Ambiguous Aggression in German Realism and Beyond by Barbara N. Nagel;

Author:Barbara N. Nagel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Semantic Field: Systematic Beating (Hauptmann)

The next analysis contains yet another technique of literary unaccountability: Gerhart Hauptmann’s Flagman Thiel is the exemplary German text on the topic of domestic violence. It is a story of denial, surpassed only by the author’s own forces of denial in the face of National Socialism.40 Flagman Thiel is the psychological study of a loving father who nevertheless closes his eyes to the abuse that his son Tobias suffers at the hands of Thiel’s second wife. The reason for this denial is as dated as it is tacky: the gateman, we learn, is sexually dependent on his wife and thus cannot bring himself to “man up” to her. Instead, he represses his son’s abuse. We are thus talking about the novella as an “unheard-of event,” insofar as Flagman Thiel is all about the not-hearing, not-talking, and first and foremost about the not-seeing of domestic violence. The boy’s name, “Tobias,” highlights this blindness: reminiscent of the son’s name in The Book of Tobit where the son, with divine help, cures his father’s blindness and vindicates the “demon of lust.” Nothing of this sort happens in Hauptmann’s version of the story; here there is neither divine nor parental intervention. The father remains “blind” to his child’s suffering. The gateman is usually at work when his son is abused, and thus out of sight, though he cannot help but to detect the boy’s bruises. One day, however, Thiel has to return home early because he forgot his lunch; upon approaching the family house the father hears the soundtrack of domestic violence and, unlike the visual sense, the auditory at first forces itself upon him:

“What, you merciless, heartless scroundrel! … Just you wait—just you wait. I’ll teach you to mind. You’ll never forget.” For a few moments there was silence. Then a sound could be heard like the beating out of clothes. And the next instant another hailstorm of abuse was let loose. …

“Shut your mouth!” when a slight whimper had been audible. “If you don’t shut your mouth, I’ll give you a portion from which to feed off for eight days.”

The whimpering did not subside. The flagman felt his heart pounding in heavy, irregular beat. (Hauptmann, Flagman Thiel, 312)41

And yet, Hauptmann’s omniscient narrator, who almost exclusively takes the viewpoint of the father, manages to neutralize these violent sounds, too, by translating qua another as if … formula into noises of domestic work: the beating out of clothes (“wie wenn Kleidungsstücke ausgeklopft würden”). In his prose-piece “Knocking” (“Klopfen”), Robert Walser, who knew Hauptmann personally, similarly has his narrator suspect that the sound of household “Klopfen” serves as a cover-up for family brutalities: “There is knocks again. Apparently it’s a carpet on which someone is working. I envy all those who practice flogging harmlessly.”42 Or also: “Possibly his wife is beating him a little like a piece of furniture [bemöbelklöpfelte] and hooding him a little [behäubelte]. One is better off not saying too much about this.”43

If in Stifters’ Granit the narrative

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