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| ‘It’s a confession’ … Katharina Volckmer. Photograph: Liz Seabrook |
Katharina Volckmer: 'Germans say they've dealt with their past. But I don’t think you can'
The Appointment’s darkly funny untangling of national and sexual identity has not been published in the author’s home country – yet. But she wants to break the awkward silence over German history
Elle HuntThursday 3 September 2020
The subtitle of Katharina Volckmer’s debut novel is revealed only on the title page: “The Appointment (Or, The Story of a Cock)”. In the US edition, it’s a “Jewish Cock”. Volckmer has said the subheading was kept off the cover “as a surprise” – making it the first of many unsteadying gear shifts in a monologue that sets out to unsettle.
In a plush private practice in London, one Dr Seligman examines a new patient, a young German woman who has recently come into some money. The Appointment follows her intimate confession as she unburdens herself to the physician – about her obsession with Hitler, her outré sexual fantasies (often involving Hitler), and the multifaceted shame she feels as a woman, as a daughter, and as a German.
In particular, the unnamed narrator expresses disdain for “that strange German silence” that persists over the Holocaust, as well as her disgust for her female body and the need to always have to “play the part of a woman”. These two strands intersect as she grapples with the end of a love affair, questions of whether her future is fixed and if she can make peace with her past.
“When I was younger I always thought that the only way to truly overcome the Holocaust would be to love a Jew,” she tells the silent Dr Seligman.
The narrator veers from the sexual to the shocking to the mundane in the space of paragraphs, seeming to dare the reader to hold their nerve. Some will balk. One online reviewer likened the experience of reading The Appointment to being flashed during an academic lecture. But this belies how wickedly funny the novel can be, its finely drawn observations of modern life, and Volckmer’s command of the emotional register.
For all its talk of sex and Nazis, she says when we meet at a cafe in London, “really, it’s about identity”. As the nature of the appointment – and the windfall that made it possible – gradually becomes clear, some of the narrator’s bitterness and bluster gives way to reveal her deep-seated insecurity. “It’s a confession,” says Volckmer, and Dr Seligman is “the perfect confessor” – not least because he is Jewish.
The tension inherent to that dynamic, writ large in the German national identity, is exploded by doctor-patient privilege – creating a rare space, Volckmer says, for a “open conversation” about the Holocaust that modern Germany is still deeply averse to having. Volckmer was born there in 1987, but left aged 19 to study languages in London. She now works in the foreign rights department at the literary agency RCW. “I guess every country has its silences, but in Germany I always found it quite uncomfortable.”
It is telling that Volckmer has not yet secured a publisher prepared to translate and publish The Appointment in her homeland. The initial response was “quite scandalised”, she says. “They say it’s too radical, it’s vulgar … They just felt deeply uncomfortable. I think they were worried that it would be a scandal.” And Volckmer agrees that it could be: “With a book like this, you’re treading a very fine line. You have to respect people’s pain.”
But, too often, respect does not go beyond silence, she says: “I think you can go a step further, if you respect certain boundaries.” Her narrator’s shame worked as a guiding principle by which to push the limits of taste and direct her early rancour towards worthy targets.
The surrealism of The Appointment, and its sacrosanct setting in an examination room – and the woman’s self-confessed tendency to deliberately wind people up, casting doubt on whether she really means the outrageous things she says – also disarms those readers who might be inclined to judgment. It is hard to take at face value a narrator who heaps scorn on her country as much for its failed fascism as its food. “You know that horrible bread we eat and tell everyone about, like some sort of self-perpetuating myth?” she rails, to the doctor. “I think it’s a punishment from God for all the crimes we have committed.”
In starting to write The Appointment two years ago, Volckmer set herself an upper limit (“pedantic German that I am”) of 30,000 words: the narrative voice is so intense, she says, much more than that “would be horrible”. But even at 112 pages, some readers have admitted to finding The Appointment overwhelming, says Volckmer – or, in one case, “very European”. Volckmer was inspired by Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, whose narrators’ darkly comic rants were also read as a critique of his national identity. But the most obvious structural parallel is Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth – another monologue delivered in a consulting room that Volckmer admits to finding hysterically funny, for all its contemporary incorrectness.
Volckmer maintains that she did not set out to shock with The Appointment – “I never thought that it would get published” – but says writing in English, her second language, may have contributed to it having that effect. “I think you probably take greater liberties. When Freud wanted to say something rude, he would say it in French.” She could not have written it in German, she says, when distance is key to the narrator’s perspective; to criticise her country in its own tongue would have struck too close to home, if there is even the language to express it. “That’s another argument that the German editors used,” says Volckmer. “It wouldn’t work in German, it wouldn’t be funny.”
To Volckmer, the resistance just proves her point that Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or reckoning with its own history, has concluded in an uncomfortable silence. As her narrator tells Dr Seligman: “We sang in Hebrew to make sure that we remained de-Nazified and full of respect. But we never mourned; if anything, we performed a new version of ourselves, hysterically non-racist in any direction and negating difference wherever possible.”
Volckmer says Germans still “just freeze” at the mention of the Holocaust, its horrors flattened into their Hollywood treatments. “It’s a story they tell themselves, that they have dealt with their past, but I don’t think that’s a thing you can do.” Meanwhile, contemporary Jewish culture remains marginalised, and antisemitic hate crime is on the rise. Volckmer believes awkwardness has led to complacency, allowing such a threat to grow: “I think they are silent about the continuities, the resurgence of neo-fascism in Germany. They have turned a blind eye – now it’s a huge problem.” Nine people were killed by a far-right gunman in Hanau in February – but it prompted none of the national outcry that Black Lives Matter did, Volckmer notes.
In its relentless tackling of taboos, The Appointment punctures the silence – often with uncomfortable laughter. “Sometimes I think the humour is more shocking,” says Volckmer. Readers have told her of finding it funny despite themselves. “Then they stopped and said, ‘Oh my god – actually, it’s not that funny…’” But in never pulling its punches, The Appointment reveals which walls we erect around ourselves are set in stone – and which may bend rather than break.
Volckmer was sensitive to how the book would be perceived by Jewish readers but has had only positive feedback so far – “The Appointment succeeds in justifying its obscenities,” wrote Joshua Cohen, author of The Book of Numbers. Instead, the pushback has been from gentile Germans resistant to its irreverent invocation of the Holocaust as one topic among many, with the combination of genocide and genitals wrinkling some noses.
“They think it’s vulgar to bring your body into a discussion about the Holocaust, because it should be the main topic – these things can’t be mixed,” says Volckmer. Ironically it is The Appointment’s exploration of non-binary identity that may prove more controversial in the UK, where trans people are frequently subjects of a national debate that Volckmer describes as “quite bizarre”. She believes gender essentialism omits a world of difference, and to everyone’s disadvantage: “There is so little respect for the experience [trans] people are having. We seem to think there’s only A and B, but there’s a lot in between, and I think it’s unhelpful to be so limiting.”
As her narrator says: “It just took me so long to understand my desires, to understand that I was forever one step removed from fulfilling them … Because I couldn’t see these boys with a girl’s eyes.” Though she calls her novel too absurd to reflect reality, Volckmer hopes that it might encourage readers to look beyond binaries: “We use gender to make sense of the world, but if you let go of that, you gain a lot. I think people are always worried they’ll lose something … but it limits men and women in many ways.”
It is through the narrator’s readiness to provoke confrontation and push past her shame that she eventually finds some peace. “Please don’t think that I am a sociopath, Dr Seligman,” she says. “I know that we need illusions, but sometimes I think we shouldn’t be so scared of the truth.”
Of course, not everyone wants to hear it. A German publisher has now expressed interest in taking on The Appointment, but Volckmer wants them to be aware of the storm it may provoke in translation. “It’s not something I particularly look forward to, publishing the book in Germany – but then I guess it would be also cowardly to say no.”
The Appointment is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (£9.99).
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