Helden wie wir.

Schwartz, Robert

Klaus Uhltzscht - nomen est omen - is a born loser. And a formidable neurotic. An encyclopedia definition of neurotic should have an inset photo of Klaus next to it, for he is a classic textbook case. Brought up by a patronizing, manipulative mother and a morally frigid father, Klaus is cursed with a stupendous sense of inferiority and a compulsion to fantasize his life away. Curiously, his deep conviction of unworthiness and incompetence is juxtaposed to a delusion of grandeur, culminating in his freakish insistence that he single-handedly dismantled the Berlin Wall.

Two points soon dawn on the reader: that Thomas Brussig's very funny, mocking, sarcastic novel is basically a sad commentary on communist East Germany prior to 1989, and that Klaus's toxic mental life, vacillating between profound insecurity and salvational flights of fancy, parallels the dysfunctional East German commonwealth surrounding him. He is deeply afraid of the Stasi, the secret police, but equally ambitious to work for it, both to prove himself and to obtain a high status in a society which he fears, despises, and celebrates all at once. His attitude toward the West, which he alternately detests and envies, is typical of the DDR's forty-five-year-old mindset. Thus we observe a diseased microcosm within a diseased macrocosm.

If a movie were ever made of Helden wie wir (Heroes Like Us), a book which makes us laugh with one eye and cry with the other, it is to be hoped that Woody Allen can be persuaded to play the part of Klaus. Although Brussig's language is more salacious and uninhibited than any Allen motion picture, the narcissistic self-analysis, the hilarious dialogues and soliloquies, and the sex-intoxicated references here cry out for a film starred in and directed by Allen. Often the language is more than "explicit" and unnecessarily unappetizing, as, for example, in chapter 6, where Cold War analogies mixed with excessively crude fetishisms approach the Marquis de Sade on one of his better days. New terms of perversion ending in philia would have to be invented to categorize some aberrations and sexual quirks. (And of course, none of this conjures up Allen.) If I were asked exactly how Klaus explains his feat of tearing down the Berlin Wall all by himself, I would have to resort to the standard reply of Catholic nuns when they decline to read profanities: pudendum (it is shameful to say it; "shame" for short). Still, I might gingerly suggest that Klaus's exhibitionism, showing visible change from impotence to sexual powers, did the trick. I think Brussig means that the whole East German state needed such a transformation from impotence to courage.

Stalin is said to have observed that the Germans will never make a successful revolution because they always pay attention to such signs as "Keep off the grass." Brussig probably had something like this in mind. German inferiority feelings should be transformed to civic courage, not to overcompensation by adopting grandiosity and tyranny. Klaus is merely the symbol of this message.

Helden wie wir is a brilliant, electrifying novel, full of rage and uproar, insolent and comical, reckless and ingenious. Like growing old, Brussig's novel is not for sissies. It is on my special list called "R.A." - read again.

Robert Schwarz Florida Atlantic University