness to relate the story of a family member who ended his days in a psychiatric hospital

MONTERO GLEZ

JUL 22, 2024 - 14:13 COT

W. G. Sebald was a German writer who died at the beginning of the century in Norfolk (United Kingdom), in a traffic accident at the age of 57, after suffering a heart attack. He stood out for altering reality without being noticed, that is to say, for constructing fictions and with them achieving what is called the “reality effect.” Sebald used photographs to illustrate his texts. In one of his books, entitled The Emigrants, the writer used his own memories to reconstruct four biographies, four lives of people who one day had to emigrate and leave their roots in search of other branches.

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck wins International Booker prize

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck wins International Booker prize 

Erpenbeck is the first German writer and Michael Hofmann the first male translator to win the £50,000 prize for novel which tells the story of a relationship set against the collapse of East Germany

Ella Creamer

Tuesday 31 May 2024

Jenny Erpenbeck and Michael Hofmann have won the 2024 International Booker prize for Erpenbeck’s “personal and political” novel Kairos, translated by Hofmann from German.

The 100 best books of the 21st century / No 5 / Austerlitz by WG Sebald

The 100 best books of the 21st century

No 5

Austerlitz by WG Sebald

Long and winding river

Andy Beckett on W G Sebald's Austerlitz, a meandering journey through time, place and genre

Austerlitz
W G Sebald
415pp, Hamish Hamilton, £16.99

Andy Beckett
Saturday 29 September 2001

In W G Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, which helped him acquire a large British reputation, one of the more memorable scenes - intentionally or otherwise - involved a fogeyish narrator, staying at an empty seaside hotel in Suffolk, attempting to eat fish and chips. The fish, Sebald begins,"had doubtless lain entombed in the deep-freeze for years... The breadcrumb armour-plating had been partly singed by the grill, and the prongs of my fork bent on it... The tartare sauce was turned grey by the sooty breadcrumbs." When the narrator finally manages to bite into his fillet, he finds "nothing but an empty shell".

 

German writers on Odessa

By The Odessa Review

July 8, 2016

Odessa was very far away, even for most of the Germans living in Russia. Traveling there was difficult, and many Europeans could never imagine that such a beautiful a city was to be found in the south of the Czar’s empire. Though the busy port nevertheless attracted a considerable number of Germans from Germany, Austria, and the Baltic provinces of Russia, it was for economic rather than literary purposes. It is for this reason that, with a few very noteworthy exceptions, Odessa hardly ever appears in German literature.
Even German playwright and journalist Wilhelm Wolfsohn (1820-1865), who himself was an important mediator between German and Russian literature, and who grew there, never wrote about his native city.

 

Katharina Volckmer

Exclusive Interview: The Appointment Author Katharina Volckmer

Paul Semel
October 15, 2020

Beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder. But so too is genre, as evidenced by the following email interview I did with writer Katharina Volckmer about her new novella The Appointment (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), which may or may not be transgressive, depending on your eyes.

The Appointment by Katharina Volckmer / An Extract

 

The Appointment

by Katharina Volckmer

An Extract

I know that this might not be the best moment to bring this up, Dr Seligman, but it just came to my mind that I once dreamt that I was Hitler. I feel embarrassed talking about it even now, but I really was him, overlooking a mass of fanatical followers, I delivered a speech from a balcony. Wearing the uniform with the funny, puffy legs, I could feel the little moustache on my upper lip, and my right hand was flying through the air as I mesmerised everyone with my voice. I don’t remember what exactly I was talking about – I think it had something to do with Mussolini and some absurd dream of expansion – but that doesn’t matter. What is fascism anyway but ideology for its own sake; it carries no message, and in the end the Italians beat us to it. I can’t walk for more than a hundred metres in this city without seeing the words pasta or espresso, and their ghastly flag is hanging from every corner. I never see the word sauerkraut anywhere. It was never feasible for us to hold down an empire for a thousand years with our deplorable cuisine; there are limits to what you can impose on people, and anyone would break free after a second serving of what we call food. It was always our weak point, we never created anything that was meant to be enjoyed without a higher purpose – it is not for nothing that there is no word for pleasure in German; we only know lust and joy. Our throats never get wet enough to suck anyone with devotion because we were all raised on too much dry bread. You know that horrible bread we eat and tell everyone about, like some sort of self-perpetuating myth? I think it’s a punishment from God for all the crimes we have committed, and forthwith nothing as sensual as a baguette or as moist as the blueberry muffins they serve here will ever come out of that country. It’s one of the reasons I had to leave: I no longer wanted to be complicit in the bread lie. But anyway, as I was delivering what we would now have to call a hate speech, I felt that the orgiastic applause coming from beneath me only served as poor compensation for my obvious deformities. I was so painfully aware that I looked nothing like the Aryan ideal I had been going on about for all those years. I mean, I did not have a club foot, but still, not all of the dead Jews in the world, nor even my alleged vegetarianism, would make me eligible for one of those hot Riefenstahl pics. I felt like a fraud. Had no one noticed that I looked like an old potato with plastic hair? I can still feel the sadness I woke up with that day, the sadness of knowing that I would never get to be one of those beautiful blond German boys with their Greek bodies and that skin that turns so wonderfully golden in the sun, the feeling that I would never be what I felt I should have been.

An Interview with Katharina Volckmer

 

AT WORK

AUTHOR PHOTO: JEAN-FRANÇOIS PAGA

Ice Pick: An Interview with Katharina Volckmer

When Katharina Volckmer and I first met over Zoom, her in London and myself in Baltimore, I couldn’t stop talking, not unlike the narrator of Volckmer’s debut novel, The Appointment. The novel is bracingly frank, acerbic; some might call it transgressive, though I don’t think that’s the right term. The novel’s titration of wit, directness, and erudition made me feel a bit like the narrator: full of nervous, excited, voluble energy. I said that if Volckmer didn’t like any of the questions I’d prepared, she could skip them. She wryly offered to “do a Klaus Kinski on me,” alluding to the German actor’s notorious hostility in interviews. Our conversation could not have been more unlike a Kinski interview: Volckmer was measured and patient, generous with her time and humor. This is not to say that our conversation was comforting, which makes sense, as Volckmer’s work refuses comfort. Elsewhere, she noted, “We cannot spend our lives wearing woolly socks and drinking tea and expecting books and art to broadly reconfirm what we think already—I’m much more in favour of thinking of art as some sort of ice pick,” recalling Kafka’s notion that “we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”

‘It’s a confession’ … Katharina Volckmer. Photograph: Liz Seabrook

Interview

Katharina Volckmer: 'Germans say they've dealt with their past. But I don’t think you can'

The Appointment’s darkly funny untangling of national and sexual identity has not been published in the author’s home country – yet. But she wants to break the awkward silence over German history

Entretien avec Katharina Volckmer

Elle Hunt
Thursday 3 September 2020

The subtitle of Katharina Volckmer’s debut novel is revealed only on the title page: “The Appointment (Or, The Story of a Cock)”. In the US edition, it’s a “Jewish Cock”. Volckmer has said the subheading was kept off the cover “as a surprise” – making it the first of many unsteadying gear shifts in a monologue that sets out to unsettle.

Walter Benjamin in Ibiza

ARTS & CULTURE

Walter Benjamin in Ibiza

By Frédéric Pajak

March 20, 2019

When Hitler came to power, Walter Benjamin did not immediately realize what the dictatorship had in store. Like many intellectuals, he counted on an early collapse of the regime. To begin with, he seemed almost serene in the face of events. But events picked up speed, and, even though it was hard to obtain reliable news, by March 1933 it was apparent to him that “there can be no doubt that in very many instances people have been dragged from their beds in the night and beaten or murdered.”

Walter Benjamin

Recalling The Past: The Intimate Objects Of Childhood

Jeffrey Lewis

May 28, 20126:00 AM ET

Some authors have snob appeal.

Like many people, I long wanted to read, or at least be able to say that I had read, Walter Benjamin, widely acclaimed as one of the geniuses of 20th century literature. But I was daunted by the fact that his most celebrated work, The Arcades Project, is difficult, long and surrounded by dense clouds of academia, mystifying would-be readers in Europe and America.

I became un-daunted, and un-snobbed, when I discovered his Berlin Childhood around 1900.

It's short — no more than 130 pages. Its prose is as direct as it is beautiful and precise; and it is about a subject so intimate and universal that I immediately felt welcomed into it.

In fact, I felt embraced by it, almost as if it were my own childhood. The book consists of 46 very short chapters, each organized around something — a sewing box, a new telephone in the house, a carousel, the otter in the zoo — to which in Benjamin's childhood whole universes of emotions, associations, bits of lore, and a child's understandings and misunderstand-ings, adhered.

In the mid-1930s, when he wrote the book, Benjamin was a man on the run from the Nazis, a man in exile, knowing he would probably never see Berlin again. He wrote, as he said, to inoculate himself against a debilitating homesickness.

Benjamin's was a middle class, city childhood, and so finely is it observed that I found myself not only recalling events from my own upbringing, but inhabiting those memories, becoming for a few minutes a child again. Take the thimble from his mother's sewing box. "Held up to the light," he writes, "it glowed at the end of its shadowy hollow, where our index finger was at home. For we loved to seize the little diadem, which in secret could crown us."

Just as his mother's thimble turned Benjamin into a prince, I could immediately recall the power window buttons in my father's car, with their chrome efficiency turning me into a mighty engineer, grandly commanding the windows to leap up and down. I learned from Benjamin how to remember my own childhood, and how to see that it as still a part of me. Benjamin, on the run for his life, took his past along with him. It was how he could triumph over nostalgia.

Berlin Childhood around 1900 is perhaps an even more important book today than when it was written. It's possible now to live in a kind of exile from our childhoods. The ever-multiplying ubiquity of photographs and film tempts us more than ever to believe that the images on our screens and in our albums are full and accurate evocations of what we were.

I see a photo of myself when I was 9 and conclude that I always frowned and always wore a plaid shirt and there was nothing invisible about me. I forget to truly remember. I neglect it. I have this photograph instead.

And so both my past and my present are diminished. What a loss. But what a gain, to read Benjamin's short book. You must read this.

NPR

Walter Benjamin / Berlin Chilidhood around 1900

Walter Benjamin

BERLIN CHILHOOD AROUND 1900

Begun in Poveromo, Italy, in 1932, and extensively revised in 1938, Berlin Childhood around 1900 remained unpublished during Walter Benjamin’s lifetime, one of his “large-scale defeats.” Now translated into English for the first time in book form, on the basis of the recently discovered “final version” that contains the author’s own arrangement of a suite of luminous vignettes, it can be more widely appreciated as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century prose writing.

Walter Benjamin who was more than a bit curious about the effects of “mechanical reproduction” on the quality of art as the mid-twentieth century approached. One can only imagine what he would have made of digital reproduction.

The Curious Case of Walter Benjamin (or where is art headed in the 21st century?)

Nicholas Petroni
May 19, 2018

What will art look like at the end of the 21st century?

Suppositions about the future of art seem to have generally stemmed from presuppositions about the interaction between the present and the shifting nature of art. Walter Benjamin, writing as the world struggled to emerge from the Great Depression could not possibly have known that capitalism would emerge from the worldwide economic wreckage, different, somewhat restrained (at least for a time), but more firmly entrenched in the West than ever before. Similarly, Benjamin could not have imagined the ubiquity of for-profit creative endeavors in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Walter Benjamin / The Philosopher Stoned

Walter Benjamin

The Philosopher Stoned

What drugs taught Walter Benjamin

By Adam Kirsch

August 14, 2006

On December 18, 1927, at three-thirty in the morning, Walter Benjamin began writing a memorandum titled “Main Features of My First Impression of Hashish.” It is characteristic of Benjamin that the first fact he thought it necessary to record was not the time he had taken the drug but the time he started writing about it. Like the books he read and the streets he wandered—like life itself—hashish was important to him less for its own sake than as a subject for interpretation.

For Benjamin, the whole world was material for criticism.Illustration by Ralph Steadman

For a writer with Benjamin’s interests and allegiances, a rendezvous with hashish was inevitable. The surprising thing is that it took him until the age of thirty-five to try it. As early as 1919, he had been fascinated by Baudelaire’s “Artificial Paradises,” in which the poet issues warnings against the drug so seductive that they sound like invitations: “You know that hashish always evokes magnificent constructions of light, glorious and splendid visions, cascades of liquid gold.” Benjamin, who regarded Baudelaire as one of the central writers of the nineteenth century, admired the book’s “childlike innocence and purity,” but was disappointed in its lack of philosophical rigor, noting, “It will be necessary to repeat this attempt independently.” The notes from his first hashish trance show him holding deliberately aloof from any kind of rapture. “The gates to a world of grotesquerie seem to be opening,” he wrote. “Only, I don’t wish to enter.” According to Jean Selz, a friend with whom Benjamin smoked opium on several occasions, “Benjamin was a smoker who refused the initial blandishments of the smoke. He didn’t want to yield to it too readily, for fear of weakening his powers of observation.”

Reality, and Other Stories by John Lanchester review / Horror for the digital age

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Reality, and Other Stories by John Lanchester review – horror for the digital age

Vinegar-sharp ghost stories play with the hold that technology has over all of us

Christopher Shrimpton
Thu 22 Oct 2020 12.00 BST

J

ohn Lanchester’s first collection of short stories begins with a lesson in etiquette. “You aren’t allowed to ask for the Wi-Fi password before you say hello,” says the narrator to his nine year old son. “It’s simply one of the rules.”