Volume 7, Issue 2

The condition of exile and homelessness is one of the recurrent features of W.G. Sebald’s work. This can be seen paradigmatically in the lives narrated in Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants). Sebald portrays the history of the West repeatedly as a gradual and relentless decline through various catastrophes towards ultimate destruction. A persuasive metaphor for this perceived human condition of uprootedness and instability is the situation of people in transit in waiting rooms in airports and railway stations. This is best exemplified by the eponymous main character in Sebald’s last novel, Austerlitz, a work in which stations and waiting rooms in Brussels, London, Paris, Prague and other cities are a recurring locus. They are linked symbolically through a network of inter- and intratextual references and associations to Sebald’s major thematic concerns: the Holocaust, the destruction of the natural world and, ultimately, the end of all time.

Irene, the protagonist in Herta Müller’s Reisende auf einem Bein, experiences the transit between two political systems as a continuous journey which does not end with her arrival, but extends into everyday life in the destination country, a life marked by Otherness, foreignness and placelessness. The political oppression suffered in her country of origin, an unnamed Eastern bloc state representing Nicolae Ceauşescu’s Romania, influences Irene’s perception of her Western destination country. While Irene suffers from the Otherness and placelessness experienced on her journey, this experience also constitutes her identity as a »vagabond« (Brittnacher / Klaue), making it impossible for her to stop. Irene makes this experience as a train passenger, as well as in train and metro stations where the movement of passing trains makes her feel disconnected, but also allows her to see the fractures in other relationships around her. The article shows how the train journey becomes a central metaphor of Irene’s transit experience, similar to Kristeva’s image of foreignness as a moving train, and describes Irene’s movement by means of the ›vagabond‹, the ›flâneur‹ (Benjamin), the ›nomad‹ (Deleuze / Guattari) and the ›system migrant‹ (Sorko).

Train journeys to the USSR were a popular topic in GDR literature. This article explores the images of the Soviet Union, of its inhabitants and of the travellers themselves in texts by GDR authors written and published between 1962 and 2010. In these texts the train becomes an important symbol for what the authors see on their journey. This also includes what remains hidden from them and, in particular, how they understand what they are seeing and what not. The train therefore turns into a symbolic transit space, a heterotopia capable of juxtaposing several spaces - that are in themselves incompatible - in a single real place (Foucault). The train, its engine, windows and compartments in the texts discussed encompass surprisingly different perceptions of the Soviet Union, ranging from those informed by a strong faith in the imminent implementation of the socialist utopia to those informed by the perception of a Stalinist dystopia - and the ongoing repression of this insight on the part of the authors.

In his novel Donau abwärts (1992) the Hungarian writer Péter Esterházy discussed the problems of intercultural experiences at a time, when these questions started to become important for the states of the former Yugoslavia: They had just broken up, communist rule in Eastern Europe had come to its end, and no one knew how to define Central and Eastern European identities. Esterházy’s novel takes the river Danube which crosses the Balkan states as the background for encounters of travelers from different countries at this historical moment in the early 1990s. According to the structure of the historical genre of the roman fleuve which was particularly popular in 17th and 18th century England, France, and the Netherlands, characters meet each other mostly on ships, talking, playing, searching for new ideas, and new identities in a mental as well as in a sexual manner. Questions of nationality are intertwined with questions of corporeality and social norms. Existing spaces of orientation, perception, knowledge and feeling are set in motion, and a new concept of living in transit spaces emerges.

This contribution considers the changes in German-Polish border narratives since 1989, and it argues for a flexible transnational approach to studying borderlands literature. In particular, the article discusses ›border poetics‹ as an idiom of the cosmopolitan imagination: it is a broadly applicable narrative and cultural practice that connects locally and historically specific border experiences with universally understood liminal experiences (e.g., life and death) or with epistemic and ontological boundaries. Using examples from German and Polish literature, the article explains that border poetics both emerges from and expands upon an understanding of the border as a contact zone.

A transit space may be defined as a ›liminal zone‹ (V. Turner): Social, sexual and cultural hierarchies may be reversed or temporarily dissolved, the continuity of traditions may become uncertain, and future outcomes once taken for granted may be questioned. The dissolution of an order in a liminal space creates a fluid, malleable situation that can allow for the establishment of new perspectives and conventions. In his Bericht für eine Akademie (1917), Franz Kafka casts a sceptical eye on the variety show as a liminal space. This might open new perspectives on Josephine Baker’s performances on stage and in life.

Referring to Marc Augé’s theory of non-places, the article shows how the protagonist of Terézia Mora’s second novel Der einzige Mann auf dem Kontinent (2009) undergoes a process of dissociation when moving either in indistinguishable, non-identifiable non-places or in virtual worlds offered by the new media. These virtual worlds constitute transitory places which neither offer the protagonist any stability or fixed orientation points, nor do they place him in any permanent relationships. In addition, the article focuses on the metafictional level of the novel, where transitory movement through architextual system references plays a central role. The text, I would argue, creates an infinite movement by means of such system references, thus putting not only the protagonist, but also the text itself into a permanently oscillating transitional movement.

Transitional and transitory phenomena are mostly interrelated with various forms of dynamic self-perception, -articulation and -reflection, and combined with relational perception, experience and construction of foreignness, alterity and difference. In José F. A. Olivers poem kompass & dämmerung (2002) poetical transformations of the transitory can be traced through the interplay of specific literary themes, motifs and techniques. The main focus of this paper is on the poetic performance of a fluctuating and pluralist self-exploration - located at dawn as a transitional phase - via deictic acts creating fleeting interior and exterior spaces which are undistinguishable. This is complemented by literary techniques of lexical splitting, poetic neologisms and multilingual references which blur the boundaries of one-dimensional perception and of determining allocation of meaning and keep words in the balance.

According to Lakoff and Johnson, metaphors allow an insight into the concepts that govern our thoughts. Looking at metaphors used to describe the product, process or agent of translation can provide insights into the concepts of translation that prevail at a particular time - and into the changes those concepts undergo. The article analyses two particular images in this regard which have been employed by translators themselves or by theorists in different centuries: The image of translation as movement between distant points, and the image of translation as a bridge and the translator as bridge builder. The way in which these spatial images have been used over time reflects a revaluation of the space between languages and cultures. Once a distance defined predominantly by the necessity to be mastered and overcome with the help of translators, the ›in-between‹ now has become inhabitable, albeit as a space that resists firm definition and demands an ongoing renegotiation of (fleeting or transitory) identities.