Monika Maron
Animale Triste
Trans. Brigitte Goldstein
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Pp. 136. $15.00

Reviewed by Irena E. Fürhoff

Monika Maron, born in 1951 in Berlin to parents who were active communists, participated in the literary scene of the German Democratic Republic from 1973 to 1988, then immigrated to West Germany. She became known for her critical-political style with the publication of her first two novels, Flugasche (Flight of Ashes, 1981) and Das Missverständnis (The Misunderstanding, 1982). Animale Triste is a love novel at the time of the so-called Wende, the "turning point," and forms part of the literature of former East German writers who have tried to capture the experience of writing after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In analogy to Proust's mémoire involontaire, one could describe Monika Maron's narrative Animale Triste as a mémoire volontaire, for the main character's attempt to capture her experiences of a blissful love affair in a time capsule after her lover has walked out on her. Memories not only appear through stimulation of the senses. On the contrary, they are deliberately recalled in a helpless attempt to relive the past. Remembering goes hand in hand with waiting, which keeps the reader in suspense about the disappearance of the lover and the question of whether he will return. The ambiguity of remembering follows the Nietzschean paradigm of painful inscriptions on the body. The narrator reflects on "making memory" at the beginning of the narrative: "If one bars people from forgetting, one might as well bar a person in excruciating pain from fainting when only fainting can prevent fatal shock or lifelong trauma. Forgetting is the fainting of the soul" (5). The act of remembering becomes a prison, but paradoxically enough it is also the basis of the whole narrative, and thus the masochistic self-indulgence of a time lost.

The narrator, an old woman who has forgotten about her real age--"Now I'm a hundred years old and I'm still alive. Maybe I'm only ninety" (1)--reminisces about her lost love, who once participated in her only experience of erotic fulfillment. The narrator turns her apartment into a memory room, where she encloses the memories about her lover in a hortus conclusus of passion and possessiveness. With her lover she shared the same passion for a brachiosaurus, "the splendid beast" (9), which she visited regularly in the museum in East Berlin. The dinosaur becomes the symbol of a lost time regained only in the artificial reconstruction of the animal in a designated space. The dinosaur is the animale triste, which turns the narrative into a parable on the loss of East German identity after the fall of the wall. The narrator longs to visit the prehistoric footprints in Pliny Moody's garden in the U.S. The footprints lose their power after they are no longer out of reach, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the people in Eastern Europe are able to travel to the rest of the world. In light of the new situation the "brachiosaurus changed into what he really was: a skeleton, whose bones were mostly not the real thing anyway but ingenious imitations" (130).

The narrator's thought follows a predictable pattern as she describes, for example, her uneasiness about her aging body. Her description of her body as "sagging folds around the posterior; soft, undulating flesh on the belly and inner thighs; under the skin, tissue separating into small clumps" (3) does not push the boundaries of how age is usually described. A woman who does not worry about her aging body would have been a novelty. Sadly, she turns into the other sad animal, the one about which Petronius wrote post-coitum omne animale triste.

The impact of the changed historical sphere on the writing subject is described with bittersweet self-irony but with full appreciation of a passionate life lived. Brigitte Goldstein, who also translated Gertrud Kolmar's A Jewish Mother from Berlin and Susanna, offers the English reader a translation close to the original, thereby retaining the subtle ironic undertones. Describing the difficult relationship between West and East in terms of lovers unable to meet each other is not new, but the way the text leads the reader to the final showdown is remarkable.