Cosmopolitan Delusions: Kat Kaufmann’s Superposition

Izy is a more complex character than a straightforwardly ethnographic reading of the novel might imply, however. Most obviously, she is bewildered by the arbitrariness of her presence in Germany as the child of a Russian Jew who seized the opportunity to quit the collapsing Soviet Union in 1990, and she is burdened by the “Bringpflicht” (obligation to deliver)3Kaufmann, Superposition, 128. Hereafter, SP. that she feels she owes her parents to be a success in her new life. More generally, though, Izy is unable to reconcile her self-understanding as a Russian, a half-Jew—only her father is Jewish—and a (relatively privileged) migrant. As she puts it, her identity cannot be resolved into a single entity, much less into the superposition of the novel’s title: “Ich kann mich selbst gar nicht mehr messen, so überlagert bin ich inzwischen. Und ich frage mich, wer würfelt wohl da so herum, im Multiversum, das all diese Realitäten in sich birgt?” (I cannot measure myself anymore, because I am so superimposed. And I ask myself, who is throwing all these dice, in the multiverse, which contains all these realities within itself?; SP, 143.)

Izy’s narration, it can be argued, manifests symptoms of the disorientation and even delirium that ensues as she struggles to inhabit her multiple realities simultaneously. In some places, then, there are lengthy passages of sociological reporting, for example when she describes the hostility her family encountered when they first arrived in 1990 (SP, 32) and the bullying she experienced at school (SP, 65–67); or when she references the stereotyping of Russians as mafia (SP, 136–37); the former astronauts, physicists, and teachers who are now unemployed (SP, 158–59); and documents “proving” Jewish ancestry that can be bought on the black market (SP, 159). Elsewhere, she adopts a more contemporary pop aesthetic to relate her life in the narrative present, including sexual harassment by her boss, erotic interludes with Timur—a fellow Russian who always goes back to his German girlfriend—the parties she attends, her love of Black jazz musicians and rave music (SP, 22–23), and her nighttime peregrinations through Berlin. Interspersed with all this, there are also elegiac reminiscences of her Russian childhood, somber retellings of her two grandmothers’ wartime traumas, and a surreal one hundred-page dream sequence set in a mansion full of Nazi, Soviet, and Jewish symbols. As if this were not enough, Izy and her friends also engage in an almost parodic academic discourse, reaching for the radical gender theorist Beatriz Preciado to debate biological sex (SP, 39–40) and for fringe scientific publications on “polysingularity.” This esoteric concept draws on mathematical theory to posit the simultaneity of multiple potential perspectives on self and the world and the act of transcending the contingency of this multidimensionality by taking a particular path while knowing that innumerable others are equally possible.4The novel cites from a website run by Dmitry Paranyushkin (SP, 195–97), a Russian electronic musician, choreographer, and “network researcher,” living in Paris. See Paranyushkin, “Polysingularity of Itself.”

Underlying Izy’s often dissonant narrative is a tension between infinite possibility and finite actuality, that is, between the lives she could have had and the one that she has in fact lived. The first suggests arbitrariness—being born a Russian and a Jew rather than something else, migrating to Germany rather than the United States or Israel, and partying with chance friends in Berlin—as well as performance: playing at being Russian, Jewish, etc. The second relates to the singular reality that Izy has actually known—how childhood memories resonate; how shared experience draws her to Timur; and how her grandmother’s wartime suffering substantiates a Jewish identity that would otherwise appear as simply a historical accident. Notwithstanding the infinite possibilities of what could have been, then, the life lived generates an emotional investment—nostalgia, perhaps, and an attachment to a particular group and its history—that both undermines performance and places limits on a truly boundaryless “being-in-the-world.”

Izy’s performance is intimated through her profession as a musical director at an experimental theater, where she fends off her boss’s advances, and her sideline as a jazz pianist at company functions. Jazz is improvisational, suggesting her constant adaptation, and as a space of encounter between Black artists and white consumers it is strongly associated with ethnic performance and subalternism.5See Sandke, Where the Dark and Light Folks Meet. (Izy also conducts a form of resistance by riffing on well-known lyrics: “Night and Day = White and Gay . . . Bei There will never be another you das you zu Jew”; SP, 22). In Izy’s case, two ethnic identities are staged—Russian and Jewish—causing consternation for the non-Jewish German majority and adding to her own disorientation. At a party with other Soviet-born migrants, she is Russian for Andreas, who is learning the language and gets an erection when he presses up against her at the bar and when she dances like a drunk Cossack for him (SP, 44–49). There may also be a sly reference to Wladimir Kaminer, the well-known writer, DJ, and consummate “Russian”: “Ah, russischer DJ, war ja klar eigentlich.” (Ah, Russian DJ, was actually pretty obvious; SP, 49.) Izy’s other performance is less accomplished. Unlike her father, she fails to grow into her Jewishness in Germany. Despite his indifference in the Soviet Union, her father now wears a Star of David, speaks of the “Volk der Opfer” (people of victims) and defends customs that he himself ignores (SP, 159–62). (He is also accused of embezzling community funds by other Russian Jews and suffers—paradoxically—their antisemitic slurs; SP, 158–60.) Izy, in contrast, is indifferent, even hostile to Jewish beliefs and rituals: “Wir sind nicht mehr in der Wüste!” (We are no longer in the desert!; SP, 98) She seems to have more in common with Stascha, a borscht-eating colleague who arrived as one of the 2.3 million Russians of German ancestry who immigrated from the mid-1980s, than she does with other Jews, whether newly arrived or settled. In fact, she doesn’t even mention the established Jewish community, and she would no doubt be a sore disappointment for a survivor like Himmelfarb’s Roth.

Izy’s presence in Germany is entirely accidental. Her “stellvertretendes jüdisches Blut” (representative Jewish blood; SP, 98) caused her to be summoned into the land of the perpetrators—ignoring the fact that she is halachically not Jewish at all—and now she is expected to fulfill the role that was assigned to her by her remorse-ridden hosts: “wir sind deine Wiederbesiedlung, Scheinjuden. Juden nach Schein, kommt wieder rein.” (We are your repopulation. Fake Jews. Jews with a document, come back; SP, 69.) She could just as likely have gone to Israel, had her parents not plumped for Germany after 1991. There she might have become a solider in the Israeli Defense Forces, appearing astride a tank in a family photo, and married a fellow Russian immigrant, just like her cousin (SP, 69). Or, following in the footsteps of other Soviet-born Jews, she might have gone to America, to New York. In Israel, it would have been military service “in einem immerwährenden Krieg” (never-ending war). In Brooklyn, she would now be living among Orthodox Jews (SP, 69). Germany is the better destination, on the whole, although she pauses to reflect when she sees armed guards outside one of Berlin’s new Jewish schools, guarding against potential terror attacks: “Vielleicht doch lieber Schläfenlocken und Brooklyn? Oder in Hollywoods Koschernostra.” (Maybe better sidelocks and Brooklyn? Or in Hollywood’s Koscher Nostra; SP, 198). The allusion to the Koscher Nostra—Jewish gangsters in late nineteenth-­century America—invokes the present-day stereotyping of Soviet-born Jews in Germany, of course.6See Metz, Koscher Nostra.

Izy performs Russianness and Jewishness for the German majority, ironically and seemingly resigned to the arbitrariness of identity. Yet her self-staging is repeatedly disrupted by what appear to be more authentic behaviors and emotions. When she visits a café, for example, Izy instinctively orders a “russisches Gedeck” (Russian platter; SP, 9), and she cries when she watches Soviet movies or listens to war hymns with Timur (SP, 69), the on-off lover who embodies home for her: “Mein Stück Heimat. Und ich deins. Wenn wir Russisch miteinander reden, wie eine Geheimsprache.” (My piece of home. And yours. When we speak Russian together, like a secret language; SP, 68.) Similarly, when Izy recalls her Jewish grandmother, her empathy and solidarity are clearly genuine. Ella saw her entire family being killed in an air raid and still insisted on being registered as Jewish in her Soviet papers, aware that Jews were being targeted for extermination by the advancing Nazis and that antisemitism was rife in her socialist motherland too (SP, 27). “Wegen der Familie,” Ella says: “‘Dabei waren alle tot [. . .] Ich bin, wer ich bin,’ sagte sie, und war kaum achtzehn.” (For my family. Yet they were all dead [. . .] I am who I am, she said, barely eighteen; SP, 27.) Izy recalls her grandmother’s decision quite suddenly as she is being driven to Wannsee and in so doing she associates the Holocaust—decided in Wannsee in 1942—with what Ella said about her obligation to remember her parents’ suffering: “Und du siehst an dir herunter, und alles, was du hast, ist das blutverschmierte Sommerkleid. Das Blut deiner jetzt im Graben wie Abfall verschwundenen Eltern trägst du an dir.” (You look down at yourself, and all that you have is the blood-stained summer dress. You’re wearing the blood of your parents, now disappeared into the pit like trash; SP, 27.) Trauma is real, and it is remembered through the generations.

Izy’s fixation on her Russian Jewish past—even if the second element is “only” a Jewish grandmother who insisted on being registered as such—blocks her integration in the present day: “Im Vergangenen leben, obwohl ein neuer Anfang sich dir zu Füßen schmeißt und ‘Nimm mich, nimm mich’ schreit?” (Living in the past, even though a new beginning is throwing itself at your feet and screaming “take me, take me”; SP, 27.) In fact, her fixation on the finite actuality of this history—on its particularity—predicts her narcissistic obsession with Timur, the fellow Soviet-born Jewish migrant whose experience is identical to hers. Their sex involves Izy’s willed submission, a hint of coercion—“Und du kommst hart in mir, als wäre es ein Gewaltakt” (you come inside me, hard, like an act of violence; SP, 142)—and love shaded with sadomasochism: “Und fickst mich wie ein Dämon. Liebesbekungungen.” (And fuck me like a demon. Declarations of love; SP, 143.) There is even a hint of incest, as Izy continues, ironically mixing English and German in a mimicry of biological essentialism: “I’m so fucking related to you. By quality, character. And blood. And Herkunft. And I want my Herkunft to be related to you too” (Herkunft=origins; SP, 235). Yet Timur has moved on. With Izy he indulges his own nostalgia for the past and takes advantage of her vulnerability to satisfy an urge to dominate. For the most part, however, the Russian Jewish migrant spends his time with his independently minded German girlfriend, visiting Izy only when Astrid is in London for business (SP, 117) and periodically emailing to end their affair (SP, 171).

One way out of the paralysis that afflicts Izy might be to transcend the particularity of her Russian Jewish past and to embrace all of humanity in her German present. And indeed, the final one hundred pages or so of the novel seem to dissolve the burden of history and re-signify the formlessness of the present as a boundless, joyous communing with others, as Izy and her friends take up residence in a vast Berlin mansion where they cook, debate, and make love. In the end, however, this lengthy episode is revealed as an illusion—or delusion—elaborated by her unconscious mind as she lies in a coma following a bomb explosion in her train carriage (SP, 172). Islamist terrorism is implied, as is—later in the text—the West’s overreaction in drone attacks from “fernen Aussichtstürmen” (distant observation towers; SP, 232). Rather than an embrace of the world, therefore, Izy’s coma-induced fabulation of togetherness with her Russian and German-majority friends might actually signal a desire to retreat inwards.

In any case, Izy’s cosmopolitan fantasy was always doomed from the start, and always limited to the privileged few. The past still intrudes, initially as a positive memory of Europe’s cultural legacy but then as an adumbration of twentieth-century trauma. Describing the mansion, Izy mentions impressionist and expressionist portraits, Art Deco furniture, an extensive library, echoes of her parents’ Soviet apartment that they somehow transformed into a baroque exhibition, a table from Imperial Russia, a huge mirror in the Parisian style, and a garden room that leads into a painterly landscape of tiger lilies and peonies (SP, 210–11). A mention of swastikas on a Moroccan carpet (SP, 211), however, introduces a jarring note into Izy’s reporting of this pastiche of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artistic movements, by reminding of what came next. The swastika appears in many cultures, of course, but here the allusion is as obvious as it is ominous: “Jede einzelne rote Swastika auf dem schwarzen Grund. Willkommen zu Hause.” (Every single red swastika against the black backdrop. Welcome home; SP, 211.) Home is the Nazi emblem, antisemitism, and genocide, as much as childhood holidays or her grandmother’s wartime trauma, both of which are also invoked earlier in Izy’s coma (SP, 182), when she had imagined the swastika juxtaposed with the Star of David and the Red Star (SP, 186). Even in her delirium, fascism and totalitarianism infect and destroy from within the cosmopolitan potential of the pan-European flourishing of art and culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Power and violence also infuse the intimate relationships between the guests in the present day. Izy’s work colleague Fili kisses her on the mouth in a gesture that signals not affection or even longing but ownership, and perhaps contempt (SP, 217–18). Staggeringly beautiful, Fili is frequently the object of male interest (SP, 39), and as might be predicted, in Izy’s coma-induced fabulation Fili ends up having sex with Timur in the gardens. Izy even colludes in Timur’s domination of the (willing) young German woman. She stands behind him as he penetrates Fili, bites into his neck, becomes one with him—“Wir sind ein Körper, ein Blut, und wir ficken Fili” (we are one body, one blood, and we are fucking Fili; SP, 234)—and presses down on his back as he ejaculates. There is a cosmopolitan fantasy of sorts within Izy’s hallucination, but this is undermined by the scene’s suggestions of aggression and submission, and by Fili’s ultimate triumph in claiming sole possession of Timur: “Sie öffnet ihre Augen, sieht dich an, greift deinen Hals, zieht dich zu sich herunter.” (She opens her eyes, looks at you, grabs your neck, and pulls you down to her; SP, 235.) Izy walks off and consoles herself with the thought that when Timur is kissing Fili, he is actually kissing her, just as she imagines that he is making love to her when he is with Astrid (SP, 236).

Fili is Izy’s opposite. Where Fili is endlessly fluid and mobile, Izy cannot move past her perception of the immutability of who she is. Fili flirts with Izy but Izy is irredeemably heterosexual; Fili’s dressing-up as a man at the mansion, with a drawn-on beard, similarly fails to inspire Izy to break gender norms; and an ensuing conversation, led by Stascha, about the genetic editing-out of Y chromosomes excites Fili but provokes only skepticism on Izy’s part (SP, 221–22). Most revealing is Izy’s abrupt dismissal of Fili’s utopianism during an earlier conversation about the reconfiguration of desire to eliminate power imbalances. Fili cites the theorist Beatriz Preciado, who speculates that it would be possible to focus sex on the anus so as to equalize who penetrates whom. This provokes Izy to ask whether women would then need to grow an oversized clitoris “zum da Reinpenetrieren? In den Anus? Als Penisgegenstück.” (To penetrate there. In the anus. As a counterpart to the penis; SP, 40.) Here and more generally, Izy’s point seems to be that there are limits to how far we can reinvent ourselves. At the (imagined) mansion, Izy asks Timur whether, if she were a man, he would perform oral sex on her. He politely declines—he desires Izy as a woman only—though Fili once again persists in her undifferentiated idealism: “‘Ich fick alles!’, sagt Fili, ‘sind doch nur Quanten.’” (“I fuck everything!,” Fili says; “it’s just quanta”; SP, 245.)

In their delirium, Izy’s friends imagine a new world order in which there is no hate, desire is ever-changing and gender mutable, genes mix, languages merge, and human beings have no limits: “In der neuen Weltordnung ist der Mensch grenzenlos!” (In the new world order humankind is without boundaries!; SP, 239–41.) In reality, however, the polysingularity that they aspire to—a “Multiversum” of parallel possibilities, as her German friend Len describes it (SP, 242–43)—is an abstraction that is contradicted by the particularities of biography and personality. Fili has a penchant for mutilating the corpses of dead animals (an activity that Izy joins her in), in Izy’s dream sequence at least, and she enjoys staging a photograph in the mansion’s drawing room in which Izy lies mortally wounded by a knife in a pool of her own blood on the swastika-adorned carpet (SP, 251). At best, Fili’s norm-breaking is a pose, or a work of art, like a second, equally stylized image featuring the entire group naked in the garden, with Len and Timur hiding their penises with commedia dell’arte masks (SP, 251). At worst, it masks a perverse fascination with death and violence that—especially when it involves a German, a Jew, and a “Hitlerteppich” (Hitler carpet)—may even suggest an urge to eradicate “otherness.” One version of the new world order would be a forced uniformity in which difference, specificity, and even memory had been erased.

Izy, in sum, is unable to transcend the finite actuality of the life she has lived and inhabit the cosmopolitan delusion that her German-majority friends embrace. At the same time, her fixation on her Russian Jewish past, and on the suffering visited on her grandmother by Nazi and Soviet regimes, may immunize her against utopian fantasies, and worse. Certainly, Izy’s focus on the real—on history, trauma, and memory—deflates a universalism that is entirely performative, self-indulgent, and even totalitarian. Arguably, this is the worldly self-possession of the white, Western elite, as elaborated in a mansion in Berlin filled with the detritus of European civilization and its phantasmagoria of global domination.

Yet Izy also seems unable to demonstrate a more authentic solidarity with the foreigners, refugees, homeless people, and gypsies that might be expected of the Russian Jewish migrant as she wanders through Berlin. These minorities inhabit the margins of a narrative that is primarily focused on Izy, other Russians, and their German-majority fellow partygoers, and it is striking that Izy refuses their attempts to make common cause with her and even descends into racist stereotypes. For example, she rails against a Turkish (or Iranian . . .) waiter’s use of the informal form of address, objecting to the implication that they are “Verbündete” (allies; SP, 15). Later, she imagines advising her future child not to confess to being Jewish in front of Muslim classmates (SP, 77); and, in a café in the Turkish district of Kreuzberg, Izy and Timur declare: “Wir sind hier nicht im Orient, Liebster, auch wenn es so aussieht manchmal.” (We’re not in the orient, dearest, even if it looks like it sometimes; SP, 125.) Finally, at the same party at which she dances “like a Russian” for the German Andreas, she imagines touching an enticingly slim Iranian girl between the legs. “Du kleines geiles Ding” (you horny little thing; SP, 51), she murmurs, with orientalizing prejudice. Even when Izy does attempt solidarity, in fact, she either fails to connect or is refused. She watches a gypsy family playing ethnic music, for instance, and declares (to herself) that she is one of them—“Ich bin auch ein Zigeuner, eine Heimatlose, Zugezogene” (I am also a gypsy, without a home, an immigrant; SP, 69)—but the child collecting tips ignores her offering. Likewise, she walks past homeless people but is unable to speak to them, and she rues the fact that the food she eats mostly likely comes from the same countries as the refugees struggling to reach Europe and Germany but, again, fails to act (SP, 71). Izy’s situation is quite different, of course. She is “quotenjüdisch” (a quota Jew; SP, 69), as she puts, it, and as such relatively welcome in Germany, fluent in the language, and, above all, white.

In the end, Izy is too fixated on her Russian Jewish past to fully align with the German majority but also too privileged to relate to other minorities, or even to refrain from racism. In any case, she seems unable to adopt a universalist perspective: having a single Jewish grandmother who fled the Nazis and endured Soviet antisemitism is enough to prompt Izy to position herself as Jewish—even with “only” a Jewish father and notwithstanding the arbitrariness of her presence in Germany—but insufficient to generate solidarity with those who are victimized in the present day. A similar parochialism characterizes Arthur in Himmelfarb’s Sterndeutung, of course, as discussed in chapter 1. In chapter 3, Salzmann’s Außer sich (Besides oneself; 2017) and Grjasnowa’s Der verlorene Sohn are analyzed as attempts to resolve this tension between Jewish particularism (and privilege) and Jewish universalism, although at the risk of dissolving Jewishness altogether. For now, however, we turn to Mirna Funk’s Winternähe, in which another—this time German-born—protagonist with “only” a Jewish father appears to succeed where Izy fails and articulates not one but two versions of Jewish worldliness. Neither, however, fully resolves her fragile identity.