Michaela throws down

Reflection on death. Heike Geißler puts concerns about the mortality of the individual at the center of her novel

Heike Geißler's prose is irritating and takes getting used to, but by no means in a negative sense. In the literary texts of the Leipzig writer, the ordinary, the rather average everyday life of her protagonists who come from big city environments, is always fused with moments of the unusual or extraordinary. Her characters, mostly women in middle adulthood, are overwhelmed by rising rents, their social roles and the neoliberal blurring of boundaries between work and leisure, and appear exhausted and powerless. But the creeping erosion of the social, political and everyday, to which they are at the mercy and against which they try to rebel, also appears to them in peculiar appearances, for example in the novel "The Week" from 2022 as an invisible child, as a personified death and as Monday, which keeps recurring within a week.

Through this unity of the real and the unreal, Geißler's texts gain a literary reflexivity in which a political urgency is also inscribed by depriving the social order of its facticity and opening up the possibility of a different one. This tension also determines her new novel “Michaela Kohlhaas” from the beginning. The protagonist of the same name, single and childless, is in her early 40s and lives in Leipzig, where she works as a deputy cemetery manager. She leads a regulated, uniform life; her everyday life has neither major swings nor surprises. But from the outset, an ominous expectation hovers over her unpretentious, monotonous life, which a nameless first-person narrator hints at before the actual story begins: "I would not like to see anyone who has already died as much, as urgently, as she does: Michaela Kohlhaas, the great woman of the century, whose lifetime was not long enough to reach her full stature."

Michaela Kohlhaas embodies, so to speak, what is repressed in patriarchal culture and thus the violent past as well as the possibility of its abolition.

The novel consistently levels out the supposed discrepancy between the protagonist's initially inconspicuous life course and her importance beyond death by following Michaela Kohlhaas, who is constantly referred to as an "exemplary woman", in the last twelve months of her life. Even during her employment at the cemetery, she sometimes feels underlying anger at what she sees as the unequal distribution of wealth and power, which, along with the use of identical names of minor characters and places as well as direct quotations, is the most obvious reference to Heinrich von Kleist's novella "Michael Kohlhaas". After a personal experience that dramatically shows her social inequality as an expression of the logic of property, she decides to leave her apartment forever with the bare minimum of clothing and live on the street from then on.

On foot, later with a covered wagon that she pulls behind her, on which she sleeps and in which she collects clothes and mostly useless objects, she travels through rural areas and smaller towns in East Germany before returning to Leipzig after a while. By neglecting her personal hygiene, she becomes increasingly neglected, other people defame her and, with a few exceptions, treat her with reserve, rejection, hostility or even violence. The reasons for completely breaking away from her current living conditions sometimes remain hidden or unclear to her; it is no coincidence that they are formulated in rudimentary terms at best. While still in her apartment, she doesn't pursue a plan, but follows an inexorable urge: "It had to happen, she knew in this state, but didn't say it, because then she wouldn't have thought about it anymore, she could only have feared it - because that's what some people said: fear - everything had to change."

Over the course of the months in which she is on the road, she, like her male counterpart in Kleist's novella, occasionally seeks revenge, but unlike Michael, Michaela Kohlhaas seems to suspect that retaliation only reinforces the injustice suffered in the civil order rather than overcoming it. By turning away from that order, it also becomes opposed to any change that is limited to the merely individual or arises from instrumental action. But because she has “the greatest desires” within her, which she herself hardly understands, she seeks an exchange with the public, inspired by the desire to unravel the cause and purpose of her undertaking. Back in Leipzig, now widely known, she writes articles from her car on the market square, but even in them she refuses to use intelligent speech and convincing rhetoric, as pedagogy and forms of influence are suspicious to her: “She has never wanted to be pushed or pushed in a more or less subtle way. She never wanted to know the tools of the powerful, and she certainly didn't want to clean the tools of the powerful. She rejected the powerful positions and did not accept a world that relied on it.

Michaela Kohlhaas embodies, so to speak, what is repressed in patriarchal culture and thus the violent past as well as the possibility of its abolition.

However, she is not fundamentally dismissive and aloof, but rather open to those who want to join her way of life, as she calls it. For example, the nameless first-person narrator of the same age who met Michaela Kohlhaas during a walk in the cemetery and who has been in loose contact with her ever since. She is on the verge of freeing herself from the confines of her small family and leaving her husband and sons, at least temporarily, but decides against it at the last moment. Nevertheless, she writes herself more and more into the text and creates space for her subjectivity by participating in Michaela Kohlhaas' story, but at the same time maintaining a reflexive distance from what is being told and from the protagonist.

Her writing, which already stands out from the rest of the text at the beginning of the novel, establishes an independent narrative level, whereby two narrative voices relate to each other. She is also the one who already provides an interpretation for Michaela Kohlhaas' story: "The woman didn't need a back story, but she had one. And it was like this: her story began with much older stories that had been told to her, that she had heard of, stories that could or should have turned out differently. They were also kept in her heart, gave the appearance of being loose threads, but were actually deeper and deeper roots.« In this perspective, the history of women in Michaela Kohlhaas' biography is condensed as one of patriarchal violence and unfulfilled promises. The violence that happens to her in the course of the novel is directed less against her marginal social existence and more against her as a woman whose non-conformist behavior can only be perceived by society as arrogance. Furthermore, shame, hurt and defenselessness are part of her previous experiences and the memories she carries with her.

In the literary processing of these tensions in Heike Geißler's novel, the aesthetic characteristics of an écriture féminine formulated by Hélène Cixous manifest themselves with particular, but never intrusive, clarity: the narrative polyphony, the emphasis on physicality, the drive economy of expenditure, the subversiveness of imagination and language as well as a still inarticulate speech, which does not commit the protagonist to a clear identity, but always her striving leaves it open and indefinite: “What would have been the meaning of ordered words?”

Michaela Kohlhaas embodies, so to speak, what is repressed in patriarchal culture and thus the violent past as well as the possibility of its abolition. The vanishing points of this abolition are the abolition of fear and the insight into one's own transience - this is precisely what makes the character deeply ambivalent. Because Michaela Kohlhaas, as an object of projection, triggers fears that people do not admit to themselves, the resulting experience of powerlessness can only be repressed through violence against her, and this violence always has the potential to kill. In this dynamic, the novel also traces the logic of the fascization of society. The protagonist counters this logic with the conviction that emancipatory change requires awareness of and concern for the mortality of the individual. Because death permeates the novel from the ground up, it points to the paradox that even the abolition of power and domination, which motivates Michaela Kohlhaas' actions, cannot forego the remembrance of the deadly violence that is necessarily inscribed in them.

Heike Geißler: Michaela Kohlhaas. Suhrkamp, Berlin 2026, 253 pages, 24 euros