Devotion by Botho Strauss

First published:Die Widmung, 1977 (English translation, 1979)

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: Summer, 1976

Locale: West Berlin

Principal Characters:

• Richard Schroubek, thirty-one years old, a former bookseller
• Hannah Beyl, the girlfriend who has left him

The Novel

Devastated by the sudden and unexplained departure of his girlfriend, Hannah Beyl, from his Berlin apartment, Richard Schroubek quits his job in a bookstore and waits in vain for her return. After a few days of roaming around the divided city, Richard barricades himself in his apartment, closes the curtains, and begins writing a journal dedicated to her (hence the story’s German title, Die Widmung, “the dedication”). His notes are at first short and aphoristic, but as the weeks go by he writes more and more and eventually spends seven or eight hours a day writing. Regarding the separation as only temporary, he writes in the hope that she will return one day and read “his conscientious and terrible protocol of her absence.”

In order to pay off their accumulated bills, Richard sells an inherited etching by the German expressionist Max Beckmann, but very little money remains afterward. One morning, he is visited by a fat young man named Fritz, who claims that he has spent three days with Hannah. She has deserted him as well, and he comes hoping to find out why. Unnerved by someone who regards himself as Richard’s “companion in misery,” Richard locks himself in Hannah’s room, where he has been keeping the manuscript for her. The telephone, which was disconnected because of overdue bills, rings in another room. It is Hannah, who has apparently paid the telephone bills. She wants to talk to Richard, but Fritz answers and excitedly agrees to meet her. By the time Richard unlocks Hannah’s door, Fritz is gone, and there is only a dial tone on the telephone.

His money spent, Richard fires Frau N., the cleaning lady and his last living connection to the outside world. Having given up books for television, he watches intently the news accounts of the catastrophic heat wave that has enveloped Europe since the beginning of the summer. He begins to develop bad habits, such as not bothering to clean the apartment, wearing the same clothes every day, and not bathing. One day, he absentmindedly tips over the honey jar onto his papers. He notices the honey only when he gets stuck in it on the floor. In a panic, he pours a box of laundry detergent and a basin of water over it, then mops up the ensuing mess with old shirts. Another accident soon occurs. He pulls the chain on the toilet too hard and breaks the shut-off valve. In the process of repairing the toilet, he falls into the toilet bowl and breaks his glasses. After he has fixed the valve (“my last silent film,” he says to himself with a bit of satisfaction), he mops up the considerable amount of water on the floor with the gray flannel suit that he wore to work.

Richard writes during the day and spends his evenings in front of the television. In his “TV delirium,” he switches back and forth between channels but retains little of what he watches, besides the latest news about the heat and the payoff of a children’s lottery in which a little girl won a thousand identical dolls. Having consumed the last of the TV dinners and yogurts in the refrigerator, he realizes that he will have to break his isolation soon. He begins to admit defeat: “I can see how my heroic and festive despair is shriveling into a miserable petty-bourgeois sadness,” he writes in one of his last entries.

In his weakened condition, Richard can no longer write. The television is on constantly now, even after the broadcasts have stopped. Hannah calls and wants to meet him at a bar. Oblivious to his filthy appearance, he runs out of his apartment but falls in the corridor, where he remembers his writings, the “biography of his empty hours,” which he gathers together into an old briefcase. On the way down the stairs, he hears his phone ring. He falls again on the way up, but the ringing has stopped by the time he reaches his door. When he meets Hannah outside the bar, she tells him that she called a second time to tell him not to come. She is drunk and disheveled and has ordered a taxi. Richard gives her the briefcase with the manuscript through the taxi window. She promises to read it.

Feeling released from “his stubborn neglect of himself,” he resolves to start a normal life the next day. He finds a new job selling books, cleans the apartment, and restocks the refrigerator with delicacies for her return. When she has not called after a week and a half, he goes to the bar where he last saw her. The host has not seen her recently, but a package has been left for him. It is the briefcase with the manuscript. Hannah left it in the taxi. Richard returns to his apartment and turns on the television. An aging pop singer is performing on a request concert. The man, “dragged in out of the past,” tries to synchronize with the scratchy recording of his own song but can no longer remember the lyrics.

The Characters

When he wrote Devotion, Botho Strauss was, like his protagonist Richard Schroubek, thirty-one years old, a resident of West Berlin, and an apolitical recluse and introspective survivor of the German student movement of the late 1960’s. Despite these similarities and Schroubek’s Strauss-like observations on Berliners and contemporary West German cultural stagnation, Strauss distances himself from his character by making him comically grotesque. The deeper Richard works himself into his self-imposed isolation and verbal narcissism, the more ridiculous he becomes. As he tries to cover up with a bohemian existence the emotional and social emptiness of his life, his despair becomes a pose, his increasing slovenliness a facade. He is aware of his own comic posturing as “Richard-without-life” and adds that “the comedy is only a protective ether that keeps the pain fresh.”

Richard’s greatest fear is of his own normality, the fact that he might be just like every other jilted lover, “lethargic, dim-witted, constipated,” as Fritz tells him. Although Richard misses the cleaning lady after her dismissal, she, twenty-five and happily married, epitomizes for him the kind of person he does not want to be, a self-satisfied, comfortable, unenlightened member of the consumer society. He, on the other hand, claims to long for poverty, solitude, shabby physical surroundings, and an erotic sensitivity to phenomena. Yet his growing addiction to television and his rapid return to normality after his brief encounter with Hannah unmask his own basic shallowness.

Lacking political and social energy, Richard has no creative outlet outside his writing. Yet his own attempts to intensify experience pale beside the great works of literature. When he reads Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, he finds that the novel’s characters live “on a higher plateau of sensibility” that has no correspondence to the “low-calorie emotional diet” of contemporary daily life. Without a sympathetic and faithful listener or reader (such as his idealized Hannah), Richard’s utterances threaten to deteriorate into inarticulate gurglings, like those of the Dante’s accidiosi, the melancholy and apathetic slime dwellers of the Inferno. Nevertheless, compared to the “dull tumult of images” emerging from the television, writing, “the great intensifier, the tracing,...the lasting spoor of language,” is the sole activity that makes him feel alive.

When Richard finally meets Hannah again, he hardly recognizes her. She is in some ways a mirror image of his own appearance: “[B]oth were dirty and had lost weight, were in rags, and unprepossessing to the point of being unrecognizable.” The narrator dryly calls them two “social casualties of love.” Although very little is revealed about Hannah, her love is likely not for Richard and perhaps not even for the unattractive school porter Fritz, who was with her at the bar. While Devotion invites comparison to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774; The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1779), Richard is at best an emaciated Werther, and Hannah, rather than being the subject of Richard’s adoration and praise, as was Werther’s beloved Charlotte, is the object of his self-indulgent fantasies. Richard’s solipsistic world thus remains virtually intact once he returns to his apartment after retrieving his manuscript. Without the hope of ever reaching his lover through his writing, he seems condemned to a lifeless existence in front of his television set.

Critical Context

Devotion is Botho Strauss’s most successful and accessible narrative. Together with his drama Trilogie des Wiedersehens (1976; trilogy of reunion), Devotion marks the turning point in his writing career. Strauss’s earlier plays, Die Hypochonder (1971; the hypochondriacs) and Bekannte Gesichter, gemischte Gefuhle (1974; familiar faces, mixed feelings), and the two stories published under the title Marlenes Schwester (1975; Marlene’s sister) were too esoteric and complex to reach a wide audience. Strauss’s later works, however, reflect the emotional reality of a politically quiescent Germany in the later 1970’s and the 1980’s with a precision unmatched by any other German writer. With the dramas Gross und Klein (1978; big and little), Kalldewey, Farce (1981), Der Park (1983; the park), and Die Fremdenfuhrerin (1986; The Tourist Guide, 1987), Strauss has become the most performed contemporary dramatist on the German stage. The short prose collected in Paare, Passanten (1981; couples, passersby) further develops Strauss’s acerbic observations of people groping to find love and meaning in a nervously satiated society. The first of his two longer novels, Rumor (1980), deals with the disintegration of a father involved in an incestuous relationship with his daughter. The second, Der junge Mann (1984; the young man), is a loose series of realistic, parodic, allegorical, and imaginary narratives centered on the fifteen-year career of a young theatrical director.

Devotion contains in nuce many of Strauss’s main themes and motifs: melancholy self-observation, political resignation, impossibility of love, escape into literature, and longing for depth and meaning in one’s life. Despite the thematic bleakness, Strauss’s macabre humor, self-assured style, and meticulous attention to detail make this short novel one of the more interesting and appealing works of modern German literature.

Bibliography

Adelson, Leslie. Botho Strauss and West German Prose of the 1970’s, 1983.

Adelson, Leslie. “Subjectivity Reconsidered: Botho Strauss and Contemporary West German Prose,” in New German Critique. XXX (Fall, 1983), pp. 3-59.

Dickstein, Lore. Review in Saturday Review. VI (July 21, 1979), p. 50.

Judd, Inge. Review in Library Journal. CIV (July, 1979), p. 1487.

Shrimpton, Nicholas. Review in New Statesman. XCIX (February 29, 1980), p. 325.