Secado bajo techo de Apeiba tibourbou Aubl

Like “The Balance of Time”, the novel Kruso takes place in 1989, the last year of the existence of the GDR. The story is narrated in the third person, and, in this case too, the protagonist, called Ed- gar Bendler or Ed, is catapulted out of his usual surroundings by a crisis, as he has lost his girlfriend in an accident. Ed leaves the large town where he studies literature at university and travels to the island of Hiddensee in the Baltic Sea, at the time a special, al- most mythical place due to its natural beauty and its political-ge- ographical position on the outskirts of the socialist country. It bor- ders Denmark to the North and thus represented a kind of outpost for freedom which was regularly used as a point of departure by people who wished to flee the country by sea. On the small is- land, special rules prevail. For instance, cars are not allowed, and the inhabitants of the island have a strong autarkic identity as the island functions as a melting pot for all kinds of outcasts from GDR-society who have established a fascinating and unique local cultural environment.

Ed’s crisis begins to abate on his journey towards the sea. Whereas he felt as if only a “feeble heart of his presence” (Seiler 2017, 18) was left at the height of his crisis, now he has a “good feeling […] as if he were only now awakening from anaesthesia, millimetre by millimetre” (24). Passing through a city on the coast, he is inspired by the names labelling the doorbells of an apartment building: “As he passed, Ed tried to capture their rhythm: Schiele, Dahme, Glambeck, Krieger …” (24). Here, the improvement in his mental state is accompanied by an increased rhythmical sensitivi- ty. Arriving on the island, Ed soon finds a job as a temporary em- ployee, a so called “esskay” (73, “Saisonkraft”, seasonal worker), at the “Zum Klausner” tavern, where he initially spends most of his time peeling onions and doing dishes. In the mysterious and charismatic Alexander Krusowitsch, known as Kruso, he finds a mentor who not only introduces him to the work and the subcul- tural scene on the island, but consequently also leads him out of the crisis. To some extent, he resembles the worker in “The Bal- ance of Time”, and Ed’s bond to him seems similarly quasi-reli-

gious and devoted. Once again, the act of working plays a central role in the relationship between the two characters. Ed admires Kruso’s way of working not so much because of what he does and how fast he does it, but because of his rhythm in doing it: “Ed admired the calm symmetry of Kruso’s movements. […] It was not so much his stamina or speed, it was more a kind of rhythm and inner tension – as if his entire existence were part of some- thing greater” (66). When Ed sees Kruso at work, it is as though he becomes “almost transfixed by the rhythm of the axe and the smooth, powerful movement of his flawless body” (70). Ed emu- lates Kruso’s sense of rhythm and synchronizes increasingly with him in the same way as he synchronizes with the rhythms of his workplace: “He had not needed an alarm clock for a long time. He had internalised the time to light the oven” (224).

The object in the tavern which is most curious is an old radio. It is called “a kind of undertone in the Klausner” (103) because a defect means that it can never be switched off. In this way it gains a certain similarity to a living organism and even an individuality, which is why it is called “Viola”:

Her constant broadcasting was like the house’s breath- ing, varying but continual, like the crash of the breakers and for the most part ignored […]. Ed felt drawn to the monotony of her half-hourly stories, with contents that hardly changed for days. At the end, the weather, water conditions, wind speed. (103)

The steady broadcasting stream allows Ed to develop a clear-cut rhythmical perception and appreciation of the radio’s transmis- sion. Its content is moved to the background as the “time signal was the most distinct sound” (103). This backgrounding of seman- tic content is playfully and poetically demonstrated by the alliter- ation of the three words “weather, water conditions, wind speed”, where the content of the words is subordinated to the phonetic pattern. Nobody pays attention to the content of the broadcasting, as Ed receives the explanation: “‘Droning on and on, just dron-

ing’” (111). This kind of media receptive behaviour touches with subtle irony on the schizophrenic situation in the GDR, where it was possible to receive TV and radio broadcast programmes from West-Germany in most areas of the country, but where the content of the broadcasts was of limited relevance to daily life behind the Iron Curtain. Consequently, the broadcasts seemed to be unen- gaging news from a remote world of fairytales. More specific, the irony also sheds light on the mental state of the subcultural and intellectual scene in the late-GDR, for which the West had little appeal and which was absorbed in its own attempts to realize per- sonal utopias - just like the island inhabitants of the novel.

From the three analyses performed her, it can be concluded that one of the common characteristics of the depiction of the central ob- jects in the texts - the Geiger-Mueller counter, the timing machine, the watch and the radio - is that their temporal dimension is high- lighted and problematized in some way. They are technical devices which are obsolescent in one way or another, things whose “ges- tures“ have become meaningless because they have lost their orig- inal functions. However, that is exactly what makes them compel- ling objects of interest to the protagonists in Seiler’s texts. They find a certain sensual quality in them, as the objects blink, vibrate and, above all, emanate sounds with regular patterns. The protagonists connect to these things through their bodies: for instance, the pro- tagonist of “Turksib” feels the sounds of the Geiger-Mueller counter penetrate his body. Not only do the protagonists feel attracted to these things; sometimes they even feel absorbed by them against their will. Above all, it seems to be the rhythmical qualities of objects which establish this connection and attraction, and other features of the objects, including their visual nature, such as shape and colour, do not receive the same attention. The protagonists are mostly fas- cinated by the sound of things, by tonic patterns and rhythms, and not so much interested in semantic content conveyed by symbolic representation. In Kruso, for instance, it is the “monotony” of the ra- dio broadcasts’ repetition which draws the protagonist’s attention. In this way, the perception of the radio is less oriented to the linear than it is to the cyclical signifying a rhythm without beginning or

end, where the internal rhythm of the protagonist converges with the external rhythm of the thing.

That the radio in Kruso is given its own name contrasts with our increasingly anonymised relation to the things surrounding us to- day. Due to ongoing technical innovation and increasing intensi- ty of consumption, technical objects obsolesce and are replaced much faster. As a result, we lack the time to get to know them thoroughly and to become attached to them. The different kind of relation between Seiler’s protagonists and their objects resembles the dis-alienated relationship between subjects and things which Rosa is seeking. Since the enlightenment, according to Rosa, dis- turbances of this relationship have arisen from an increasing re- duction to “causal or instrumental interrelations with inanimate objects, especially artefacts” (Rosa 2016: 381) and a “reified ob- jectifying relation to things” (Rosa 2016, 385). These are “alienated forms of relation which make things appear ‘stiff and silent’” (Rosa 2016, 387). In resonant forms of relations, by way of contrast, they “begin to ‘sing’” (Rosa 2016: 387). As the things in Seiler’s texts are anything but stiff and silent, it is tempting to interpret their depiction and the eccentric relation of Seiler’s protagonists with them against the background of Rosa’s assertions and of his more general thesis regarding acceleration in late-modernity.

In Seiler’s texts we also find an awareness that complete disen- gagement from overall social dynamics is not realistic. Therefore, a possible strategy might be to create islands where slower per- ception is possible and where resonant relations might be created. In the work of Seiler, this happens in remote geographical places: on the Turksib, on the island of Hiddensee in the late GDR, or even in a delimited location such as a watchmaker’s shop. These are all places where protagonists who tend to feel out of step with their usual surroundings find the time to synchronize with obsolete technical objects and experience eurhythmia or even isorhythmia as their internal rhythm meets an external rhythm. It is in this state of obsolescence that they find their very own temporary niche in accelerated society.

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