Erasing the Past: the Ultimate Escape
The end of Christian Kracht’s “Faserland” portrays a feeling of escape. The main character talks about telling Germany’s story to his unborn children as a way to escape the past and make it no longer exhist. He longs for a future so far away that telling these stories may not even be worth anything because his children will have no idea that this Germany actually occurred. I do not agree with a lot of the things this main character does and thinks, and this is one of them.
I think choosing to forget the past is a dangerous thing. Yes, history repeats itself; however, by remember what has occured before us, society can at least make an attempt to prevent tragedies from happening again. Without remembering wars and death, how can society not only correct its mistakes, but also honor those who were lost along the way?
The Wende signifies the complete transition from socialist rule to the German Democratic Republic. “Faserland” appeals to a contempory German audience whose parents and grandparents grew up during the time of the Berlin Wall, and they may inditify with our narrator’s longing to forget this time and this pain.
On a personal level, I can understand why the narrator may want to forget certain aspects of his own life; pooping the bed at my girlfriend’s house would not be on my top 10 hits either. The narrator has already chosen to erase certain portions of his life. For example, the reader never gets any insight into the main character’s relationship with his family, so one can only assume that his childhood may have been a traumatic time for him.
According to the Stop It Now organization (a group dedicated to protecting children from abuse,) the narrator exhibits many signs of child abuse, such as soiling his bed and “fear of intimacy or closeness.” He also seems very “distracted or distant at odd times.” When he was talking about how much he liked Karen, he also noted that she had nothing worth while to say, which is a weird thing to think about a person that you have serious feelings for. Throughout the book, he was constantly distracted with how people looked and could not pay attention to what his friends were saying/doing.
I think the narrator wishes either Germany never existed or that he want’s to move so far into the future that he does not remember it. This could be an attempt to erase his entire past, so that he does not have to confront his trauma. The main character has a history of running away whenever he has to confront an embarassing or potentially sexual situation, and this would be the ultimate escape resulting in the ultimate freedom.
