A cold war text for the COVID generation

Abstract

As the last question to the final exam for my German literature in translation course about a decade ago, I threw my students a softball: “Which book was your favorite, and why?” The answers, as I expected, varied. What I did not expect was that out of nearly 20 students in this General humanities course, not one listed Marlen Haushofer's Austrian novel Die Wand (The Wall, 1963, subsequently referred to in English because class taught in translation). This silent censure was surprising. I had in part assigned the bestseller because I was confident that students would be gripped by its shocking turn of events: the dystopian pseudo-memoir chronicles the daily routines of a woman who, during a weekend vacation in the foothills of the Alps, suddenly finds herself alone and isolated from the rest of the world by a massive, invisible, and insurmountable wall. The author never reveals the specific cataclysmic event that precipitated the wall but given the tense geopolitical climate in which it was written, most readers have assumed some kind of nuclear disaster from which the narrator has been spared (but who built it? and when?). What follows is a Robinson Crusoe-esque chronicle describing how the protagonist fills her days, days of inescapable social distancing that seem to blend together into cycles of food gathering and speculation about an uncertain future.

After The Wall failed that final exam, I felt compelled to remove it from my reading list: students simply could not relate to the novel's odd mixture of personal and social trauma along with the quotidian tasks of harvesting, cooking, and other domestic chores. The book, they collectively lamented, was about housekeeping. Blissfully unaware of how mundane daily routines can help us maintain the illusion of order and control in the midst of catastrophe, most of my students, who tend to come from comfortable backgrounds, could not imagine themselves into anything resembling the narrator's circumstance.

COVID-19 has given the novel renewed relevance. Not only do the early pandemic fads of sourdough baking and mushroom foraging make the narrator's frontier-style life now seem less removed from reality, the loneliness, uncertainty, and subdued terror that form the backdrop of her daily routine perhaps for the first time will be relatable to students. Certainly, the fears of the nuclear age—and indeed of any geopolitical or viral cataclysm—pose the same threats to our most basic livelihood, peeling away as unessential our layers of humanity and at worst, leaving us mere organisms seeking our next meal. The novel's fixation on mundane household tasks, steeped in unease, alienation, and accompanied by hints that the entire cataclysm likely was caused by human hands, create an unsettling combination of banality and terror—a word pair that also describes life under a pandemic lockdown.

At first glance, the novel reads like a survival handbook, emotionally austere in light of the sudden and distressing nature of the narrator's circumstance. One senses some kind of psychological defense mechanism at play here, as if the numb chronicling of daily household tasks is the most self-expression that she can muster amid circumstances she cannot yet fully process. And yet she also reveals an urgency to tell her story, even if only to an imagined readership. Indeed, as a fictional memoir, The Wall is structured as if meant for fellow survivors—provided there are others—to read. Haushofer may have intended with her choice of the novel's memoir structure to foreground the role of creative expression in a situation of uncertainty: the written word, after all, connects us to other humans even in their physical absence.

Even now, long after the high-water mark of the pandemic has passed, this need for social connection is acute, especially in teens and young adults who have spent some of their most formative years in the social isolation of the COVID-19 lockdown. Both high school and college students today report being lonelier than ever, despite being linked to each other through social media and in many cases living on a densely populated campus. And their loneliness begets deeper woes: the most recently released Youth Risk Behavior Survey (2023) issued by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention shares that almost half of high school students in 2021 reported “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness,” a significant increase from prepandemic times.

How might we use literature, such as this novel, to help students navigate a postpandemic world? As Germanists, we could argue that our students were uniquely primed linguistically and intellectually to process the tragedy of COVID-19. Due to the devastating events of the twentieth century, we are accustomed to teaching about catastrophic disruptions to daily life. Already in our lower-level classes, we find ourselves regularly introducing vocabulary that reinforces German's stereotype as the “downer” language: from entry-level cognates such as Trauma and Schock, to the upper-level mouthful Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past). And in our advanced courses, students share a running joke that any text on a German literature syllabus is by definition “depressing.”

At the height of the pandemic, a colleague suggested that more than ever, our teaching is not primarily about the transmission of facts, but rather about human connection. I suggest that in light of my future students’ unfortunate new repertoire of experiences, this continues to be the case. With this priority shift in mind, I plan to put The Wall back onto my reading list. Perhaps in the text's failure to resonate with young readers, the fault was mine in the first place for teaching it in hypotheticals (“what would you have done?”), a conditional tense and verb that primes students to focus their discourse on action. Rather than leading my students to fixate on a certain reality—or its opposite—my own COVID-19 experience suggests that perhaps I would do better to draw out of them the many and creative ways by which they bear witness to this reality (“how will you speak/write of this to your children or grandchildren?”) My hope is that the experiences of the past 3 years have made my students more empathetic readers—indeed, more empathetic humans.

To help address students’ needs for expression and connection, I plan to orient my lessons around variations on the theme of walls—both physical and conceptual. One successful prereading activity engages with the lexical differences between German and English and the limitations of translation: even in a general studies course, the differences between die Mauer versus die Wand is interesting to address. Students with basic historical knowledge likely will infer that a German novel from the 1960s with the title The Wall must be about the former east–west barrier. Regardless of their academic background, past students have responded creatively to an open-ended prereading question: “What do you think of when you hear the title?” “What kind of wall could this be?” As we progress through the novel, I plan to explore the “wall thematic” more deeply. In a variation of an American Association of Teachers of German sponsored public graffiti event created by my colleague several years ago to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall, I will repeat her prompt: “Which walls hold you back?” Key to her question was the understanding of a “wall” as any kind of social, physical, or mental impediment that prevented students from fully realizing their goals. If past student responses to my colleague's version of this activity is a predictor, answers will be richly varied: “My own self-doubt.” “Racism.” “Organic Chem lab.” Aligning this question even further with the specific content of Haushofer's novel, I will ask: “What kind of (conceptual) wall isolates you?” By sharing their answers, students have the opportunity to find community through common experiences and to empathize with the struggles of others.

More practically, I have also reconsidered writing and close reading activities to accompany the novel. Students might, for example, write their own memoir intended for fictional future readers, focusing on the routine of daily life. Furthermore, the recent (2013) German film adaptation can be taught in tandem with the novel. In particular, the moment at which the narrator encounters the wall is jarring; a comparison of the literary versus cinematic description of this event offers students the opportunity to consider the power and/or limits of the written word.

Like COVID-19, The Wall ends with no distinct moment of resolution. The pandemic and its memory will remain a part of students’ lives long after we have overcome the virus. The many ways in which this formative experience will have taught our students about self-expression and community are still to be determined, but in part will be mediated by the words of those who have come before, and by those of us who facilitate their messages.