Sleights of Hand

Let me begin with a biographical detail that also marks a historical event: in the year 1284, the chronicle reports that a man now known worldwide as the Pied Piper—in German der Rattenfänger, the rat-catcher—was cheated out of his pay when he rid the town of its rats. So he abducted all the children of Hamelin, city of my birth. To this day research has failed to determine what became of them. Only two children, one blind and the other lame, remained behind. They weren’t fast enough to keep up with the piper. They were the only witnesses to a disappearance that in my hometown remains foundationally tragic. In my most recent book, Hoppe, a fictional autobiography, the story has a different spin, as the tale of a beginning: “For if the Piper hadn’t taken them,” it says there, “then they’d still be sitting in Hamelin and wouldn’t know what to do with themselves.”

Presumably this is why I became a traveling writer who, like many of her trade, pursued a study of German literature along the way. My studies concluded not with a German but with an American degree in 1985 at the University of Oregon in Eugene, “out with the lumberjacks” as a colleague in Tübingen somewhat dryly observed at the time. The American immigration official turned that barb around when, after looking through my documentation, he asked: “Don’t you have good universities over there anymore?”

I do not remember how I answered, but I do know that the exploration of German literature on the West Coast of North America certainly shaped and put in perspective my view of that literature. It makes a big difference whether you discuss German authors with people whose mother tongue is German or with professors and students for whom the language is foreign. German literature “abroad” is, like every journey, a matter of both gain and loss: gain, because of the distance and fresh air; loss, because the gain is achieved at the cost of immediacy and connectedness.

My first seminar paper in the Department of German—which puts me in the middle of my topic—concerned Heinrich von Kleist’s earliest drama, Die Familie Schroffenstein. Its author designated its genre as Ein Trauerspiel. Its final lines go like this: “Away, old witch, away. Your sleight of hand is nimble, I am satisfied with the play. Away.”