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Der Neger Jupiter raubt Europa
Audio Cassette
First published January 1, 1987
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October 31, 2019
It's 1926 and the title has the word 'negro' in it. (English translation: The Negro Jupiter steals / rapes Europe. And the initial pages certainly confirm that racism will be here in this book. Incidentally, racism was also there in my 1987 [!] dtv edition that thought to market the book with this excerpt as its only blurb on the back cover:
"O, er kannte sie, die Neugierde der weißen Frauen! Er konnte wohl im Abendlande studieren, Ämter bekleiden, Sitten annhemen, er war doch nur geschminkt mit europäischer Kultur, sie ging ihm nicht ins Blut hinein. Irgendwie blieb er ein Wilder, ein Heide, ein Kannibale. Wie sie ihn beschnuppert hatte, diese blonde Frau! O, seine fünf Sinne waren noch animalisch stark, er hatte es beinahe gehört, wie sie die Nasenflügel auftat, um wie ein junger Hase seinen Geruch einzuziehen..."
"O, he knew it, the curiosity of white women! It was all very well that he had studied at university in the Occident, that he was in office, that he adopted manners; European culture was still mere make-up for him, it didn't enter his bloodstream. Somewhere he stayed a savage, a heathen, a cannibal. How she had sniffed at him, this blonde woman! O, his five senses were still animalistically strong, he had almost heard how she opened her nostrils in order to draw in his smell like a young rabbit..."
This paragraph shows you the ideology here but also the power of Goll's Expressionist prose. I'd read her poetry before and was struck by the force of her language, and she translates some of this into this novel.
Reading it historically, the novel also operates as an expression of what white people thought of black people in 1920s Europe. Goll left Berlin for Paris in the wake of the first world war, and she interestingly sets her love story in France, a colonial country. Marcia Klotz called Weimar Germany a 'post-colonial state in a still-colonial world'; this makes for a difference in the way Germans viewed non-Europeans from how colonial nations like the British, the French, the Dutch, the Spanish or the Portuguese viewed non-Europeans. Africans, specifically, had a particular fascination for Germans -- but for that matter, for all European avant-garde artists who loved African masks (looted from colonies for European collections) and African-coded jazz and dance. This novel fits into this whole discourse, with its exoticisation of the black man for whom civilisation (coded as European) is but a veneer and whose authentic wildness will rise to the surface. The only literary model seems to have been jealous Othello. Then there are absurdities of the black man leaving black fingerprints on a white handkerchief (what even).
The stereotyping is interesting historically but galled me as a present-day reader. For all that, however, if you subtract the racism, the dissection of And some of the painful sentiments are the actual pain of a black person trying to make his way in a white context, trying to assimilate. But, of course, this is far from #ownvoice.
"O, er kannte sie, die Neugierde der weißen Frauen! Er konnte wohl im Abendlande studieren, Ämter bekleiden, Sitten annhemen, er war doch nur geschminkt mit europäischer Kultur, sie ging ihm nicht ins Blut hinein. Irgendwie blieb er ein Wilder, ein Heide, ein Kannibale. Wie sie ihn beschnuppert hatte, diese blonde Frau! O, seine fünf Sinne waren noch animalisch stark, er hatte es beinahe gehört, wie sie die Nasenflügel auftat, um wie ein junger Hase seinen Geruch einzuziehen..."
"O, he knew it, the curiosity of white women! It was all very well that he had studied at university in the Occident, that he was in office, that he adopted manners; European culture was still mere make-up for him, it didn't enter his bloodstream. Somewhere he stayed a savage, a heathen, a cannibal. How she had sniffed at him, this blonde woman! O, his five senses were still animalistically strong, he had almost heard how she opened her nostrils in order to draw in his smell like a young rabbit..."
This paragraph shows you the ideology here but also the power of Goll's Expressionist prose. I'd read her poetry before and was struck by the force of her language, and she translates some of this into this novel.
Reading it historically, the novel also operates as an expression of what white people thought of black people in 1920s Europe. Goll left Berlin for Paris in the wake of the first world war, and she interestingly sets her love story in France, a colonial country. Marcia Klotz called Weimar Germany a 'post-colonial state in a still-colonial world'; this makes for a difference in the way Germans viewed non-Europeans from how colonial nations like the British, the French, the Dutch, the Spanish or the Portuguese viewed non-Europeans. Africans, specifically, had a particular fascination for Germans -- but for that matter, for all European avant-garde artists who loved African masks (looted from colonies for European collections) and African-coded jazz and dance. This novel fits into this whole discourse, with its exoticisation of the black man for whom civilisation (coded as European) is but a veneer and whose authentic wildness will rise to the surface. The only literary model seems to have been jealous Othello. Then there are absurdities of the black man leaving black fingerprints on a white handkerchief (what even).
The stereotyping is interesting historically but galled me as a present-day reader. For all that, however, if you subtract the racism, the dissection of And some of the painful sentiments are the actual pain of a black person trying to make his way in a white context, trying to assimilate. But, of course, this is far from #ownvoice.
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