(np) Hubert Fichte

Wed Nov 5 04:51:24 CST 2014

The death of the translator Martin Chalmers (RIP) brought to my 
attention that Hubert Fichte's third novel - Detlevs Imitationen 
"Grünspan" [1971] -, in my opinion among his very best, is available in 
English. You may check this out!

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2315574.Detlev_s_Imitations

Set in Hamburg, this novel traces the life of a half-Jewish boy who 
survives the Hamburg firestorms of 1943 to become a child actor and 
later an exponent of gay culture and student revolt.

https://sites.google.com/site/germanliterature/20th-century/fichte

*Hubert Fichte* is certainly the most underrated and arguably one of the 
greatest German-language authors of the period between 1945 and 1989. He 
was born to a Jewish father in 1935; he died at the height of the AIDS 
epidemic in 1986. In between he produced over 50 books and several 
hundred articles, interviews, features, and other texts in which he not 
only minutely observes his own West German reality, but also extends it 
to encompass virtually the whole of the black diaspora as represented by 
the syncretic religions, and compares it with the experiences of an 
astonishing range of other people, from Presidents to prostitutes, from 
across the globe.
Although he is often treated as an outsider, Fichte in fact made unique 
and outstanding contributions to each of the main trends and tendencies 
of his time. His first collection of short stories, /Der Aufbruch nach 
Turku (Escaping to Turku)/ 1963 gives a new twist to the pared down 
prose of the so-called ‘Kahlschlag’. His first novel /Das Waisenhaus 
(The Orphanage)/ (1965) is a novel of National Socialism which engages 
critically with the tendency of /Vergangenheitsbewältigung/ or 
‘overcoming the past’ by showing how totalitarianism is endemic in the 
way individuals and hierarchies use language. With/Die Palette (The 
Palette)/ (1968) he rode the wave of Pop literature and created a 
bestseller which can also be read as a big city novel, an underground 
novel, and an outstanding example of the linguistic experimentation of 
the time. /Detlevs Imitationen “Grünspan” (Detlev’s Imitations)/ (1971) 
brilliantly refutes Sebald’s peculiar thesis that the Germans had not 
written about the bombing of their cities and turns completely inside 
out the so-called ‘search for identity’ which literary historians see as 
the dominant theme of the decade. In his /Interviews aus dem Palais 
d’Amour/ (1972) and /Wolli Indienfahrer/ (1978) he extends the scope of 
documentary literature to the world of pimps and prostitutes, noting in 
the latter title the new-found fad for travel to the third world. In 
/Versuch über die Pubertät (Essay on Puberty)/ (1975) he cocks a snook 
at the so-called ‘new subjectivity’ by counterpointing his own puberty 
with the rituals of the Afro-American religions and the torture of 
political prisoners in Latin America. And in /Hans Eppendorfer, Der 
Ledermann spricht mit Hubert Fichte (Hans Eppendorfer, the Leather-Man 
Talking to Hubert Fichte)/ (1977) he straddles the genres of interview, 
radio feature and theatre play while engaging in complicated ways with 
the topical themes of justice, violence, sexuality and sensationalism.
In 1976 Fichte and his partner, the photographer Leonore Mau 
(1916-2013), produced the first of three two-volume multi-media 
projects, which make much (West German) literature seem narrowly 
parochial. /Xango/ (1976), /Petersilie (Parsley)/ (1981) and the 
posthumous /Psyche/ (1990 and 2005) use photographs, newspaper items, 
diary entries, excerpts from interviews, lists, litanies, statistics, 
fragments of narrative, dialogue, and discursive prose, together with a 
variety of other forms to create a carefully structured open montage 
which seeks not to recolonize the ritual remains of the religions of 
Africa as preserved in the black diaspora, but to document the process 
by which a white writer and a white photographer seek to come to terms 
with the experience of researching them. The questions raised – about 
tourism, dictatorship and constellations of exploitation, about 
ethnographic research and the dangers of monologic thinking, about magic 
and rationalism, knowledge and power, and about the unspoken sexual 
component in all these debates, are if anything even more urgently 
relevant now than they were then. And the form in which they are cast 
uncannily prefigures post-colonial debates about hybridity, subaltern 
speech and the third space.
Meanwhile, Fichte had started work on an auto-fictional project which 
makes the recollections of his contemporaries seem virtually unreadable. 
The posthumous /Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit/ (1986-2006) is a 
/History of Sensitivity/ understood as: a quality of photographic paper 
and other recording instruments; a quality of human interaction opposed 
to the heteropatriarchal imperialist history of domination and 
subjugation; a quality of an individual endowed by circumstances (a 
Jewish father, a non heteronormative sexuality) with unusually raw 
nerves and acute perceptions; and a quality of the human body which 
enables it to respond to pain and tenderness alike. The work published 
under this title offers all the pleasures of a good autobiography: 
gossip and pen-portraits, insights into the genesis and reception of 
literary works, an alternative narrative to set alongside the fiction, 
forthright opinions and a full-blown family romance. Almost by accident 
it includes collections of Fichte’s award-winning Radio Plays 
(/Schulfunk – Schools Broadcasting/, 1990) and of his feisty literary 
criticism (/Homosexualität und Literatur – Homosexuality and 
Literature/, 1987 & 1988). But it also engages, in a characteristically 
subversive manner, with a wide variety of familiar themes: the tourist 
novel (/Eine Glückliche Liebe – A Happy Romance/, 1988), 
(/Forschungsbericht – Research Report/, 1989), the parent novel 
(/Geschichte der Nanã – Story of Nanã/, 1989), the novel of Islam 
(/Platz der Gehenkten – Hanged Men’s Square/, 1989), the Third World 
novel (/Explosion/, 1993), the New York novel (/Die schwarze Stadt – The 
Black City/, 1990), the Hamburg novel (/Der kleine Hauptbahnhof oder Lob 
des Strichs – The Little Central Station or in Praise of Renting/, 
1990), the Pop novel (/Lil’s Book/, 1991) and the AIDS novel (/Hamburg 
Hauptbahnhof. Register – Hamburg Central Station. Index/, 1995). It also 
contains programmatic and explicit accounts of the encounters its 
bisexual subject has with both men and a woman. Like /Xango/, 
/Petersilie/ and /Psyche/, it deliberately adopts multiple perspectives 
and makes use of a variety of found material, including whole works by 
Fichte himself. Mercilessly honest and acutely self-aware, it is 
constantly relativizing statements made and positions adopted, and never 
allows the point of view to reify. Indeed it works tirelessly to subvert 
precisely the kind of imperialism predicated on being unironically 
right. To that extent, the /Geschichte/, like the rest of Fichte’s 
oeuvre can be seen as being indicatively, and thoroughly, queer.
*English Translations*
Hubert Fichte, /The Orphanage/, trans. by Martin Chalmers (London: 
Serpent’s Tail, 1990)
Hubert Fichte, /Detlev’s Imitations/, trans. by Martin Chalmers (London: 
Serpent’s Tail, 1992)
Hubert Fichte, /The Gay Critic/, trans. by Kevin Gavin, intro. by James 
W. Jones (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996)
*Further Reading in English*
Robert Gillett, ‘On not Writing Pornography: Literary Self-Consciousness 
in the Work of Hubert Fichte’, /German Life and Letters/ 48:2 (1995), 222-40
Robert Gillett, ‘An Index and Its Chronicle: Hubert Fichte’s Hamburg 
(Hauptbahnhof)’, in /Cityscapes and Countryside in Contemporary German 
Literature/, ed. by Julian Preece and Osman Durrani (Bradford Series of 
Colloquia on German Literature, Bd. 8) (Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 
2004), pp. 67-83
Robert Gillett, ‘Fichte: /Detlevs Imitationen „Grünspan/“’, in 
/Landmarks in the German Novel 2/, ed. by Peter Hutchinson and Michael 
Minden (Bern and Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 43-60
Robert Gillett, ‘Writing queer performance: Hubert Fichte's inimitable 
/Imitations/’, /Sexualities/ 15:1 (2012), 42-52
Christian Gundermann, ‘Hubert Fichte 1935-1986’, in/Encyclopedia of 
German Literature/, ed. by Matthias Konzett (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn 
2000), vol. 1, pp. 286-87
B. Martin Kane, ‘A Note on Hubert Fichte’s New Novel’, /20th Century 
Studies/ (December 1969), 106-08
Craig B. Palmer, ‘Fichte, Hubert’, in /The Gay and Lesbian Literary 
Heritage. A Reader’s Companion to the Writers and Their Works, from 
Antiquity to the Present/, ed. by Claude J. Summers (New York: Henry 
Holt, 1995), p. 271
Debbie Pinfold, ‘The Tainted Voice: Hubert Fichte’s /Das Waisenhaus’/, 
in Debbie Pinfold, /The Child’s View of the Third Reich in German 
Literature: The Eye among the Blind/ (Oxford: Clarendon Press 2001), pp. 
199-203
Jeffrey L. Sammons, ‘Hamburg Dropouts. Hubert Fichte, /Die Palette’/, 
/Novel/ 2:3 (Spring 1969), 280-28

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
On the photographer Leonore Mau, Fichte's artistic partner and wife, see 
here:
http://www.urbanautica.com/post/79451401890/the-second-sight-of-leonore-mau

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