John L. Plews, University of Alberta
Ingeborg Drewitz’s urban novel Das Hochhaus (The High-rise, 1975) depicts a week in the everyday lives of four young adolescents and their parents in an apartment building in West Berlin in the 1970s.[1] Though food is a recurrent motif in the novel, the reader hardly ever sees anyone actually eating. Instead of consuming food, Drewitz shows the characters shopping in a supermarket, making preparations before the meal, or clearing away the remains after having eaten. In this way, she manages to make the very actuality of human eating seem absent. The author, therefore, is able to suppress the individual’s physiological need to eat and, simultaneously, emphasize the social aspect of people coming together. By peering beneath this social dimension of the scenes in which food and eating are described in the novel and revealing the private concerns of the individuals involved, I will show Drewitz’s intention to unveil the historical conditions that exist underneath the seemingly blissful image of human congregation in the family context and, thus, the personal isolation and insecurity it attempts to hide.
Though the novel describes the meals served in the workers’ canteen and the produce available at the supermarket, it focuses more often and more acutely on the food found within the environment of the home. The discourse of food belongs very much to the domain of the family. One of the four homes examined by the author is that of a middle-aged scriptwriter of little significance and his fifteen-year-old son, Jockel. The teenager is found sleeping under his father’s car one morning by the caretaker after having stayed out all night. His anxious father, noticing that the boy looks so thin it is as if he were starving, immediately prepares a meal. However, the food the father buys and the meal he then prepares is befitting of a special family occasion; after all, they normally eat straight out of the pans and without using any plates. The menu consists of meatloaf, cake, ice cream, oranges, biscuits, and red wine. Indeed, following a “culinary psychoanalysis” as suggested by Margaret Visser in her sociological study of the ordinary meal, the image creates a perfect balance of warm (meat and oranges) and cold (ice cream and cake), dry (biscuits and wine) and moist (cake and oranges), the childlike (cake and ice cream) and the adult (meat and wine), and, also, the red-blooded male (meat and wine) and the nurturing female (ice cream and oranges).[2] With hours spent in the kitchen chopping up onions, slicing pickles, and whipping the ice cream, Jockel’s father is presented as deliberately trying to transform reality into the image of communion with the harmonizing social appearances of food. Clearly having been preoccupied with a new script, he is now trying to make amends for neglecting his son.
In the terms of Roland Barthes’s theory of everyday mythologies, it may be said that Drewitz is reflecting in this dinner scene a socially engendered myth.[3] The meal is generally perceived within society as an occasion practiced since time immemorial when people come together on a supposedly equal footing. It forms an act of communion, a notion that can be traced to the very roots of Christian culture: the image of the Last Supper, which symbolizes in Western society the dividing up of the whole for the benefit of all the individuals present. Once referred to a broader social context, this image of sharing-in-common conceals the egocentric nature of an individual’s physiological need to eat—a situation reflected in the fact that food consumed by one person can only be eaten exclusively by that person and by no one else.[4] However, the connotations of sharing and harmony when imposed upon the contemporary family meal must be seen as utter fabrication. The image of people coming together for the family meal is distorted within society by a particular sense of social togetherness or familial solidarity to convey the message of communion. This supposedly equitable exchange of thought around the dinner table masks the reality of an already existing social order. Indeed, where sociology is concerned, the very structure of the meal reaffirms a particular social hierarchy. This is most pertinent in the realm of the nuclear family, where it is usually the father who holds the position of the highest rank. He sits at the head of the table, takes responsibility for the carving of the meat and supervises the subject matter of the conversation, thus reflecting his socioeconomic and political position as the head of the family who seeks to control its centralized development. In keeping with most northern and central European cultures, the remaining members of the family descend in rank in order of gender and age from other adult males to the mother and finally the children.
In light of this discrepancy between the “natural” sense of communion taken for granted by society in the image of the family meal and the existence of a clearly patriarchal structure within the family, one may regard the connotation of “communion” as the signification of a second-order semiological system borne out in the primary language-system of the family meal. Referring to Barthes’s terminology, the contemporary image of “the family meal” may be identified as the language object or signifier of a primary linguistic order. This may be seen in a similar vein to “the steak” in Barthes’s Mythologies (62–64). Just as the theorist maintained that “the steak” agrees with the arbitrary concept of “masculinity,” so it is that the linguistic signifier of “the family meal” may be seen to correspond to the social usage or linguistic signifier of “physical togetherness” or “congregating.” Certainly, the communal or family meal provides an opportunity to assure both the healthy physical growth and, more significantly, the centralized sociopolitical development of the family unit as a whole. Much like “the masculinity of steak,” one comes to understand the total of the signified and the signifier, in this case, the linguistic sign of “togetherness during the family meal.”
This linguistic sign is then robbed of its autonomous history as a physical assembly and appropriated by society to serve as the mythical signifier of a secondary semiological order. Once again, this follows the pattern of Barthes’s language of “the strength and masculinity of steak,” the properties of which in the eyes of the homesick French traveler are, he maintains, appropriated due to the pangs of nostalgia to the very fact of being French. Indeed, it may be seen how the broader social form of the linguistic sign of “togetherness during the family meal” no longer represents the arbitrary concept of actually “physically coming or belonging together.” Rather, it is driven by society’s historical intention of maintaining the status quo. In this respect, the concept—or mythical signifier—of “social togetherness” is motivated by the concerns of adults for disciplined order in general and society’s obsession with ideological stability according to family values in particular. As a result, the myth of “communion” is initiated by falsely relating the physical act of congregating with the notions of sharing-in-common, equality, and universal understanding.
We can now return to the situation concerning Jockel and his father. The boy, having been starved of paternal love and affection, has been spending the nights pursuing his adolescent sexual curiosity. His father, meanwhile, has been walking the city streets under the premise of searching for his son. However, the reader is informed that one evening the father comes across a pink poster and the graffiti of “die zottigen Würste,” the shaggy sausages (62). He ends up in a gay bar. In their loneliness and confusion the two thus seem to be growing further apart. Instead of addressing their problems directly, namely the question why his son did not feel like returning home in the first place, and thereby rectifying their obvious inability to communicate with one another, the father hopes to improve their relationship by fostering the “natural” sense of “togetherness” implied in “the family meal.” In the absence of the boy’s mother, he is anxious to show Jockel that he can be a competent father. Considering the insinuation that the father is a homosexual, the scene implies a rather naive case of hypercorrection: in a sense the father is also trying to be a competent mother.
The familial bliss and emotional harmony, however, is bound to fail. Monika Shafi remarks that in Drewitz’s novels fathers tend to be absent, ill, dead, alcoholics, or “simply incapable of adjusting to any other understanding of roles than the traditional one tailor-made for the middle class.”[5] During the meal—the act of eating is avoided in the text—Jockel’s father steadily becomes more and more drunk on the red wine. His effort to assert a sense of familial well-being breaks down, and the appearance of communion he had been building up earlier disintegrates into crumbs and a stain left by the red wine. These visible remnants represent his humiliating failure at being a capable father figure and at creating a balanced family atmosphere. Grieving the loss of his wife and unable to provide his son with the sense of belonging to a complete family unit, the father is shown to divert his frustrations by following his tentative professional aspirations. He is also seen to hide behind the constructs of “the family meal.” He is unable to express his true emotions or talk to his son about the facts of life, the reality of his own sexual orientation, or the absence of the wife and mother, that undeniable missing part of their lives. The family’s despair and feeling of emptiness are only heightened by the void at the end of the meal. Whatever remained of any bond between father and son is finally destroyed after the meal. The father returns to the kitchen to counter his intoxication by drinking some water, while Jockel reaches out to his classmate, Peter, in a letter of friendship, something his father seems unable to give.
Drewitz reflects the social appropriation of the discourse of food in the father’s extension or distortion of the sense of physical togetherness during the family meal in order to imply “familial solidarity” and give the impression of “communion.” This discourse, however, is instantly revealed by Drewitz as an empty fabrication. Instead of describing the act of eating, Drewitz chooses to portray only its preparation precisely to reveal its social aspirations, and finally its catastrophic demise.
The example provided by Jockel and his father is not the only such case. In Das Hochhaus “the myth of communion” implied by the appropriated image of “togetherness during the family meal” is deliberately shattered each time it is invoked. A parallel is found in the example of Kalli’s family. Kalli is a midget and the eldest son of four, soon to be five, children of a Turkish immigrant family. Though the family always sits down together at mealtimes, the meals themselves are arranged according to the father's work schedule; he is a bus driver. Indeed, the family is organized entirely according to a patriarchal structure. Whereas the father takes on the role of provider and the head of the family, the mother tends to the home and the well-being of her family: this includes fetching the groceries and preparing all the meals.[6] She is often shown peeling potatoes, a task also occasionally performed by Kalli. Once again, it is the father of the immigrant family who seems to extend the sense of physical “togetherness during the family meal” to imply the more social connotation of familial unity or “the myth of communion.” On one occasion, while eating a meal consisting of potatoes and gravy, Kalli’s father advises his son not to be misguided by the pretentious and immoral high-earning Berliners. The boy is told that he would do better to stick to his “own kind” and to his family in particular. The father is thus imploring a sense of solidarity as Turks.
Again, this ideal is destroyed at a later point in the text. Indeed, the father is exposed as a hypocrite in that he fails to do as he preaches. For one, Kalli’s family persistently eats in a non-Turkish way. The question here is why. After all, they live in the West Berlin of the 1970s, a city with the largest population of Turks outside Turkey itself, and thus with an adequate provision of Turkish-owned stores selling Turkish foodstuffs. Yet the family’s never-changing diet consists of onions, a generic “meat,” potatoes, and gravy. At a later point the father eats a more German-style sandwich prepared for him by his wife and made of rye bread and liver sausage. It appears that the German bread, as opposed to its equivalent Turkish pita bread, or Fladenbrot, is instilled with the welcome connotation of strength: “He relishes … the hefty rye bread” (212). By refraining from a traditional Turkish diet and choosing to eat more typically German food,[7] the father conforms to local customs in order to convey the appearance of having integrated socially. Thus, the sense of “communion” as Turks dictated during “the family meal” turns out to be a farce, as Drewitz shows the father contradicting his own advice. While he ignores his son’s aspirations to be accepted into German society, the father himself is making every effort to assimilate. Once again, communication between the members of the family breaks down as the father attempts to hide his own desire to be accepted by others in the construct of “the family meal.” In this case, Drewitz reveals “the myth of communion” as a falsehood designed specifically to mask social inequality and marginalization grounded on matters of race.
A similar pattern can be seen where Peter is concerned. Peter lives alone with his mother, a thirty-four-year-old shop assistant, while his artist father is serving a prison sentence in Tegel, a suburb of Berlin. One evening the boy barricades himself in the family apartment to protect the home as his mother has not returned and he fears that someone will come to take him away. The next day, when it is all too apparent that something serious is amiss, the distraught Peter begins to reminisce about the time when his parents were together. He recalls the ideal of familial bliss as a moment when his mother passes her dessert across the dining table to his father. This memory overrides any recollection of what his parents actually said to one another. Peter obviously evokes a sentimental picture of his parents to soothe himself in his moment of need. The mythical quality of “togetherness during the family meal” again supplies a sense of “communion.” This construct, of course, is immediately shown by Drewitz to be a cruel falsehood called upon to repress the unpleasant reality of isolation and the sacrifices of the adult world. The mother's gesture alludes to the reality that the woman of the family is prepared to devote her entire life to fulfill the needs of her husband and children. Drewitz even implies that the mother’s life is sacrificed to the needs of others since she does not return from her mysterious absence.
By referring “the myth of communion” purely and simply back to the language object of “the family meal,” that is, by refusing to support it with the sense of “togetherness” usually appropriated by society, the author dismantles the myth, exposing the very mechanism employed to perpetuate it. This process resembles Barthes’s description of “revolutionary myth” or “Myth on the Left” (145–48). By imposing a third order, or the “fully political” literary level of farce, upon the secondary semiological order, or social “myth of communion,” the author speaks clearly about the covert existence of bourgeois myth, turns it about, and revokes it.
This third level may consequently be regarded as the process of “demystification.” Drewitz appears to steal back the “myth of communion” from the secondary semiological order. This is achieved by emptying it of its distorted meaning of “social togetherness” motivated by the historical intention of maintaining the status quo according to family values. The author’s tactics are therefore identical to the process of distortion undertaken at the social level. Here, the sign of the primary linguistic order was initially appropriated to serve as an accomplice to the ideological ends of the concept of “social togetherness.” The lie or “myth of communion” was thus established by falsely equating the physical act of coming together with the notion of sharing-in-common. As a result of Drewitz’s literary (re)appropriation, however, “the myth of communion” becomes the signifier of a third order. Once emptied of its mythical intention, it must be seen to refer back again to the original usage signified by the language object of “the family meal”: “togetherness.” Nevertheless, seeing as the author is herself motivated by her own historical intention of revealing the discrepancy in understanding between adults and children,[8] the new signifier of “the communion of the family meal” now corresponds to the new signifier or concept of “false togetherness.” In this way, Drewitz reveals the equation of the physical act of coming together with the notion of sharing as a falsehood. Furthermore, the author may be considered as a mythologist as she uncovers the new signification of “the farce of communion.”
The disclosure of this discrepancy by the intentional destruction of “the myth of communion” is demonstrated most explicitly in the dinner scene in Susanne’s family at the end of the novel. Susanne is twelve years old and has just moved to Berlin from Kassel with her parents, a company codirector and a housewife. The family’s evening meal is a performance of rehearsed familial bliss and reinforced bourgeois correctness. The cutlery and crockery have been arranged according to accepted custom. The serving bowls and glasses counterbalance one another perfectly. The bottles of mineral water and choice of fruit juices are poised asymmetrically to the main table. Finally, the mother plays her little guessing game to whet the appetite: “Guess what I’ve got in the oven (the pot, the frying pan)!” (240). Thus the reader witnesses the mother’s staging of an idealized “perfect” family unit. But the atmosphere is stifling, and there is no room for variety or genuine individual expression.
The usual image of this somewhat monotonous stability may be analyzed as a coverup whereby the cultural appearance of “the family meal” provides “a sense of togetherness” which, in turn, is intentionally invoked to give the impression of “communion.” This image of mutual understanding and equitable order is used within the society parodied by the author to obscure the emotional distress of the individual members of the family. Drewitz then undertakes to expose this mechanism. As soon as Susanne’s father comes home from work her mother conceals a whisper—that she is having difficulties with Susanne—with the secret code and exaggerated proclamation: “I’ve got something delicious in the oven!” (235). In the context of Drewitz’s novel, then, the image of “the communion of the family meal” relates to a “false togetherness.” As the mother’s little game and exaggerated proclamation begins to indicate, “the myth of communion” is but a farce.
The father plays along with the harmonizing ritual, hazarding a guess that the food might be perogies. Instead she has prepared Quarkkeilchen, a modest peasant dish from Saxony made from curd cheese formed into wedge shapes, and Plinsen, a type of crêpe (235). She constructs an entire conversation around the dish, explaining how it can be eaten with either caster sugar, pears, or an onion sauce. She then digresses onto the subject of luxurious feasts and the wisdom of modesty learned from such old customs as the food before them. Indeed, Susanne’s mother may be seen to reappropriate the common discourse of traditional food of the peasant family—its resourcefulness and adaptability, its nutritional value and social function—as a modest communion. The traditional preparation of food becomes an aesthetic support to her position in the family in that it seems to subscribe to the preservation of the present centralized structure of society.[9] Her conversation is apparently informed and, by analogy, evidently lays claim to its prestigious subject matter of the wisdom of family values.
The meal, however, is clearly a pretence. The mother’s table talk is designed specifically to avoid the real problems at hand. Just as in the comfort of her middle-class home it would be ridiculous to suggest that she would ever have to learn the modest ways of the peasantry—the frivolities of the dinner party at the beginning of the book is evidence enough of this—so it is that the emotional crisis disturbing her daughter is felt to be equally incongruous with the family’s lifestyle. The disappearance of Peter’s mother, the removal of the boy himself to a home, and the subsequent loss for Susanne of one of her friends are topics thus avoided. There is a clear discrepancy between Susanne’s perspective and that of her parents.[10] Though she would prefer to discuss the events taking place in her building, her father insists that it is not their place to care about the plight of others. While “the communion of the family meal” does not fully deny the presence of social and emotional problems, it does not assist the exchange of thought, either. Its purpose is to convince Susanne to conform to her parents’ way of thinking and, therefore, assume their privileged position in society. The “communion of the family meal” itself now signifies a “false togetherness” and has been demystified as a “farce.”
Susanne is nauseated by the food and her mother’s conversation about it. She refuses to be convinced by her mother’s airs and rejects the food. To her the food bears no pretentions to wisdom or modesty: it is merely a product of milk that has curdled, or turned sour. She finds it impossible to glaze over the outside world and particularly the events taking place in her building. Ironically, her refusal to eat draws attention to her physiological need to eat and thus shatters the socialization aspect of the food. Consequently, the mother’s trite conversation, the entire façade of familial “togetherness” and the subsequent “myth of communion” break down into the mocking scene of domestic chaos. The mother is forced to confront the truth: as she complains that Susanne is becoming thin, she ironically compares her daughter to the woman who has disappeared. The mother’s reward for finally disclosing the source of her daughter’s fears and isolation (for Susanne will now lose her friend, Peter) is literally to have the food she prepared thrown back in her face.
Finally, Susanne’s father attempts to restore the peace by explaining to her that they, her parents, are trying to prevent her from being devoured by the real world of the city. He suggests that only her family can provide her with the protection of “belonging together.” This same sentiment has already been expressed by Kalli’s father. It is also that feeling so desired by Jockel and Peter. However, as Drewitz’s treatment of the subtext of food has revealed, “the myth of communion” supplied by the familial sense of “togetherness” is an illusion.
The shopping for, preparation of, and final consumption of food is shown in Das Hochhaus to play an integral part in the maintenance of the social status quo by proliferating a sense of “communion.” This social and emotional harmony is initiated in order to conceal the chaos and repression which enables such a centralized society to survive in the first place. Unlike the works of Thomas Mann,[11] it appears that the lie of myth is not working smoothly in this novel by Drewitz. It is, on the contrary, exposed due to the author’s intention to explore the unique dichotomy between the unpretentious perspective of a child and the complex, multicoded, and politically centralized world of adults.
NOTES
[1]
Ingeborg Drewitz (1923–1986) is the author of several dramas, novels, short
stories, essays on literature and politics, radio plays, and a biography of
Bettina von Arnim (1969). Drewitz’s play Alle
Toren waren bewacht (All the Gates Were Guarded, 1951) was the first work
of German literature to deal with the Nazi concentration camps. She is perhaps
best-known for her work Gestern war Heute—Hundert Jahre Gegenwart (Yesterday Was
Today—A Hundred Years in the Present, 1978), a semi-autobiographical novel
documenting five generations of women from one Berlin family between 1923 and
1978. Other novels include Oktoberlicht
(October Light, 1969) and Eis auf der
Elbe (Ice on the Elbe, 1982). Her often realist works focus on the
difficulties faced by women as they deal with the tensions of marriage, family,
and work, and can be considered examples of the Neue Sensibilität (“new sensitivity”) of German literature of the
1970s and 1980s. All references are to Ingeborg Drewitz, Das Hochhaus. Roman (Stuttgart: Gebühr, 1975) and appear in the
text in parenthesis. All translations are my own.
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[2]
See Margaret Visser, Much Depends on
Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils
and Taboos of an Ordinary Meal (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987).
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[3]
See Roland Barthes, Mythologies,
trans. Annette Lavers (London: Paladin, 1985).
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[4]
See Georg Simmel, “Soziologie der Mahlzeit,” Brücke und Tür, ed. Michael Landmann (Stuttgart: Koehler, 1957)
243–50.
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[5]
Monika Shafi, “Die überforderte Generation: Mutterfiguren in Romanen von
Ingeborg Drewitz,” Women in German
Yearbook 7 (1991): 32.
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[6]
For an analysis of food as the oppressive responsiblity of women, see John L.
Plews, “Ingeborg Drewitz's Gestern war
Heute: Food as a Danger Zone for Women,” Frauen: MitSprechen MitSchreiben. Beiträge zur literatur- und sprachwissenschaftlichen
Frauenforschung, eds. Marianne Henn and Britta Hufeisen (Stuttgart: Heinz,
1997) 468–78. See also Liz Wieskerstrauch, “‘Wege aus der Verzweiflung, die
täglich neue Nahrung bekommt!’ Ingeborg Drewitz zum 60. Geburtstag,” die horen 27.4 (1982): 107–13.
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[7]
I am fully aware that there is no such thing as a German national cuisine and
that culinary traditions in “Germany” have developed on a strictly regional
basis: perogies from East Prussia; Grüne
Soße from Frankfurt; Eisbein mit
Sauerkraut from Berlin; Spätzle
from Swabia; Birnen, Bohnen und Speck
from Bremen; and Rievkoochen from
Cologne. However any non-German would also maintain that there is a certain
perception beyond the borders of Germany as to what could be termed generically
as German food: wurst, sauerkraut, Bratkartoffeln,
rye bread or pumpernickel, sweet mustard, steins of frothy beer, Kaffee und Kuchen, and waffles, are but
a few examples.
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[8]
Drewitz remarks on the need to rectify the unrealistic infrequency of children
in contemporary women’s literature in her essay “Frauen sind dazu berufen,
Utopien bewohnbar zu machen,” 1984—am Ende der Utopien. Literatur und Politik.
Essays (Stuttgart: Radius, 1981) 91–95.
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[9]
For comments on Drewitz’s depiction of the role mothers play in introducing
their daughters to their “proper place” in the patriarchal familial order, see
Shafi 33–35 and Plews 475–77.
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[10]
The novels by Drewitz which Shafi examines share in common a predominance of
the mother’s perspective in the mother-daughter relationships they depict, a
point which, Shafi maintains, sets them apart from works by those of her female
contemporaries. While they also deal with mother-daughter relationships, they
adopt the daughter’s persective (23–24). However, Das Hochhaus does not conform to Shafi’s model since it clearly
focuses on the various perspectives of the children.
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[11]
Cf. Stefan Hardt, Tod und Eros beim Essen
(Frankfurt/M: Athenäum, 1987).
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