Stephan Krause: Topographien des Unvollendbaren. Franz Fühmanns intertextuelles Schreiben und das Bergwerk, Winter, Heidelberg 2009 (= Probleme der Dichtung, Bd. 42)

• Marijke Mulder

Contrary to most scholarship on Franz Fühmann (1922 1984), which emphasizes the “Wandlung” and “Brüche” at the core of the East German writer’s poetics, Stephan Krause signals on the opening page of his study that he will focus on the continuity of Fühmann’s oeuvre with the humanistic tradition. Krause’s invocation of continuity is amplified with reference to the work of Sigrid Damm, who holds that the focus on disruption and change has tended to situate Fühmann’s work in the historical political framework of twentiethcentury Germany – where rupture is an unavoidable fact – rather than in an aesthetic framework whose open dimensions extend well beyond the Third Reich and the two postwar German states. The sense of continuity Krause is after, therefore, does not reevaluate Fühmann’s thematic concerns, so much as draw out ways in which Fühmann’s oeuvre belongs to a living hermeneutical context. Already in his title, “Topographien des Unvollendbaren”, Krause indicates that this context cannot be restricted to the GDR as a geo-political territory, but is an intertextual setting structured by the rhetorical topoi of translatability, writability of experience, myth, modernity, utopia, and the subterranean labyrinths of the literary archive. As rhetorical sites, these topographies are marked not by objective boundaries, but by openness to the process of poetic understanding.

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