The Reconciliatory Potential of Objects in Stefan Chwin’s novel Death in Danzig

Abstract

This article examines the artistic rendering of post-German objects in Stefan Chwin’s 1995 novel Hanemann [Death in Danzig] through the lens of new materialism theories. In his depiction of the historical transformation of Danzig/Gdansk from a German to a Polish city Chwin applies two strategies: he centers portions of the narrative on objects and human-object entanglements and employs an imaginative child’s perspective which tends to view reality in animistic terms. In utilizing these narrative strategies, Chwin’s novel resonates with the works of the key representatives of the field of new materialism (e.g., Jane Bennett, Stacy Alaimo and Donna Haraway). More specifically, their similarity lies in the employment of anthropomorphism to open human perception to a whole world of unnoticed activities and processes of the nonhuman that resemble those of the human. In the concrete context of post-World War II forced migrations, the writer presents both the displaced Germans and Poles—as well as the German material possessions— as active entities, who come into contact with each other with loosened, uncertain identities. The affects that the humans and the objects discharge or respond to involve them in mutually transformative relations. Thus, I argue that seen through the non-dualist and non-hierarchical ontology of new materialism, the human-object relations in Chwin’s novel reveal the reconciliatory potential of materiality, in particular its ability to level hierarchies and soothe animosity.