Writing sample

Smiling Bonds and Laughter Frees: Marginal Humor and Modern Strangers in the Works of Hung Gurst and Wladimir Kaminer [Finding the Foreign: Proceedings of the Thirteenth Interdisciplinary German Studies Conference at the University of California, Berkeley. New York: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007. 47-58].

Julia K. Baker


Some scholars may have reservations towards the topic of humor in literary texts, particularly when such texts are written by non-native German authors. In fact, most transnational literary criticism is dedicated to literary works, which focus on problematic rather than humorous aspects of being a foreigner in Germany. This might help explain the lack of secondary literature on Hung Gurst’s work as well as the slightly derogatory treatment of Wladimir Kaminer as a multi-talented Russian immigrant and popular author whose main intention is seen as “merely” making his German readers laugh. While I am particularly interested in the role, power, and effect of humor in literary texts by these two authors, the overall aim of this article is to examine the connections between humor (as created by the authors in their texts), and smiling and laughter (as intended effects on the reader).
While laughter is most often associated with humor or contentment, sociologists, psychologists, and theologians have pointed out that we also laugh to avoid being hurt or controlled by someone else. We laugh when we are nervous, afraid or in order to conceal our fear. Sometimes laughter liberates, while other times it threatens. According to religious comparatist Klaus Heinrich, laughter shares one aspect with other convulsive gestures of the body such as hiccupping and crying: people who laugh are on the verge of disaster; their laughter expresses their relief to have escaped certain catastrophic situations (Heinrich 1986, 18-19).
Three theoretical perspectives of humor are considered in this article: the superiority theory, the incongruity theory, and the relief theory. Developed by Plato and Aristotle, the superiority theory explains laughter as the result of feelings of superiority over others or over our own former position. It thus can help us to gain status. In this context, humor researcher Anthony Chapman notes that laughter not only occurs, but even prospers when people are oppressed, impoverished, or in acute pain (Chapman 1983, 151). Originally introduced by Kant and Schopenhauer, the incongruity theory suggests that amusement is the result of the unexpected. Finally, the relief theory—best represented in the work of Sigmund Freud—describes humor as an expenditure of excess psychic energy. Freud distinguished between “innocent” and “tendentious” jokes: “Where a joke is not an innocent one, there are only two purposes it may serve. It is either a hostile joke (serving the purpose of aggressiveness, satire or defense) or an obscene joke (serving the purpose of exposure)” (Freud 1960, 90-91). According to Freud, the characteristic of jokes depends on their hearer’s reaction to them. In the case of the innocent joke, the joke is an end in itself and serves no particular aim. Tendentious jokes, on the other hand, have an ulterior motive. Thus, they run the risk of meeting with people who do not want to listen to them.
For the person who makes others laugh, and who laughs at and about him- or herself, marginality is key. According to Lesley D. Harman, marginalized individuals have become “modern strangers” who seek a paradox “to accomplish distance through membership and membership through distance.” As Joanne Gilbert has pointed out, sociological marginality tends to stigmatize, but rhetorical marginality may actually empower: “A comic’s marginality…grants him or her the authority to subvert the status quo; in this way, deviance from social norms and dominant cultural traits serves as a license for social criticism.”
A theoretical discussion of humor in literature must consider Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis of carnival literature. As Bakhtin pointed out, carnival—during which a temporary destabilization of order takes place—traditionally gives people the chance to relax in an otherwise strictly regulated environment. However, it also allows them to address social injustice and instability. Based on Bakhtin’s observation that humor reflects the cultural setting in which it is used, I suggest that the humor used by Hung Gurst and Wladimir Kaminer to depict intercultural encounters and every day life in Germany immediately following unification provides insights into power relations and the status of foreigners in contemporary German society.
For both Germans and foreigners facing the reality of a reunited Germany, uncertainty, change and confusion became a way of life. The narrator in Hung Gurst’s story “Moru, der kleine Elefant,” most of the characters in Kaminer’s Russendisko, as well as the authors themselves have experienced the crumbling of political systems in their home countries. They coped with the loss of jobs, homes and relationships prior to their arrival in Germany. As a consequence, they are able to look at the humorous side of the chaos that comes with the unification of two different worlds, making Gurst’s and Kaminer’s characters generally more relaxed and in a way also superior to their neighboring Germans. Very few of them ever lose their patience; none of them becomes violent; all of them seem to find better ways than the Germans to cope with the difficult situations they face. In the scenes described by both Gurst and Kaminer, people who are otherwise separated by insurmountable barriers find themselves united, sharing a common humor. They cope with extraordinary situations and laugh together at what Bakhtin has referred to as “scandal scenes, eccentric behavior, inappropriate speeches and performances, which indicate the potency of the earth and the body, and the system of carnevalistic humiliation” (Bakhtin 1984, 117).
Gurst and Kaminer use humor to entertain their readers, but also to make a statement about the destabilization of the political and social situation in Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification. In my analysis, I focus on the different ways humor, smiling, and laughter are used to depict relationships between foreigners and Germans. I ask how a foreigner must act in order to live peacefully and successfully among the “locals” and whether the use of humor generally helps foreigners earn the right to question, to criticize, and to overcome social and cultural norms.


Hung Gurst

In an interview with Lerke von Saalfeld, Vietnamese author Hung Gurst reflects on the role of smiling and irony in his work:

Ich muss über die Dummheit der Menschen, die andere einschüchtern oder sogar schlagen wollen, ein wenig lächeln. Ich lächele, damit es mir ein bisschen besser geht. In der Geschichte über Moru bin ich wieder der Verlierer, aber der Verlierer muss lächeln und Ironie annehmen, um sich zu beruhigen. Ohne Ironie kann ich diese Geschichte nicht schreiben. (Saalfeld 1998, 240).

In “Moru, der kleine Elefant,” Gurst writes about a Vietnamese man’s experience with xenophobia in the former GDR. The narrator takes a train from Berlin to Leipzig a few days after the Wall came down. The train compartment serves, in Bakhtin’s words, as “a place of encounter and contact between diverse people” (Bakhtin 1969, 56). The Vietnamese compares the fall of the Wall and the current political situation with the unification of North and South Vietnam and concludes that democracy makes much more sense here because all Germans seem to love democracy. While he is celebrating the victory of democracy, four Germans enter the compartment. They begin at once to attack the foreigner by calling him a Fiji: “Damit meinten sie mich, denn die meisten Ostdeutschen glauben, alle Asiaten kommen von der Fidschiinsel, und wissen nicht einmal, dass die Indianer doch aus Asien kommen und nicht umgekehrt” (Gurst 1998, 240).
In communicating with the foreigner, the German youth use a grammatically incorrect language, and the narrator decides to play along by speaking the same language as well, despite the fact that his German is nearly flawless. When they ask him what he is studying in Leipzig, he lies: “Wäre ich ehrlich gewesen und hätte gesagt, dass ich Germanistik in Leipzig studierte, wäre es arrogant und zu intellektuell gewesen und das hätte als neue Provokation aufgefasst werden können” (241).
An advertisement for Kitekat (cat food) in the train compartment reminds him that Germans supposedly love animals, and so he invents the story of Moru, the little elephant. According to this story, he and his family own five elephants, among them three elephant babies—Doku, Karu, and Moru, his favorite elephant. He then adds that he is studying German elephants in a zoo. When the Germans ask why he studies elephants in Germany although he owns five of them himself at home, he praises the German elephants for their discipline. Thus he is saved because the Germans enjoy talking about well-behaved German elephants. They continue to ask many questions, and of course they are also curious about how elephants procreate. The narrator feels inclined in the situation to adapt to their rather crude level:

Die Elefanten immer schämen, nicht zeigen, wie sie bumbum machen...Aber alte Menschen erzählen, Elefantenmann und Elefantenfrau suchen ein Gefälle. Die Elefantenfrau stehen unten, und lehnen die Schultern an einen großen Baum, und Elefantenmann laufen schnell von oben und springen auf seine Frau...Und wenn der ganzen Wald wackeln, dann weiß man, daß die Elefanten bumbum machen. Ich schämte mich, die Elefanten so blöd darzustellen, aber ich hatte gar keine Wahl. (Gurst 1998, 240)

According to Don Nilsen, when a person tells a joke, s/he is in the position of control; but when s/he hears a joke, it is the other person who is in control (Nilsen 1993, 289). The German youths’ laughter at the narrator’s story about the elephants reflects their feeling of superiority. They find him funny because he gives them reason to believe that they are not like him, a “foreigner from the jungle.” However, it is really the foreigner who proves to be superior, as he takes control of the situation by telling a joke. When Gurst’s story takes an obscene turn, it does so because the narrator knows the youths better than they know themselves. The narrator’s humor enables him to form a bond with and at the same time to maintain a distance from them. He overcomes the threatening situation by approaching it in a non-threatening way. He knows what his fellow travelers find funny and that by being obscene, by telling what Freud refers to as a tendentious joke, he plays on their repressed aggression and desires. In Freud’s terms, Gurst’s joke can be placed somewhere between the hostile and the obscene joke. It serves the purpose of defense (a characteristic of the hostile joke) and exposure (a characteristic of the obscene joke). It protects him against the others’ aggressiveness and simultaneously exposes their hostility. By making the passengers laugh, the narrator deflects their initial aggression. Although he seemingly humiliates himself by speaking poor German, by emphasizing and at the same time falsifying his foreignness, and by making himself the center of his own joke, he is still able to smile at the situation.
At the beginning of the story, the narrator praises the Germans for their ability to appreciate democracy and to live according to its values and beliefs. By the end of story, the narrator has reason to doubt this judgment. As a foreigner, the Vietnamese feels the need to protect himself against an aggressive group of locals. He does so by using his own weapon, marginal humor. At the very end of the story, when the narrator finally gets off the train, he hears a group of people chanting: “Deutschland, Deutschland.” Disillusioned after his intercultural encounter on the train, he assumes that their chanting most probably is not political, but refers instead to an Oberliga soccer game being held that day. Gurst’s foreigner defends himself by using humor but on a subtler level, he also makes a political statement concerning the state of democracy in a unified Germany after the fall of the Wall.


Wladimir Kaminer

When asked why he came to Germany, Wladimir Kaminer explains: “I was young—twenty-two—so nobody was really calling for me. I had friends there that I had met in Moscow. This was 1990, you didn't need a visa, not even a passport. All you needed was an invitation. And it was inexpensive” (Fischman 2003).
In his first collection of stories, Russendisko (2000), Kaminer’s narrator adds another reason why he chose the GDR: he claims he is Jewish. In order to emigrate to Germany in the 1990s, one could pretend to be Jewish. The Russians do not really understand why Judaism is a prerequisite to emigrate to a country that, a few decades earlier, had expelled, persecuted, and killed people for being Jewish. It puzzles them that Germany of all countries would make arrangements for Jews to prove their Jewishness. Kaminer’s narrator has his own theory: “Vielleicht war es bei den ersten Juden im Polizeipräsidium am Alex nur ein Missverständnis, ein Versehen, und dann wollten die Beamten es nicht zugeben und machten brav weiter? So ähnlich wie beim Fall der Mauer?” (Kaminer 2002, 17).
This is one of Kaminer’s oblique criticisms of life in Germany after reunification. He neither openly attacks Germany nor the Germans. He writes mainly about other immigrants and how they cope with everyday life, and how they help each other in their attempt to improve their status. According to Dieter Hildebrandt, Kaminer’s secret is his candid satire:

Er schreit nie auf, protestiert nicht, sondern wundert sich bloß. Aber er sagt nicht einmal, dass er sich wundert, sondern lässt es uns zwischen den Zeilen spüren. Ganz selten nur zerstört er das naive Gespinst seiner Abenteuer durch direkten Witz oder eine Pointe und schon gar nicht durch jenen Hohn-Ton, der deutsche Satire meist so unerträglich macht. Kaminer ist Subversiv-Ironiker. (Hildebrandt 2002, xxx)

On the surface, Kaminer’s stories are easy for German readers to digest. Many accept, even celebrate him as a Russian author whose portrayal of immigrants does not focus on the difficulties of life. As Dagmar Wienroeder-Skinner points out, Wladimir Kaminer is the “good Russian” and therefore “offers an alternative to the other Russians who still inflict fear because they carry an air of the unknown” (Wienroeder-Skinner 2004). In her view, Kaminer functions as the optimistic facilitator between cultures: he observes his multi-ethnic environment and writes about its conditions. She contends that Kaminer’s success is based on the fact that his comments and short essays aim at harmony and humor, but at the same time, she criticizes the perceived lack of depth in his work:

Die deutsch geschriebenen Bücher des russischen Immigranten Wladimir Kaminer öffnen eine entspannte Welt, die das Skurrile und Aussergewöhnliche ihrer Menschen, deren Lebensumstände und Verhaltensweisen aufzeigt. Diese Welt wird mit Humor und Ironie arrangiert und präsentiert und grenzt zuweilen an das Absurde. Es ergibt sich aber auch eine angespannte Unruhe, denn der Leser/die Leserin wartet auf das Tiefere oder zumindest auf eine versuchte Tiefenreflexion. (Hildebrandt 2002, xxx)

It is particularly Kaminer’s use of humor that adds depth and a critical edge to his stories. Even if he does not openly reflect on the “deeper meaning” of his characters’ lives for his readers, the invitation to do so is at hand. I therefore expand Wienroeder-Skinner’s judgment of the author and his work by suggesting that Kaminer’s use of humor not only serves to pacify the Germans—to offer them an entertaining view of foreigners in Germany and themselves—but it also helps to mask the author’s critical look at his surroundings. Kaminer’s stories depict the political and social environment for Germans as well as immigrants in Berlin at the beginning of the 1990s: Germans and foreigners alike try to make sense of the changes that have been taking place around them. The narrator’s comedic and, in Bakhtin’s words, carnevalistic glance at life, as well as his emphasis on hilarious experiences, transcend difficult realities.
At first glance, Kaminer’s immigrants are pragmatic, open-minded and ready to take a risk to become entrepreneurs in the global economy. Most of Kaminer’s characters belong to a particular group of people: “Die meisten waren bildende Künstler, Musiker oder Dichter: Menschen ohne Entwicklung, die sogenannte Zwischenschicht—ewig zwischen Hammer und Sichel, bereits etwas zerlumpt, aber immer noch gut drauf” (Kaminer 2002, 174). Kaminer’s narrator and most of his fellow foreigners choose Germany as a new home not as refugees. Most of them come out of curiosity, to see what life in the West has to offer. However, this does not necessarily mean that life is simply fun, as readers might deduce from Kaminer’s stories. His immigrants try different jobs, relationships and religions and thus continuously change their identities. A Russian restaurant owner summarizes the situation: “Eigentlich kommt es nur auf die Sauce an” (Kaminer 2002, 105), i.e., on superficialities. Whatever lies underneath the surface, i.e., what an immigrant’s life is really like, remains unclear. While the foreigners in Kaminer’s stories venture on many undertakings, their foreignness is reduced to stereotypes in the eyes of the locals: guests at the “Jägermeisterkneipe” across the street find a name for the Russian’s restaurant long before it officially opens, calling it “Russenmafiapuff,” indicating their stereotypical view of Russians as all criminals or prostitutes.
Russendisko is filled with intercultural encounters. However, these encounters are mainly between immigrants, not so much between foreigners and Germans. When they do meet, the encounter has in most cases a negative impact on the German character. There is, for example, Markus Lenz in “Die Birkenfrau” who invites Russian folklore dancers to his home, where he boasts about his collection of antique weapons. The Russian women feel attacked, overwhelm Markus and throw one of his swords out of the window. After his neighbors call the police, he is arrested and mistaken for a Yugoslavian. Alternatively, Germans are portrayed as individuals who do things foreigners would not even do for money. In “Als ich einmal Schauspieler war,” the Russians are supposed to play barbaric soldiers. However, they are mostly ashamed of the directors’ instructions, particularly when naked buttocks are required in a sex scene. Only the German extra takes his pants off for an additional DM 250. In “Die Systeme des Weltspiels,” Kaminer’s narrator praises different cultures’ approaches to gambling. Germans, however, do not seem to have a system; they just dabble with the others’ systems. In addition, they do not seem to get excited when they win nor are they too disappointed when they lose: “Im Grunde genommen sind sie [die Deutschen] nicht aufs Spiel aus. Die Deutschen gehen ins Kasino, weil sie weltoffen und neugierig sind. Dort lernen sie die Systeme anderer Nationen kennen, die sie im Grunde aber auch nicht sonderlich interessieren” (Kaminer 2002, 82).
In other words, in Kaminer’s stories, Germans do not really bother to understand foreigners. Although they claim to be cosmopolitan, they often misunderstand other people’s cultural backgrounds. It is the immigrants who open up to what is new and strange to them and incorporate it into their lives. Kaminer’s narrator makes it sound like fun, but underneath the layer of humor, he also shows that taking risks and opening up is not always easy. After all, how much fun is it to hurt oneself on purpose so that one is not deported? How enjoyable is it to be living with neighbors who all look like homicidal maniacs and to be considered one yourself by the police? What is so funny about setting up an illegal beer booth at a train station? What is so romantic about trying to get one’s partner into the country legally?
By adding humor and making the reader laugh, Kaminer portrays his situations as rather easy to overcome. In his own words, his stories are “Alltagsbewältigungsprosa”; writing is thus like another daily chore, i.e. cooking: “[Schreiben] Ist wie Kochen, man kann damit viel erreichen, zum Beispiel die Familie versorgen. Experimentieren, Spaß haben, unaufdringliche Botschaften in die Welt setzen.”
Kaminer sends unobtrusive messages with the help of humor. However, after forty-seven stories, the last three strike a more critical tone. The narrator seems suddenly tired of entertaining his readers. After all, most of the immigrants’ lives are not as happy or easy as that of Genosse Petrov, a character in the narrator’s textbook Deutsches Deutsch zum Selberlernen. According to the book, Genosse Petrov lives in a different, ideal world: “Den im Lehrbuch vorkommenden Leuten geht es saugut, sie führen ein harmonisches, glückliches Leben” (Kaminer 2002, 184). The textbook world is thus used as a contrast to the world described in the previous stories. When the narrator states that the foreigners in the textbook lead a happy life, does he not simultaneously imply that the opposite is true for his own characters?
In the last story, “Warum ich immer noch keinen Antrag auf Einbürgerung gestellt habe,” the narrator spends hours thinking about acceptable statements for the naturalization documents he has to fill out. When he asks his wife why they had come to Germany in the first place, she replies that they came to see whether it would be fun to live there. Instead of “fun,” the narrator writes down “curiosity.” However, in the end, his documents slip out of his hands and fall into a hole. He is not too upset about it. Russendisko ends with the rather disillusioned statement and question: “Ich werde wohl nie die Einbürgerung bekommen. Aber wozu auch?” (Kaminer 2002, 192).
Kaminer’s transparent narrator, a “cipher” as the author describes him in an interview (Fishman 2003), is one of the “modern strangers,” who seek “to accomplish distance through membership and membership through distance.” Distance and membership are both accomplished through the use of humor. In most of the stories, the readers are invited, even expected, to laugh at the foreigners’ struggles and failures. They laugh because after all, it is a foreigner who is making fun of other foreigners. He thus becomes less foreign and more like the readers. In this ambivalent position, however, he is also able to express subtle criticism of Germans and Germany. Kaminer’s stories have a bonding effect; they offer foreigners and Germans alike a way of looking and laughing at themselves and thus help them cope with the difficulties of life in post-unification Germany.


Conclusion

According to Regina Barreca, “making your own jokes is equivalent to taking control over your life—and usually that means taking control away from someone else” (Gilbert 2004, 9). But what if, for political reasons, people find themselves in an environment lacking control and stability, such as Germany after the fall of the Wall and reunification? Hung Gurst’s and Wladimir Kaminer’s humor takes on life in Germany in this transitional period to provide temporary relief in a time of crisis. The experience of loss, change and reorientation is difficult for Germans and foreigners. Both find it difficult to gain control over their surroundings. However, the foreigners seem to master the situation better than the natives. This applies to the characters created by the authors, but also to the authors themselves, who have mastered the German language to such an extent that they compose their work in it.
In Hung Gurst’s story “Moru der kleine Elefant,” the narrator makes himself the center of a joke and thus takes control away from the Germans who are about to attack him. For Kaminer’s foreigners, it is not about taking control away from the Germans who, if they are mentioned at all, are described as rather powerless characters themselves. Gurst’s and Kaminer’s characters’ laughter, and the laughter it generates for their readers, proves to be as ambivalent as life itself in Germany at the time. Laughter allows both foreigners and Germans to perceive life differently; it suggests different ways of thinking and behavior.
It is easier to comment on instability and social injustice when the critic includes him/herself in his critical observations and when the critique is delivered with a smile or, even better, when it causes the critiqued to laugh. By making their readers laugh and by laughing at themselves, Gurst’s and Kaminer’s modern strangers work against what Malcolm Muggeridge has called the enemy of humor, i.e., fear:

Fear requires conformism. It draws people together into a herd, whereas laughter separates them as individuals. When people are fearful, they want everyone to be the same, accept the same values, say the same things, nourish the same hopes, to wear the same clothes, look at the same television, and ride in the same motorcars. In a conformist society there is no place for the jester. He strikes a discordant note, and therefore must be put down. (Nilsen 1993, 289).

The foreigners depicted by Hung Gurst and Wladimir Kaminer appear as jesters who perform their marginality by foregrounding their otherness, while at the same time emphasizing what they share with the majority, namely a lack of stability and a loss of orientation in the search for new homes, new jobs, and new identities. To be able to live peacefully and successfully among the Germans, Gurst’s and Kaminer’s foreigners point out the humorous aspects of their own experiences. They might not fully obtain the right to question or criticize existing social and cultural norms, but the bonding and freeing effects of smiling and laughter help minimize fear and thus encourage Germans to become members of a less conformist, more open-minded society, which will eventually offer the jester a place to stay.


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