Born in the East (Magdeburg) in 1960, and smuggled, ninety miles away, into the West (Hanover) as a six-year-old, Schernikau was always already an interloper, the circumstances of his childhood prefiguring his ability, in literature and life, to destabilize borders and their production of in and out, either/or securities. Likewise, b is effervescent, variable, a floating signifier, a roving camera that, as narrator, not only captures people’s resemblances but registers their interiorities; “is it obvious when b’s gaze follows people around the school yard? there goes leif, under his gaze. how does it seem to someone who’s watching? pathetic? cheesy?” Schernikau’s b is both the gaze and the look reflected back upon the voyeur, and also the bystander filming, producing an archive of non-encounters. Is this not so often the case for those of us who have had to love in secret and thus to never be for the world who we are to ourselves? “[B] sometimes fantasizes about picking a boy, going up to him, embracing him, kissing, smiling at him afterwards. so far he’s never done it and yet has done it countless times. i exist, b thinks, when a passersby’s gaze lingers on him.” Schernikau’s fugitive narration elucidates what it feels like to want to be invisible to others with the knowledge that one’s existence requires, nevertheless, being looked at. When the actual moment of physical consummation occurs in a string of yearnful scenarios, it’s singular; the narrative briefly explodes; the personal determiner leaks out—it’s stunning, it’s beautiful, it’s painful, it’s too short-lived:
love, whatever that is: leif has tried it, and gave in when b touched him. the room in berlin after breakfast was filled with the two of them when they embraced. they didn’t know what was happening, were both speechless and lost and very close. they went downstairs to the others in silence, separated from them by an experience which they tried to repeat for weeks: the experience of another. what eyelashes can be, a look and eyes closing, chapped lips on my skin. then, calm below, the feeling of being known. the desire to say: my love! darling.
Not a page later, still inside and outside leif, b’s narrative also zooms out, characteristic of the text’s threading of social commentary, poetry, philosophy, and narrative exposition, an elasticity and expansiveness that adjusts the dimensions of novella to the absorbent corridors of the notebook:
what’s left are a few moments, a slap in the face. no support, hoping, tenderness, fighting. just smile. leif doesn’t even get to experience everyday squabbles with b; they are never considered a couple like babsi and roland, sebastian and magdalena, aki and tita. leif and b won’t get around to savoring their difficulties. for that, they would have to come out in the open, not stay apart at all costs; they would have to feel for the other’s hand not just in private, would have to be able to laugh at the stares, laugh together, kiss in the movie theater, not care, be confident, say: my boyfriend. here is where the first endurance test begins, not in the no-entry-zone of b’s childhood bedroom. the fact that they can’t bear each other’s caresses even here shows how far the contempt of the human race extends—into people themselves. who wants to dance with me? you decide. happiness doesn’t come for free, happiness still has to be fought for: we know this. … i love myself, i hate myself, i’m waking up.
I want to linger on these two moments, set in such close proximity as they are in SMALLTOWNNOVELLA, because together they represent both glimmers of resistance and, ultimately, the failure of the systems to which we belong and that we reproduce, daily, in turn; b’s vulnerable, poignant acknowledgment here limns the book’s broader denunciation on the usual order of business, the twinning of desire and violence, social and political orders, the impotence of education and its machinations as a protonationalist engine, and most of all, the society of a free world that teaches us to hate ourselves. It is not incidental that, forty-five years after Schernikau’s book debuted in West Germany, and thirty-four years after his passing of AIDS in 1991, the US’s National Endowment for the Arts began terminating many existing and previously committed grant awards, including creative writing fellowships and programs for underserved communities, in order to align with the new presidential administration’s priorities, which currently include celebrating American independence, supporting military causes, and fostering AI competency. It is not incidental that humanities departments across the country are today being wiped from institutional budgets by third-party consultants, a solution for the problem of a decline in growth created by the preexisting cutting of courses, the diminishment of programming for students, and the hiring freeze of faculty to teach them; one hand washes the sins of the other until what’s resolved is wiped clean; things and people disappear. “[N]othing,” b inwardly remarks, “is more self-destructive than the patriarchy ridiculing the conditions it has produced.” And later: “so, it’s a fight against mockery for failure, against being written off; don’t stand out, take minutes, and learn by rote. it’s indoctrination through inhumanity, perfection enhanced by the experience of the rapist.”
What’s at stake is not just the past and the present or even the future but their interactivity; the hypostatic charge of education as the transmission of knowledge across generations. Schernikau knew this well before he died, though he continued fighting for it even as he was dying. Reading SMALLTOWNNOVELLA with the knowledge that the life of its once-wunderkind author (the first edition of Kleinstadtnovelle went out of print a few days after its publication, though much of Schernikau’s later work was unpublishable in East Germany as well as the West, and remained untranslated and largely unfamiliar to readers outside of the newly reunified German state years after he died) was mercilessly cut short reminds us that any idea about a past that never fully came to be is also a vision of a possible future; that to lose something and someone in the present is yet to find the possibility of their undefeatable reconnection to the horizon, activated by the outstretched circuits of such cultural forms that shape our understanding of the new when glimpsed as the flipside of the unknown; what, in the end and at the very beginning, is made possible as a vector of change.