Review: Peter Wawerzinek’s Rabenliebe: Eine Erschütterung

The German idiom Rabenmutter (literally "raven mother") denotes a bad, abusive or absent mother.  A Rabenmutter is at the heart of Peter Wawerzinek's autobiographical novel Rabenliebe: Eine Erschütterung ("Raven-Love: A Shock") which won the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for 2010.  The novel is Wawerzinek's attempt to understand and overcome the "shock" of having been abandoned by his mother when he was just two years old. 

The narrator's mother (like Wawerzinek's real mother) leaves her toddler son and even younger baby daughter home alone in Rostock and flees to the west (BRD) in the early days ot the DDR. The abandoned son plumbs his memory in an attempt to reconstruct the source of the great "shock" – the existential pain that would plague him for the next five decades. 

„Die Vergangenheit ist eine Höhle, in die man einfahren kann wie der Bergmann in den Berg, um in das dunkle Innere zu gelangen. Das Erinnern ist die kleine Taschenlampe im Kopf, die das Vergangene wie eine Märchengrotte zu beleuchten versteht.“

(The past is a cave in which the miner enters to reach the dark interior.  The act of remembering is like the small headlamp which illuminates the past like an enchanted cavern.)

The act of remembering is sometimes agonizing, both for the narrator and the reader, and, as it turns out, not always reliable. 

The first half of Rabenliebe recounts the narrator's years in an East German orphanage, his first two adoption attempts, which didn't take, and finally his adoption by a souple who view the young boy as an experiment in socialist child-rearing (which fails miserably). The young boy was so traumatized by being abandoned by this Rabenmutter, that he is unable to – or refuses to- speak until he is four years old.  In his mute state, however, he develops an extraordinary capacity to observe, and the scenes he reconstructs from his time in the orphanage are the most powerful in the novel. 

Although the book deals with growing up in a divided Germany, this is no way a political book.  The narrator is focused – perhaps obsessively so – on his own emotions and the wider social sphere barely registers.  Still, it seems like East German teenagers were just as enthralled with Elvis and the Beatles as their western counterparts. Life wasn't so different on the other side of the border, and even his model socialist adoptive parents resembled the middle class equivalents in the west in their automaton conformity.  Only once does the narrator rail against "the west" for "stealing" his mother away with the glittering facade of consumer capitalism. 

The second half o Rabenliebe is not an easy read – especially for those of us who stubornly insist on plot and dialogue in a novel. (Absence of plot appears to be a characteristic of prize-winning German novels these days.) The narrator keeps digging into the bleeding wound of his abandonment – his "motherlessness" – and yet can't seem to muster the courage to visit his mother in Erbach am Neckar, long after he finds out her address and cell phone number.  Here the narrator breaks down thinking of his imaginary mother who can never be a substitute for the real thing:

Ich weine, weil ich ein Leben mit meinem Ersatz verbringen werde und nicht loskommen kann von deisem Mutterersatz, dieser Muttereinbildung, die eine Muttermogelpackung ist, und mich am Leben hält, weil keine Frau der Welt an eine Mutter heranreicht, selbst wenn die Mutter eine Rabenmutter ist und dem Kind nicht zur Verfügung steht. (…) Ich bleibe in meinen tiefsten, geheimen, inneren Winkeln mit einer ausgedachten Mutter behaftet, weil es die echte Mutter nicht gibt, ich mich durch diesen Umstand gezwungen sehe, sie mir als Einbildung, Nachbildung zu erhalten, dass ich nicht an ihrem Fehlen krepiere, die Lebenslust verliere.

(I weep because I must spend a lifetime with my replacement and cannot escape from this replacement mother, this imagined mother, whch is a mother in deceptive packaging, and which keeps me alive, because there is no woman on earth who can compare to mother, even when the mother is a Rabenmutter and is not there for her child. (…) I am stuck with this imagined mother in the deepest, most secret aspects of my being because the real mother is not there and I am forced by circumstances to keep her within me as imaginary, a repiica, so that I don't just perish due to her absence and lose the will the live.)

FInally, after two hundred pages of procrastination and decades of false starts, the narrator does seek out his birth mother and – surprise! – finds out that his Rabenmutter has no more emotional connection to him that did his loveless adoptive parernts.  And so he finally resigns himself to a permanent state of motherlessness but can move on with his life.  Actually, the novel comes alive with appearance of his eight half-siblings he meets for the first time – but this happens in the final ten pages of Rabenliebe.  This could be a starting point for a more interesting narrative on the meaning of family in a broader sense.

It should be stated that Peter Wawerzinek is a word virtuoso – which is why he won the Bachmann Prize.  He intersperses his emotionally charged run-on sentences with factual newspaper clippings concerning abandoned, abused, or even murdered children.  Like a jazz saxaphonist he uses his sentences as a springboard for improvisations that include nursery rhymes, fairy tales, pop lyrics and even Goethe's poems.  Half the time his word-riffs crash and burn like Jimi Hendrix's rendering of The Star Spangled Banner.  But there is no denying Wawerzinek's courage as a writer.  What Rabenliebe needed was a good editor, for it is impossible to sustain this kind of intensity over 400 pages. One senses that Wawerzinek had to tell the story about his lost childhood. Now he can employ his considerable talents to new literary endeavors that are not so completely egocentric  (ich-bezogen).