Der fremde Freund; The Distant Lover

Der fremde Freund; The Distant Lover (1982)

(published in West Germany as Drachenblut; Dragon’s Blood)

This book managed to evoke the shock of unflattering self-recognition in readers on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The story is told by a first person narrator, the doctor Claudia who is about 40 years old and lives in East Berlin (though she could live in any country of the developed world).

Occasioned by the funeral of her ‘distant lover’ Henry, with whom she had a non-committal relationship, Claudia recalls the year she spent with him, but also starts recapitulating her whole life. In the course of this recapitulation, she creates the image of a person seemingly successful in her professional and private life, of someone who functions perfectly in her environment, yet has no need for any emotional commitments. She claims that she ‘didn’t need friends. I had acquaintances, good acquaintances; I saw them occasionally, and I enjoyed their company. But in reality they were interchangeable, and therefore not essential to me.’

She purports to be the cool, experienced and hardened (thick-skinned) type who is under no illusions about herself or anyone around her, and therefore invulnerable. But behind this sleek facade, one can detect signs of emotional impoverishment and of existential fear. The question arises, why is she fooling herself and what exactly is she trying to repress?

The book starts with the description of a dream featuring the ruin of a bridge stretching over an abyss. This clearly serves as a pretext to Claudia’s narrative: She and an acquaintance of hers must cross this bridge together. They attempt this gingerly and carefully, holding on to one another, yet not wanting to be dependent on each other. The dream does not see them reach the end of the bridge, but on their way, they encounter a group of young men running across the bridge with complete ease. It is obvious that Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis lends itself as a tool for interpretation of this scene. The unstable bridge can easily be read as linking past and future, and the endless and anxious movement of the two characters along the bridge as a reference to their present situation.

Indeed Sigmund Freud is often suggested as a key to understanding the book – but not so much his Interpretation of Dreams as his writings on Civilization and its Discontents, a book in which he considers the tensions between civilization and the individual. He asserts that there is a crucial contradiction between every individual’s quest for freedom and civilization’s demand for compliance and the repression of dissent. As David W. Robinson suggests, Hein’s novella depicts the ‘reality of unfreedom within the illusion of freedom’, a universal phenomenon which applies to all societies of whatever political persuasion.

In this and other respects, Der fremde Freund is comparable to Hein’s novel Willenbrock which appeared in 2000. Its protagonist is a car dealer near Berlin in the 1990s who can again claim for himself to be successful in his business and life, and whose emotional impoverishment and social isolation only become apparent to the reader, whilst Willenbrock himself carefully represses any knowledge of this. The closing passages of both books reveal how thin the civilized façade of their protagonists has worn and how much they have repressed.

Further Reading

Graham Jackman, ‘The Fear of Allegory: Benjaminian Elements in Christoph Hein’s The Distant Lover’, New German Critique 66 (Autumn 1995), 164-92

Phillip McKnight, Understanding Christoph Hein (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), Chapter 2: ‘The Invulnerability of Silence: The Distant Lover’

Jakob Norberg, ‘Late Socialism as a Narrative Problem: Christoph Hein and the Limits of the Novella’, German Studies Review 38:1 (2015), 63-82

David W. Robinson, Deconstructing East Germany: Christoph Hein’s Literature of Dissent (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 1999), Chapter 3: ‘Power and Repression’