Dance by the Canal

Tanz am Kanal; Dance by the Canal (1994)

This novella, set in ‘Leibnitz’ – the name merges ‘Leipzig’ and ‘Chemnitz’ – depicts the troubled life of the first-person narrator, Gabriela von Haßlau.

Gabriela is descended from ‘Anhaltinian’ aristocracy, and her father, Ernst von Haßlau, is a leading vein surgeon. She thus represents a cultural anomaly in the supposedly egalitarian society of the GDR. The narrative switches between Gabriela’s childhood and her present perspective as a homeless woman living under a canal bridge after German reunification. Gabriela’s marginal social position(s) and her great sensitivity for language give her a distanced, estranged perspective on both East and West before and after 1990.

Gabriela feels that she has been ‘chosen’ to write, and her writing certainly helps her to cope with her many traumatic experiences, which include sexual abuse by her violin teacher Frau Popiol, her parents’ divorce, her father’s alcohol problem, being raped in a park, police harassment, Stasi persecution and homelessness. Her rapists cut a ‘cross’, likely to be a swastika, into Gabriela’s forearm. When she shows this wound to the police, they call her a liar and insist that she mutilated herself, presumably because it contradicts the official narrative of the GDR as an ‘anti-fascist state’. They coerce her father into performing a skin graft on her in order to conceal the scar.

Gabriela’s parents keep her isolated from her schoolmates. Her only friends are some spiders, until her mother crushes them with a mop. Later, she befriends a working-class girl called Katka Lorenz who is determined to become an artist, and who defies the narrow conformity required at school. Gabriela is a failure in academic terms, and works briefly as an apprentice in a factory. Her repetitive job as a metal cutter contradicts the idealistic clichés of dignified labour associated with Socialist Realism. Gabriela works for the Stasi for a brief period, before escaping to a farm in Mecklenburg. The Berlin Wall falls, and she returns to her home town where she lives under a bridge. There, she is ‘discovered’ by two journalists from Mammilia, a West German women’s magazine. Finally, Gabriela has achieved a sense of agency. But her newfound success draws the attention of Paffrath, a corrupt policeman.

English Translation

Kerstin Hensel, Dance by the Canal, trans. by Jen Calleja (London: Pereine Press, 2017)