Spaces of Relationality and Temporality in LUTZ SEILER’S Stern 111

Abstract

LUTZ SEILER'S novel Stern 111 (2020) follows the contrasting experiences of a married couple from Gera in Thuringia and their adult son, Carl, over a period of sixteen months immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The experience of the parents who head west throws a critical light on social patterns of the capitalist system. The son, on the other hand, experiences an alternative social model when he joins the squatter scene in Berlin-Mitte. Although convivialist structures within the group of squatters that has adopted Carl and with their environment soon disintegrate, Carl develops into a relational self who becomes aware of his relationality in the process. This can be understood as a ‘poetics of failure’, because with the failure of the social model a temporality is created, which allows for new dynamics and networks of relationships. What emerges is an aesthetic time-space (‘Eigenzeit’) that makes further possibilities of living together imaginable.