Losing His Religion: Hans im Unglück

Iris Hanika's satirical novelDas Eigentliche (Authenticity, 2010) announces the decline of the project of Vergangenheitsbewältigung and the demise of the melancholy genius of ethical memory. An employee of the “Zentrum für Vergangenheitsbewirtschaftung” (Center for the Management of the Past), the main protagonist, Hans Frambach, has fallen prey to the affliction of acedia, the hermit's melancholy of early Christian monasticism that in the Middle Ages became one of the Seven Cardinal Sins. Reviled by the extent to which the once noble project of Vergangenheitsbewältigung has been degraded in the Berlin Republic to “Shoah business,” Frambach tells his only friend, the lumbering, lovelorn Graziela, that his particular acedia is not of a theological nature (DE, 123). Rather, he has lost his ability to extract joy from the good works of Vergangenheitsbewirtschaftung because this project, established, politically correct, and in unified Germany readily financed, has become separated from authentic feeling and ethical memory.

The title of the novel, Das Eigentliche, announces this disaffection because it plays on Theodor W. Adorno's critical essay concerning the jargon of authenticity (“Jargon der Eigentlichkeit”). In this essay Adorno criticizes the ideology of authenticity that prevails in ontological philosophy of the twentieth century. In his view, the work of Heidegger and others gives voice to a philosophy of private virtues, authenticity, and inwardness that are presented in the guise of public virtue and political action. “Jargon” is a particularly strong kind of identity thinking in Adorno's view, a reified mentality that tries to press difference into uniformity. Jargon manifests itself in language through the choice of words that reinforce an ideology of universal humanity.