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Speaker(s): Lilla Balint

For Kathrin Röggla, the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the financial crisis in 2008 was marked by an ideological, political, and cultural inertia. Taking Röggla’s remarks on the (im)possibility of narrative action under these conditions of stasis as its starting point, my talk explores narrative motion in her experimental documentary novel wir schlafen nicht (2004). Commonly read as a text about managerial discourse, what the book calls “bwler-deutsch,” I expose an unexamined aspect to argue that wir schlafen nicht renders the new economy on the rhythmic level as two contrastive motional forces: while the fast speech of the protagonists performs their restlessness (echoing economic productivity), the figures themselves remain stuck in the ever-same patterns of thought and speech. Building on this argument based on a close reading of the text, the second part of my talk zooms out to reveal the ways in which wir schlafen nicht, and Röggla’s oeuvre more broadly, reflects on and negotiates the place of literature vis-à-vis the economization of language and the social.
 
Lilla Balint received her Ph.D. in German Studies from ������ý in 2014, where she was recipient of the Ric Weiland Graduate Student Fellowship and ������ý’s Centennial Teaching Award (2012). Before returning to California to join UC Berkeley, she held appointments at Vanderbilt University and Hamilton College. Since 2018, Balint is Assistant Professor of German in the Department of German at University of California, Berkeley. At UC Berkeley, she is affiliated with the Institute for European Studies and the Jewish Studies Program. Currently, she is at work on a book manuscript, “Ruins of Utopia: History, Memory, and the Novel after 1989,” that exposes the afterlife of socialism in contemporary literature. This comparative and multilingual study puts authors from Central Europe in dialogue to investigate how historical fiction after 1989 reconstructs the Cold War East. Her other main research project is an exploration of contemporary work through its artistic renderings, both in analogue and digital formats. Part of this project was the international conference “Arbeit 2000,” which Balint co-organized with Heide Volkening at the Alfried-Krupp-Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald.