Why Join?

  • Add New Books

  • Write a Review

  • Backpack Reading Lists

  • Newsletter Updates

Join Now

Novella set in Germany (East and West, looking both ways)

1st September 2017

Dance by the Canal by Kerstin Hensel, translated by Jen Calleja – novella set in Germany.

When I pass homeless women, I look into their faces and wonder: why her and not me? I sense that maybe our differences are not as great as I would like to believe. Dance by the Canal tells the story of a woman who fails to find her place in society – neither in the communist GDR nor in the capitalist West. Her refusal to conform to the patriarchal structures of both societies forces her into ever increasing isolation. This book will make you think.

Dance by the Canal, novel set in former East Germany

This is Book No. 24 from Peirene Press who excel at producing short books translated from Europe: “Truly big stories inNovella set in Germany small packages“. We have reviewed several books from Peirene (we have selected 5 previous reads with review-links to each title – click on the cover and dotted them around this post) – all beautifully and harmoniously crafted.

Contemporary European literature, thought-provoking, well-designed, short.

Dance by the Canal is the story of Gabriela Von Haßlau, the “von” denoting a lineage of (in this case Anhaltian) nobility. She is born into a wealthy and seemingly cultured family, where her father is an esteemed vascular surgeon and her mother a society hostess. She is given a violin when she is 5 years old but her teacher Frau Popiol labours to extract Gabriela’s musical talent. Fleeting intimate contact, in part, derails Gabriela’s future intellectual efforts.

The von Haßlau’s part of the country is under Communist rule and the von has to go. It’s too bourgeois. And unless Gabriela joins the Free German Youth, she will not even be allowed to study at a Socialist University. As it turns out, she has no option but to take on the intensive training as a mechanical engineer when she leaves school, but she drops out and comes to rely on handouts from the state. (It was very common in the days of Communist rule, that in order to achieve an egalitarian society, the offspring of intellectuals had to take on more menial work, they were forbidden to enter a similar profession as their parent).

Leibnitz is a fictional industrial German town, in former East Germany, the waterways polluted by effluent from local factories. The villa of Gabriela’s childhood sounds regimented, but materially wanting for nothing. There is a sense that the family, with all their partying and celebrating, is on borrowed time….

The narrative is one long set of paragraphs. Time periods are distinguished by Gabriela’s childhood trauma “life under communism”, of coping with an alcoholic father, and coming to terms with her mother who abandons the family; and “bridge life”, where she sleeps under the bridges dotted around Leibnitz, during the 1990s (after the Fall of the Wall). The two time periods dovetail throughout.

Her fall from a relatively comfortable beginning is in truth sobering. It highlights how childhood experience combined with the rigidity of a political system can cause lasting, often unconscious damage to an individual. When, for example, Gabriela is randomly attacked, the police choose to adhere to political systems over the welfare of the individual and dismiss her charge: such attacks cannot possibly happen in a socialist state, she must surely have made it up, and harmed herself….. It is overall a sad read, seeing the demise of someone so young, with little or no emotional support.

For me, however, this novel is one of the least polished of Pereine’s books that I have read to date. The role of a translator – which we have pondered many times (see Found in Translation) –  is to bring to life the essence of the book and to transpose the words therein into the native language of the reader. I think the translator in this instance has struggled with this task: “A Flat Five in Civics” would, I imagine, mean nothing to an English speaker who is unfamiliar with the German language. Perhaps the translation reflects a rather wooden German prose in the original, it’s hard to say. A staccato construct, coupled with a procession of lightweight characters, makes up much of the text and it just wasn’t one for me.

Tina for the TripFiction Team

You can follow Peirene on Twitter and discover more of their amazing books on their website.

Do come and connect with Team TripFiction via Twitter (@tripfiction), Facebook (TripFiction), Instagram (TripFiction) and Pinterest (TripFiction)… and now YouTube

For more books set around Germany, come and peruse the TripFiction Website!

Subscribe to future blog posts

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *