Expansions of the Instant: Disruptions of Time in Contemporary German Literature

Abstract

Time stands still in Thomas Lehr’s novel 42. A cosmic “disruption” (Lehr 2005: 35) has caused a single moment to linger on for all eternity, time as an ephemeral experience has been suspended, brought to a standstill in the interface of a single, everlasting moment. The novel tells the story of the “chronified” (Chronifizierten), a small group of randomly assembled protagonists, who, for reasons that remain unknown to them as well as the reader, can continue to move through this frozen world, enclosed in their own small temporal spheres, in which their own private time goes on ticking as usual. The “time zombies,” as they call themselves, soon begin to lead a nomadic existence: they traverse the world, which has become a mere backdrop, in which aircrafts hang motionless in the eternally cloudless sky and people remain frozen in mid-step. The visual presence of an – in principle – familiar reality, which is one of the major effects of the scenario, enters into a strangely incongruous relationship with its “unreality,” with the mystery that the world of the eternal present seems to harbor. For in Thomas Lehr’s work, time has stood still around midday, of all times, so that all of Europe is lit by never-ending bright sunlight, which literally illuminates reality right into the last nook and cranny. This maximum degree of visibility, this visual monumentalization of the existing world, is bound up with a deep ontological doubt: everything that is so clearly visible here suddenly seems like a facade, a copy, like a gigantic museum of the world, lacking the “wintery air of real reality”; it seems more like a “sculpture garden,” populated by “mummies,” “wax figures” and “shop window mannequins of a decorator suffering from delusions of grandeur” (Lehr 2005: 236, 33–34, 53 & 63). Leitmotifs involving metaphors of art, images, and photography are used to describe this world, thus alluding to a context drawn from the theory of the media: the world brought to a standstill appears as the purest “summer painting, across which a brilliant photo-realist has scattered his highlights, his intimate hues and life-like shadows,” like a “painting by Spitzweg,” or rather “a film by Spitzweg, [...] in which in principle everything would be able to move,” were it not fixed in the immobility of a single snapshot (Lehr 2005: 11, 124 & 132). And elsewhere, concerning a spontaneous remark made by a “chronified” child, we read: “It seems to have been photographed, crystallized and fixed in place by the ad-