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Wolfgang Müller-Funk
The Architecture of Modern Culture
Culture & Conflict
Edited by 
Isabel Capeloa Gil and Catherine Nesci
Volume 3
Wolfgang Müller-Funk
The Architecture of 
Modern Culture
Towards a Narrative Cultural Theory
ISBN 978-3-11-028288-7
e-ISBN 978-3-11-028305-1
ISSN 2194-7104
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Cover image: “Umbruch” from the “teheran series” (with many thanks to the Austrian embassy 
in Teheran). © 2011 by Sabine Müller-Funk. www.sabine.mueller-funk.com 
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Dedicated to my Drosendorf seminar students
Preface
These collected essays bring together important issues arising from my work over 
the last decade on cultural analysis and cultural studies and are presented here 
for the first time to an English-speaking audience. As in my German books Die 
Kultur und ihre Narrative (Culture and its Narratives) and Kulturtheorie (Theory 
of Culture), the first section of the volume contains essays in which narratology 
is understood and developed as a key concept of and a central approach to cul-
tural analysis. This section includes texts on the relations between narrating and 
remembering and the function of narratives for the construction of individual and 
collective identity. It also contains an essay that further develops my concepts of 
hidden narratives. 
Looking at a more systematic issue in cultural theory that goes hand in hand 
with the so-called “turns” (the spatial turn, the performative turn), the book 
develops the idea of a narrative theory of culture that is no longer exclusively 
a narratology in the sense of a standard theory of literature. On the one hand, 
it can be shown that narratives have both a spatial and a performative aspect. 
The characters in a story all act in and on certain places and are, at the same 
time, actors. On the other hand, formulating a narrative cultural theory makes 
it possible to correct the lopsidedness of contemporary cultural theories that are 
based only on concepts of space or performance. For example, many traditional 
theories of memory, since Saint Augustine, are obsessed with the spatial aspect, 
corresponding with the idea of storing and places of memory. With a narrative 
theory of remembering (see chapter three) it is possible to develop the idea that 
remembering is a never-ending process that includes processes of re-narrating 
and changes of identities. Mikhail Bakhtin did not develop the idea of chronoto-
pos in a systematic way, but used it rather in a metaphorical sense; nevertheless, 
I think that his idea of a time in space that integrates both elements into a new 
single element is still extraordinarily important for a narrative cultural theory, 
combining the spatial aspect (“globalisation”) with the temporal one (modernity, 
modernism).
Narrative, like music, is based on time, and time remains a very important 
factor in the era of globalisation. It is the doubled and broken time of the narra-
tive (the time of storytelling, the time of events that is expressed by the process of 
storytelling) that creates continuity and identity, a relative stability of symbolic 
order, and change in constancy (and vice versa). Certain features and structures 
are present in central elements of what we call culture (or Culture) narrative: 
for example in creating values, in remembering and recollecting, in construct-
ing identity, and in constructing meaning. As opposed to (Foucauldian or non-
Foucauldian) discourse, narrative always entails a reference to the Lebenswelt. It 
VIII   Preface
creates empathy and integrates our body into the process of constructing a sym-
bolic world. Narrative is a very powerful– maybe even the most powerful – sym-
bolic “weapon” in structuring a world that is always, in the end, a cultural one. 
Extending and deepening central theses from the book Die Kultur und ihre Nar-
rative (Müller-Funk 2002/2008), I argue that such a narrative theory is not only 
broader than standard theories of literature because it also refers to film, visual 
arts and new media (including computer games), but is also an important part of 
cultural theory, because it analyses the function of narrative for the construction 
of the symbolic order we call culture.
The second and the third parts of the book should be read as adaptations of 
the first, theoretical part. Part 2 (Space, Time and the Global) deals with important 
questions of contemporary cultural analysis such as translation, time and space, 
and globalisation. The central idea is the notion of an exemplary and, at the same 
time, fragmentary contribution to relevant aspects of modern culture from a nar-
rative perspective. Part 3, The Heritage of Classical Modernism, is a collection of 
close readings of (Austrian) modernist authors such as Robert Musil, Hermann 
Broch and Elias Canetti, whose oeuvre can be read as cultural analysis in the 
medium and form of literature. What I am interested in is the question of how far 
the dialogue about modernity and modernism can be related to the mainstream 
discourse in contemporary cultural studies, which very often operates on a syn-
chronic level. In a narrative theory of culture, a historical and temporal element 
automatically comes into play: the question of how to tell the story about modern-
ism and its transfer in a globalised world. This is a topic that runs through each 
of the chapters of parts two and three, for example in the study of the work of the 
Japanese artist On Kawara.
In contrast to philology, the works of these and other authors are analysed 
in contributions to cultural analysis. As in my book on “Essayism” (Müller-Funk 
1995), I read The Man without Qualities as a cultural analysis in a literary form. 
The same can be said of Canetti’s ambitious essay on power and the crowd. In the 
essays on Lenau and Kafka, I connect theories of stereotype (the Aachen School, 
Homi Bhabha) with a narrative approach; clearly stereotypes are based on certain 
narratives in which symbolic positions are fixed. In this respect, the structure of 
the book works as a network. I hope that all the essays in this book can be linked 
to one another, as is the case in a network structure. 
This is a book written by a German native speaker, who has received profes-
sional support by English native speakers. Following Benjamin’s idea of transla-
tion, I did not want to extinguish the traces of German language and Austrian 
culture. These “strange” elements will be noticeable in the English text. What I 
have in mind is that this book should be part of a cultural transfer, in a double 
sense. Without my academic years in Birmingham (UK), I would never have 
 Preface   IX
written this book. So it represents a transfer from the English-speaking world to 
the German-speaking one. But at the same time it is a journey from Austria to the 
English-speaking “continents”.
Among many others, I have to thank especially Chris Barber, Michael 
Böhringer, Malcolm Spencer and Joanna White for correcting individual texts. My 
colleague John Heath read the whole manuscript and also provided a great deal of 
help in giving the book a consistent style. My theory seminars with my academic 
PhD “team” – Lena Brandauer, Daniel Bitouh, Daniela Finzi, Nicole Kandioler, 
Ursula Knoll, Gerald Lind, Emilija Mancic, Matthias Schmidt, Gottfried Schnödl, 
Eva Schörkhuber, Alexander Sprung and others – have always been a source of 
intellectual inspiration,as is the case with “companions” and colleagues such 
as Anna Babka, Marijan Bobinac, Milka Car, Michele Cometa, Pál Dereky, Heinz 
Fassmann, Isabel Gil, Endre Hars, Alfrun Kliems, Ingo Lauggas, Brigitta Pesti, 
Mauro Ponzi, Sonja Neef, Ansgar Nünning, Clemens Ruthner, Andrea Seidler, 
Antonio Sousa Ribeiro, Heidemarie Uhl and Birgit Wagner, the spokesperson for 
our working group, Cultural Studies/ Kulturwissenschaften at the University of 
Vienna. 
This book has arisen out of many different places and environments: the 
Gießen Centre for the Study of Culture (GSCS), where I was senior scholar in 2009; 
my scholarship at GWZO (Leipzig University 2010) and at Trinity College in Dublin 
2012; an academic residence in Lisbon and Coimbra; and a series of lectures in 
2011, organised by the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York and Los Angeles. 
The last work on the book has been done during my research fellowship at 
the Trinity College in Dublin in September 2012. So, I would like to thank Jürgen 
Barkhoff, the director of Long Room Hub, including his kind and professional 
team, and Clemens Ruthner, the director of Research at the School of Languages, 
Literatures and Cultural Studies. 
Modern literary theory has taught us that authors are unable to control their 
readers and the reception of their books. Nevertheless, it is possible to hope that 
this book will be welcomed in foreign territory, i.e. that it will find interested 
readers in the English-speaking realm.
Dublin, Vienna and Drosendorf, October 2012
Content
Preface   VII
Part 1 
Culture and its Narratives   1
Identity, Alterity and the Work of the Narrative: A Transdisciplinary Discourse 
Report   3
The Hidden Narratives: Latency, Repression, Common Sense   20
On the Narratology of Cultural and Collective Memory   42
Romanticism and Nationalism: The Heroic Narrative – Hermann and the 
Battle for Germany   58
Polyphem’s Children: (Post-) Colonial Aspects in Western Modernity and 
Literary Modernism   76
Murder and Monotheism: A Detective Story in Close Reading   97
Part 2 
Space, Time and the Global   109
Space and Borders: Simmel, Waldenfels, Musil   111
Time in Modern Cultural Analysis   128
Walter Benjamin and the Translational Turn   135
The Arts and the Split of Time: On Kawara   147
Part 3 
The Heritage of Classical Modernism: Broch, Canetti, Musil, Kafka   161
The Disappearing of Ruins: Thomas Glavinic’s The Work of the Night and an 
Imaginary Symposium with Benjamin, Simmel, Freud and Foucault   163
Fear in Culture: Hermann Broch’s Massenwahntheorie   173
Mass Hysteria and the Physics of the Crowd: Canetti and Broch – 
A Theoretical Divorce   187
Musil’s Version of Round Dance in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften   204
From Early Modernism to the Late Avant-garde Movement: The Austrian 
Example   211
XII   Content
The Broken Mirror: The Construction of America in Lenau   225
Images of America, Made in Austria: After Lenau – Franz Kafka    239
Austrian Literature in a Trans-cultural Context   248
Bibliography and References   264
Original place of publication of single chapters   276
Part 1 
Culture and its Narratives
Identity, Alterity and 
the Work of the Narrative
A Transdisciplinary Discourse Report
I.
In Travelling Concepts in the Humanities, the Dutch cultural theorist Mieke Bal 
develops the idea that terminologies and concepts are not stable and fixed within 
a certain academic discipline, but are transferred from one academic field to 
another  – within but also beyond the humanities (Bal 2002a, Neumann/ Tyg-
strup 2009; Müller-Funk 2010, 332–349). This suggests a dialogical relationship 
between various fields of research. Moreover, it becomes striking that the ‘same’ 
terminology has different meanings in different disciplines. This is true for key 
concepts and terms in cultural analysis such as discourse, space, and narrative, 
but also for identity. There are two reasons for these different meanings. Firstly, 
literary studies or art history have different references to and understandings of 
cultural and social reality than, for example, history or sociology, which concen-
trate on practice and actions. Secondly, they have a different focal point, or – in 
the terminology of literary narratology – another perspective, another focalisa-
tion. In other words, one can argue that the transdisciplinary field of cultural 
studies and cultural analysis is also a territory in which productive dispute and 
discussion can take place.
This is extremely important with regard to our topic. Identity is a typical 
travelling concept; one can find discourse on identity in different schools of 
philosophy, in sociology and political science, in psychoanalysis, in British cul-
tural studies and German Kulturwissenschaften (see: Straub 2004, 277–303), and 
in modern literature. For example, whereas phenomenology has discussed the 
problem of identity from an internal perspective, British empirical philosophy in 
the tradition of John Locke and David Hume has analysed it from an external focus. 
In the case of identity, this is decisive. From an internal perspective, Lucius, the 
hero transformed into a donkey in a novel by the Latin writer Apuleius, remains 
the same person whether he is a human being or a donkey (Bakhtin 1989, 38f). 
In contrast to this internal perspective, the donkey and the human being called 
Lucius are not identical as far as his social surroundings are concerned, because 
a donkey and a human being cannot be identical.
Sociological functionalism and cultural constructivism also choose perspec-
tives from outside, describing identity as an artificial and illusionary procedure 
that is constitutive and necessary for social action and for one’s place in a given 
4   Part 1: Culture and its Narratives
symbolic space. In contrast to our internal experience of the uniqueness and 
authenticity of our identity, the social sciences and cultural studies make clear 
that this kind of self-experience is illusionary and imaginary. Here identity is 
either the result of a social procedure (identification) or the result of a symbolic 
process. 
Psychoanalysis as modern fiction offers an interesting in-between approach, 
since in this symbolic field the focus is itself the wandering between the inside of 
a patient and the outside of an emphatic person, namely the therapist (Erikson 
1959/1973, 17f). And in literature, especially in modern novels, there is always the 
possibility of changing perspectives and therefore of the confrontation between 
inside and outside. Already on a structural level, identity can be seen here as a 
dynamic phenomenon that is based on the presence of an other, the ‘reality’ of an 
unavoidable Other, a difference, which at the same time is a structure. In contrast 
to Erikson, this has been interpreted in French structuralist and poststructuralist 
theory as the end of classical identity (Descombes 1979/1981, 93). 
Widening Bal’s concept, one can say that there are at least three levels of 
travelling concept with regard to “identity”:
– Travelling within the humanities and social sciences.
– Travelling between different national cultures which have different tradi-
tions of science and culture.
– Travelling between the social sciences and humanities, and literature and 
the arts.
As Odo Marquard and Karlheinz Stierle have pointed out, an essential part of the 
vocabulary of identity (as a person, as a role, as a mask) comes from theatre and/ 
or literature (Marquard 1979, 11). As we will see, the concepts are forever chang-
ing during their travels and what distinguishes one discipline from another is the 
different use they make of seemingly identical terms. With regard to identity, one 
can differentiate at least three ‘journeys’ and shifts of concepts in general:
– A journey from the social sciences to philosophy, as Odo Marquard 
has pointed out in his article Identität: Schwundtelos und Mini-Essenz. 
Bemerkungen zu einer Genealogie einer aktuellen Diskussion(Disappear-
ing Telos and Mini-Essence – Remarks on the Genealogy of a Contemporary 
Discussion) in the volume Identität (Identity) in the series Poetik und Her-
meneutik (Poetics and Hermeneutics). Referring to G.H. Mead and symbolic 
interactionism, Marquard alludes to the multiple importation of a sociol-
ogy of identity from Anglo-Saxon into German speaking academic spaces 
(Marquard 1979, 349), but he also adds later that the term had previously 
migrated from philosophy (Marquard 1979, 353).
 Identity, Alterity and the Work of the Narrative   5
– A theoretical import from French post-war philosophy into Anglo-Saxon 
cultural studies and to contemporary cultural analysis und Kulturwissen-
schaften. At the centre of this transfer is the interest in the figure of the Other 
and its function for identity.
– A shift from modern psychology and sociology to literature (and from 
literature to psychology and sociology). This refers to a type of literature 
and artistic production that is used as the ‘medium’ of an experimental form 
of knowledge as is the case in Musil, Broch, Valéry, Borges, Joseph Roth, 
Proust, Frisch, Kundera, Marías and many others. Here literature is under-
stood as a specific episteme or, to borrow from Schelling, as an intellectual 
view (“intellektuelle Anschauung”). 
In the following sections I will discuss these different approaches in the field of 
German philosophy, Anglo-Saxon social sciences, French philosophy, in cultural 
studies and Kulturwissenschaften, and in classical modern and postmodern lit-
erature. I will look for the interdependences and breaks which have taken place 
in the in-between of these different forms of epistemai.
The title of this essay implies the simple question whether there is any iden-
tity beyond culture. And how can one describe the relationship between identity 
and alterity? What is the function of the narrative aspect? I will begin with the 
German philosopher Odo Marquard and later discuss Paul Ricœur’s concept of 
two different forms of identity and his analysis of narrative identity. In a further 
step, I will read two European novels, one from a modernist author, Joseph Roth, 
the other from a postmodern writer, Javier Marías. Both novels have a program-
matic reference to the topic itself. At the end of the essay I will try to perform the 
art of differentiation with regard to our topic: culture, identity and alterity.
II.
Marquard states that the master-word identity is a topic that has a problem with 
identity. It was never a central concern of traditional philosophy; it was Scho-
penhauer who distinguished between personal identity, ownership and prop-
erty, and representative identity (Marquard 1979, 348f). From the perspective of 
(German) philosophy, identity comes from the outside or at least from its margins. 
Identity always produces problems and splits. There is, for example, an official 
and an unofficial identity. Especially in contemporary social science and its focus 
on role distance, the accent is no longer on the true and hidden but on the hiding 
Self (Marquard 1979, 350). The philosopher Marquard agrees with the sociolo-
gist Niklas Luhmann that identity is an essential issue of cultural modernity: It 
6   Part 1: Culture and its Narratives
is absolutely necessary, Luhmann argues, for self referential complex systems 
to find identity in their ‘environment’, “Umwelt” (Luhmann, in: Marquard 1979, 
318). Identity is seen as an operation and as a functional element in modern 
societies. Identity always comes into play when it is threatened by change. It is 
interpreted as a substitute for traditional metaphysics, a vestige of such emotive 
terms as essence (essentia) or telos. The question of absolute beginning or origin 
is replaced by the problem of identity.
There are two interesting distinctions in Marquard. Firstly he speaks about 
the old facets of identity as being religions, states, nations and classes, and the 
new issues of identity as being reflexive, communicative and concerned with a 
universal identity that undergoes permanent change (Marquard 1979, 352). I dare 
say that there is a mix of “old” and “new” identity in the contemporary discussion 
and discourse on culture. There are, on the one hand, suspicions regarding a uni-
versalistic concept of identity and a return to particularistic identity, yet on the 
other hand, there is an insistence on the fact that this particularity is constructed, 
meaning that it is part of a dynamic process, i.e. culture. Thus, identity is the 
result of the breakdown of traditional terms such as “essence” and “teleology” 
(Marquard 1979, 358f).
Secondly, the German philosopher also contrasts an identity of generality 
with an identity of particularity. The first version has its roots in ancient Greek 
philosophy, which states that every being is identical with itself. Here, identity 
negates difference. In contrast, the Jewish idea of Jahwe (“I am, who I am” or “I 
am, who I will be”) lives from the indefinite qualitative difference, as Marquard 
points out by quoting from Kamlah’s theological work (Marquard 1979, 354). The 
first version of identity is beyond time (and space), the second has a strong his-
torical aspect; it is in time and space. Or in other words, it is a constructed narra-
tive identity. Or to put it yet another way, ‘cultural’ identity in particular is always 
an inscribed narrative matrix.
III.
According to postmodern philosophy or post-structuralism, identity no longer 
can be seen as the authentic kernel of a nut. This idea was central e.g. to the clas-
sical autobiography and the Bildungsroman, especially in German literature, for 
example in Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit or Wilhelm Meister, or in a Romantic 
and ironic version in Eichendorff’s Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts. The cor-
responding narrative is based on the “chronotopos” (Bakhtin) that after a long 
period of wandering and straying, the homodiegetic narrator and protagonist 
finds his/ her true calling. Elias Canetti’s autobiography in three volumes is also 
 Identity, Alterity and the Work of the Narrative   7
based on the idea of an identity that is found at the end, a typical adaptation of 
the Aristotelian idea of entelechia. It is a fixed kernel within yourself (Currie 1998, 
2ff) that becomes visible at the end of the story. There is a strong deterministic 
aspect to this concept of identity. In the first chapter of his life story, Elias Canetti 
writes that all his later experiences had already happened earlier in Rustchuk 
(Canetti 1977, 9). Compared with the ‘classical’ Bildungsroman or autobiography, a 
new moment comes into play that has similarities with the idea of psychoanalysis 
(although Canetti, like Musil, was a harsh critic of Freud) – namely, the idea that 
it is the experiences in early childhood that prove formative for one’s later life. 
Canetti’s autobiography also includes the classical telos that he was predestined 
to become a writer. 
In all these literary examples, identity is understood more or less as a fixed 
and durable element, a reliable factor in one’s life, which is beyond time and 
space, constant and immobile as Aristotle’s unmoved mover. From a narrativistic 
perspective, this is itself a narrative construction of identity, a story about how a 
specific human being searched and found his/ her true “self” at the end.
There is another concept of identity in modernity, namely a social and socio-
logical one, which describes how a person, a collective or a community finds his, 
her or its place in the world of modern society. Here, man or woman is not seen 
as a fixed being but is formed through the process of socialisation in institutions 
such as the family or school. Identity is seen as the result of identification. His/ 
her identity, personality and language are the result of that process, which is seen 
as integration into society and/ or culture (Ruegg 1969, 229; Lohauß 1995, 129–161). 
Erikson’s theory of identitymay be seen as a concept that bridges the gap 
between psychoanalysis and the social sciences. Here, identity is understood as 
the result of the drama of childhood but also as a complicated balancing of three 
key elements of personality: the Es, the Ich and the Über-Ich, or id, ego and super-
ego. Identity is seen as a creative synthesis between our desires and the demands 
of a culture. The interesting point is that it is the figure of the father (and to some 
extent of the mother) who represents the dimension of the Other on two levels: 
on a personal level and a collective one. Through a complex process of identifica-
tion, identity is generated on a personal and a collective level because the father 
represents the super-ego (Erikson 1959/1973, 11–54; Peter Lohauß 1995, 30f), the 
Lacanian symbolic order. In the theoretical framework of Lacan’s version of 
psychoanalysis, personal identity is also illusionary and imaginary. However, I 
would add that this does not mean that it does not represent a cultural ‘reality’.
It is the oedipal triangle that proves to be the symbolic space where the 
process of identity building takes place. It entails a difficult process, which is 
seen as positive integration into society and its specific symbolic order (culture). 
Identity is the cornerstone of what is called socialisation: finding a place in 
8   Part 1: Culture and its Narratives
society and culture. In contrast to Straub (Straub 2004), there is no real differ-
ence between personal and collective identity, for example an imagined commu-
nity (Anderson 1991/1996). Identity is seen as the result of positive development. 
Moreover, identity is the precondition of psychological health. Similar to the 
concept of humanistic Bildung, identity has an extremely positive denotation and 
connotation. This affirmative moment is distinguished in post-structuralism but 
also in British cultural studies. Here, identity takes on a widely negative meaning. 
Identity is seen as an illusionary idea and – together with the double meaning of 
subject – a symptom of oppression by society (Straub 2004, 277f). 
In the eighth chapter of Robert Musil’s unfinished novel Der Mann ohne 
Eigenschaften (The man without qualities), the essayistic voice speaks about 
the strange, unreal and uncanny configuration of Kakanien, a country in which 
every body distrusts each other. The author uses the German word Charakter in 
this context in an unspecific sense that is quite similar to identity. It is mentioned 
that every inhabitant of this multicultural empire has at least nine identities (or 
characters): profession, nationality, state, class, geography, gender, conscious-
ness, unconsciousness, and privacy. The last Charakter is the most interesting 
one. On the one hand, it bands together all the other identities within itself; on 
the other, it is dispersed by all those others. This private identity or character is 
compared to a small and eroded hollow into which all the other characters drain 
and out of which they then come again to fill, together with other small rivulets, 
another hollow, which is defined as the passive fantasy of unfilled spaces (Musil 
1978, 34).
Thus, identity disappears in Musil’s novel into the imaginary. Ulrich is not so 
much a man without qualities, as the English translation suggests, but a man who 
lives in these unfilled spaces as a man without identity. There is no longer a strict 
relation to the sample of identities, rather there is a radical vacuum behind all 
the qualities and characters. In the interior of modern identity there lies: nothing. 
The plurality of identities undermines identity itself, it becomes an empty phe-
nomenon, a ‘fader’ (S. Weber 1978, 85–97).
To a certain extent, the diagnosis in Musil’s novel can be understood as a par-
allel analysis of society and culture in the decades between 1870 and 1930 with 
regard to disciplines such as sociology and psychology (Lepenies 1985, 239–401). 
But Musil also has something in common with post-structuralism, namely the 
idea that identity is a complex, fragmented and doubled phenomenon.
As far as I can see, there is in Musil neither a focus on the symbolic aspect of 
the process of identity production, nor a specific interest in the dynamic between 
self and other, which goes hand in hand with this process. This is also true of 
modern sociology. Yet these two aspects of identity – alterity and the role of nar-
rating – have become central to the humanities and social sciences in the wake of 
 Identity, Alterity and the Work of the Narrative   9
what have been called the new cultural turns in the Kulturwissenschaften (Bach-
mann-Medick 2006).
IV.
In my view, Paul Ricœur’s contribution to this topic is remarkable, because he 
has presented a new perspective in his three-volume monograph Temps et récit 
(Ricœur 1983–1985/1988–1991) and a book about the relationship between self-
ness and otherness – Soi même comme un autre (Ricœur 1990/1996). The connec-
tion between both topics is striking, although the French philosopher elaborates 
on this relation in an explicit form in only one chapter of his later book, where 
he differentiates between personal and narrative identity (Ricœur 1990/1996, 
144–206).
In this book, the author discusses not only the complicated relations between 
the Self and the Other but also differentiates between two aspects of identity: 
Whereas identity in the sense of the Latin word idem (sameness) is connected 
with constancy in time (and space), identity in the sense of the Latin ipse (self-
hood) does not imply the idea of an unchangeable kernel of a personality (Ricœur 
1990/1996, 11). With regard to alterity, it follows that there are also two aspects 
to alterity: otherness and (cultural) alterity, which correspond to sameness and 
selfhood respectively. As in other concepts (for example the Lacanian dyad je 
and moi), there is a double fragmentation: On the one hand, identity has two 
sides that are connected and divided at the same time. On the other hand, the 
Self is always split because of the priority of the Other that is written into it. It 
is quite clear that the idem identity is very abstract and symbolically empty; in 
contrast, the ipse identity contains positive predicates. The two elements work 
as in mathematical logic: x(a), there is an x that is a. Or A=A (Marquard 1979, 
360). The first identity is absolute, but like Musil’s it is hollow, tautological and 
deictic. In Pierce’s terminology it is indexical (Peirce 1991: 350). As the word I 
(Ich), it refers to a person but has no (explicit cultural) meaning itself. It becomes 
meaningful only by the addition of the predicate (woman, worker, Austrian etc.). 
Only the second, changeable aspect of identity refers to our topic: cultural iden-
tity, although one might argue that the other aspect of identity, the self-reference 
that is perceived by an internal focalisation, has also affected cultural change. 
It becomes important in post-traditional, modern, Western or non-Western cul-
tures, in which every human being is required to work out this relationship to the 
Self (Straub 2004, 280). 
Narrative is not only a manner of speaking, a speech-act or a Sprachspiel 
(Wittgenstein), but is a central element with regard to identity. It is the narra-
10   Part 1: Culture and its Narratives
tive that integrates the two aspects of identity, the idem and the ipse, or in Mar-
quard’s terminology, a general with a particular identity. Narrative generates a 
configuration of events. It suggests continuity and produces sense by transform-
ing contingency into narrative necessity (Ricœur 1990/1996, 173–186). Narrative 
identity makes it possible to combine constancy with change. Through narrative, 
one can invent or imagine possible (ipse) identities and play with them, as it is 
the case in the famous Bob Seger song If I were a carpenter and you were a lady. 
Or one can tell the story about the young and enthusiastic communistone was 
in one’s youth. Narratives of emigration also have a similar structure. Here, in 
contrast to the main person – the narrated I – providing the stable element in 
the narrative, this is instead represented by the voice of the storyteller, since the 
narrated I is potentially undergoing permanent change. It is the narrative process 
itself that creates identity through a complex dialectic between sameness and 
selfhood, otherness and alterity. It represents continuity and therefore the aspect 
of the idem, the idea of the uniqueness of a certain person, and it contains all the 
metamorphoses, transformations and conversions of a person who is telling his 
or her life story. The frog and the prince, the ardent communist and the harsh 
conservative, Saul and Paul are connected in a paradoxical way, so that one is the 
other and at the same time is not. The narrative guarantees duration in change.
V.
As I have shown in an earlier essay (Müller-Funk 2009b, 365–382; Müller-Funk, 
2009a, 241–261), narrating not only means telling a story, but telling a story to 
someone. Sometimes this can be very abstract and not represented by the manner 
of speaking (as is the case in many classical modernist novels, which often avoid 
the gesture of having an empirical person narrate the story). Nevertheless, the 
other is written into the configuration of the narrative matrix. There is always 
a hidden I who speaks to an Other. There is always, as Mieke Bal has shown, a 
dialogical element which has the structure of an abstract letter (Bal: 2002b, 7–43; 
Müller-Funk 2010, 332–349). Therefore, it also entails an ethical aspect (Ricœur 
1990/1996, 207–246). Narrating means an invitation to identification, a plea for 
recognition and especially the idea that my story is ‘true’ or, in the case of liter-
ary fictions, plausible or reliable. Identity needs confirmation by the Other, who 
is – from a cultural perspective – part of the symbolic field that is established not 
least by narratives. The narrative is the unavoidable medium of this cultural pro-
cedure. Therefore, only narratives are able to create collective identities, which 
are based on narrating communities, on groups of readers, who become storytell-
ers at the same time. This kind of narrative always tells a story about who we are 
 Identity, Alterity and the Work of the Narrative   11
and who we are not. On an individual level, it creates a narrative unity of life. On 
a collective level, it suggests – in an act of abstraction and imagination – the ‘life’ 
of a nation, the history of a movement, a group etc. Identity establishes a clear 
order with a very often unconscious negative identity that is similar to the image 
of another we fear to be or to become. It is the image of a misused castrated body, 
an ethnic group or an exploited social minority (Erikson: 1959/1973, 28). 
Coming back to Musil’s novel, what does loss of identity mean? What kind of 
identity is it? These confusing and irritating cases of narrativity can be, as Ricœur 
argues, formulated anew in his terminology as the revelation of the ipse identity 
by the loss of the idem identity that is supporting it (Ricœur 1990/1996, 184). Fol-
lowing this argument, the hero is someone who can be characterised by interfer-
ence between the two levels. In the case of anti-heroes such as Musil’s Ulrich or 
Max Frisch’s Stiller, this relation is broken. Nevertheless, those works contain a 
narrative that is the loss of identity and character, a master narrative of classical 
modernism, one the philosopher Günter Anders has given the title Man without 
world. It is the story of alienation (Anders 1984, XI). It is part of the modern cul-
tural laboratory in which new forms of narrating are experienced.
VI.
The idea that identity depends on the figure of the Other is, in many aspects, 
an astonishingly late one. It was to be picked out as a central theme in at least 
three symbolic fields: in French philosophy, in contemporary cultural analysis, 
but also in modern and postmodern literature. It is literature that is best able to 
present the paradoxes of identity under the circumstances of global modernity.
Joseph Roth’s text Beichte eines Mörders erzählt in einer Nacht is a literary 
masterpiece and an object lesson for every narrative theory because it demon-
strates several important aspects of narrative configuration, of the performance 
of narrating, the Sprechweise (manner of speech), but also of the function of 
narrative in creating and sustaining communities. This, in particular, points to 
the phenomenon that identity is always based on its opposite, alterity. The short 
novel (more a novella) is set in the late 1930s in Paris and also presents the (fic-
tional) audience, the narrative community (Erzählgemeinschaft). This is a very 
specific narrative community, namely a diaspora, here Russian anti-communist 
exiles who meet each other night after night in a particular restaurant. Diaspo-
ras, which have become prominent in contemporary cultural studies (Appadurai 
1996), are highly interesting narrative communities with regard to their (fragile) 
identity. Emigrants live in between the old and the new identity, between the 
12   Part 1: Culture and its Narratives
symbolic space of their old national culture and of the culture of the immigration 
country. Thus there is a strong and permanent need for storytelling.
In contrast to many other ‘classical’ modernist writers, Roth plays with the 
act of narrating itself by using a form of storytelling which seems to be very tra-
ditional in the sense of Benjamin’s famous essay (Benjamin 1977, 385–410), but 
proves to be post-traditional at the same time. Using Genette’s terminology, the 
novel is intradiegetic, i.e. it includes a narrative frame with two storytellers, the 
embedded narrator named Golubtschik, who, night after night, tells the visitors 
of Tari-Bari his fantastic life story, and a non-identifiable frame narrator, who 
represents the visitors in the restaurant, but is displaced for two reasons. He pre-
sents himself to the audience and to the embedded narrator as a German writer, a 
person who speaks many European languages, including Russian. Like the guests 
in the Russian restaurant, he is an emigrant, but he is not part of the diasporic, 
anti-communist Russian community. His identity is mysterious. The inside and 
outside perspectives do not fit together. Like many other protagonists in Roth’s 
œuvre, the frame narrator is the author’s double and also has a double in the 
text itself. He has something in common with the author (his Central European 
origins, his knowledge of foreign languages, his European attitudes, that he is 
a German native speaker, that he was in Russia in World War I and that he lives 
as a writer in exile in Paris). At the same time, he is also the mediator to the real 
audience outside the world of the text, which is important, because this small 
novel also refers to the problem of reliability. Through its figures, the novel pre-
sents three cultural spaces; Russia, France and Central Europe, which includes 
Germany, Austria and Hungary.
It is also important to mention that time stands still in this exile restaurant, 
firstly because there is not a specific time to order as is usually the case in French 
restaurants, and secondly because the clock has stopped. Everyone (incidentally, 
there are no women in the Russian restaurant) is looking clandestinely at the wall 
clock, although they know that it no longer works (Roth 1984, 79). This is a rhe-
torical reference to a specific moment of storytelling: Narrating is an act in which 
the past is preserved and suddenly becomes contemporary. During Golubtschik’s 
narration, present time disappears. Everyone feels as if he had experienced Gol-
ubtschik’s life (Roth 1984, 47). During this night, Old Russia rises again. 
But there is also another interesting aspect of cultural alterity. As an expert 
of another culture, the frame narratorexplains to the reader why Russian émigrés 
are so careless about time: it is because they have lost their cultural orientation in 
exile. They are out of time because they have lost their former identity. But they 
also neglect time because they want to demonstrate their cultural difference to 
French culture. They play “echte Russen” (“authentic Russians”), those people 
who do not have the same kind of calculating mentality as those in the West.
 Identity, Alterity and the Work of the Narrative   13
This is a story about the insecurity of identity that is itself the result of wrong 
or false stories. Entering the world of the text, we get to know the private space 
of identity, a hollow filled with vacuum and fantasy, as it is described in Musil’s 
novel. This post-Romantic prose combines the topic of wrong or false stories with 
the motif of the double. There are a lot of mirroring effects: between Golubtschik 
and the frame narrator, between the frame narrator and the author, between Gol-
ubtschik and his ‘false’ brother Krapotkin, who proves to be a rival in love, and 
between Golubtschik and the demonic Hungarian devil Jenö Lakatos.
But there is also a break in identity with regard to time. Golubtschik and his 
mistress Lutetia have lost their former selfhood. This becomes evident at the end 
when Golubtschik’s narration is caught up by time. The ugly woman who comes 
for Golubtschik is none other than the former beauty, the model Lutetia. Names 
and life stories are permanently changing in the novel (Roth: 1984, 123). This 
creates an atmosphere of uncanniness, which Freud described in his interpreta-
tion of Hoffmann’s piece Der Sandmann (The Sandman), which in turn played 
a key role in Julia Kristeva’s definition of the strange that irritates every form of 
identity (Kristeva: 1988/1990, 199–202). Speaking critically, Kristeva identifies the 
strange of the unconscious with the cultural strange in an undifferentiated way.
In contrast to Hoffmann, in Roth the darkness of the narrative space is 
increased in so much as the embedded narrator, but also all embedded narra-
tors within his own narration, are unreliable storytellers (Nünning: 1998, 3–39). 
According to the narration of old Golubtschik, the embedded narrator, the young 
Golubtschik is driven by the oedipal fantasy that ‘in reality’ he is not the son of a 
forest official, but – this is an oedipal narrative – is the illegitimate offspring of a 
mighty, fantastically rich prince. Influenced by the devil, the obscure Hungarian 
businessman and spy Jenö Lakatos, he tries to gain recognition as the son of this 
prince, called Krapotkin. He wants the name of ‘his’ father. He spends half his life 
on his obsession with becoming a Krapotkin instead of a Golubtschik. The Slavic 
name has a connotation with dove. So Golubtschik means he is a cock pigeon, a 
male dove. But this possibility of a metamorphosis from a small peaceful being 
into a powerful person is thwarted by the official son of Prince Krapotkin. Gol-
ubtschik’s insidious adviser Lakatos makes him believe that his rival is not the 
real son of the Russian aristocrat. In his view, he, and not Krapotkin junior, is the 
real son of the superior ‘father’. Golubtschik, the male dove, becomes a spy and 
a member of the Tsarist secret service, the Okhrana. This murky field is ideal for 
the disappearance of all fixed identities. He evolves to become a master at black-
mail, control and betrayal. After a failed attack on his rival he has to leave the 
country and continue his job in Paris. Ironically, he now adopts the pseudonym 
Krapotkin.
14   Part 1: Culture and its Narratives
There is also an interesting female protagonist in the novel, called Lutetia – 
this is the Latin name for Paris. The misogynistic gender construction in the text 
is instructive. Lutetia, the model, the allegory of Paris, is an artificial creature, a 
mask, pure performance, the broad kat´ exochen. Woman, especially a French 
one, has no identity (Riviere: 1994, 40), only false names and stories, changing 
clothes, lingerie, gestures and perfumes. Lutetia is the mere ipse without any 
idem. Her restless lover, however, is also a man who failed to find an identity in 
another way. This is the kernel of the narration, of his life story, of his confession. 
The reliability of his story remains ambivalent. For example, he did not murder 
his rival and his faithless lover, although he tried to do so. At the end, he finds his 
rival again in Paris as part of the Russian community that has been expelled by 
the Communist regime after the civil war. The heinous Lutetia is also still alive. 
She has lost all her beauty. This is a form of revenge and, at the same time, it is a 
melancholic plot of perishability. But when she enters the restaurant on that very 
morning, she has a scar, a trace of the attack of her lover years ago. So this part of 
Golubtschik’s story might be true.
She is the same and, at the same time, she is another. The abyss of time ruins 
identities that were connected by the chain of events in Golubtschik’s confes-
sion. This is an indication that Golubtschik’s story cannot be totally false. There is 
another uncanny effect in the text when, at the end of the story, Lakatos reappears 
as the frame narrator’s neighbour in the hotel. This ending signals the return of 
the same disaster for the narrator that was so characteristic of Golubtschik. The 
frame narrator has never seen Golubtschik and his narrative community again, 
but Lakatos remains in this demonic world.
The story is perhaps also characteristic of the situation of a very specific 
cultural minority and its fragile identity. One could relate this private story to 
history, to the breakdown of patriarchal pre-modern Tsarist Russia in 1917. In this 
reading, the novel could be understood as a noteworthy piece of literature with 
a psychoanalytic background. It is located on the margins of space and time and 
describes the transformation of a peripheral cultural region under the conditions 
of a modern, non-transparent world. In this interpretation, Golubtschik’s confes-
sion is an integrative part of the symbolic reservoir of a narrative community.
But it is also quite evident that Roth’s novel is part of the narrative complex 
of alienation or, to refer to Ricœur, a narrative version of the revelation of the ipse 
identity through the loss of the idem identity. This could be seen as the deep struc-
ture of so-called globalisation. In different ways, the protagonists in the novel are 
people without identity: Golubtschik, Lutetia and, especially, Lakatos. They still 
have a certain identity, as men or women, as French, Hungarian or Russian, but 
this identity is mere appearance and no longer has any supportive power.
 Identity, Alterity and the Work of the Narrative   15
The opaque demimondes of the secret service, of fashion, but also of the 
diaspora (which in Roth’s novel is a bleak and comfortless symbolic space) are 
presented as a metaphor for the modern world. The covert ruler of this modern 
uncanny dystopia is, as in other texts by Joseph Roth, the globalised Hungarian, 
the entrepreneur Jenö Lakatos, who, like Lutetia, is only a surface, a squire and 
enchanter, a phenomenon of performance without any story – with the excep-
tion that he is marked as a Hungarian and that he jumps on one leg like the devil 
(Roth 1984, 31). Roth’s narrative version of modernity is extremely pessimistic, 
conservative and demonic and one could reduce the emplotment of Roth’s text to 
the statement that the symbolic overkill of narrative acts neutralises all serious 
forms of narration. Therefore, all forms of identity have become weak and eroded; 
firstly because all narrations prove to be lies, secondly because it seems that there 
is no longer any need for storytelling. When Golubtschik meets his rival again in 
Paris and tries to apologise for the attack years ago, Krapotik jun. answers that 
he should not speak about thepast, but only about the present and future (Roth 
1984, 127).
VII.
There is a strong dialogical moment in Roth’s story about storytelling. The major-
ity of the visitors in the restaurant already know the confession of the ‘murderer’. 
Confession itself has a dialogical structure: It needs an alter ego who is the 
addressee of the mysteries and shares one’s life. 
The Other is the instance which takes the position of a moral or juristic 
instance. S/ he is the one who exculpates, acquits, pardons or forgives the person 
who confesses about a chain of events from his or her life to another person, 
either someone directly involved in the narrative or an outsider who is seen as 
neutral. The confession is a radical form of narration, but this aspect is hidden 
in all sorts of narrative processes. It marks the ethical dimension of storytelling.
Again and again, the embedded narrator pauses in his story and there is 
time for the audience’s reflection, especially the frame narrator’s mediations 
on whether his story can be true (Roth 1984, 47, 123). A narrative always has an 
addressee who is not – under modern circumstances – a direct and explicit one, 
as is the case in Roth’s novel. Narrating means to narrate something to someone. 
This dialogical element, this presence of the other in the narrative matrix is also 
the precondition for what one may call cultural identity. Cultural identity pre-
supposes that a group of people, a community, believes that a certain story or 
a narrative complex is true, realistic and reliable. The goal of all storytelling is 
that my counterpart believes in ‘my’ story. In contrast perhaps to the contempo-
16   Part 1: Culture and its Narratives
rary readers, the visitors of the Tari-Bari in Roth’s text have decided to believe in 
Golubtschik’s story in a weak sense, because even invented stories are true in at 
least one sense: They reveal the character of the narrator and are symptomatic 
of the situation of a cultural group. They want to believe the ‘murderer’s’ story. 
Up to a certain point, all cultural identity is based on the will to believe a story. 
Quite evidently, the criteria are not rational but entail psychological aspects. In 
Golubtschik’s case it is his body language which makes the audience believe him 
(Roth 1984, 123).
The topic of credibility is prominent in Javier Marías’ novel Maňana en la 
batalla piensa en mí (1994) too. Here, the addressee of the narration is not a cul-
tural minority as in Roth, but a single person, Luisa. She is the sister of a dead 
woman, Marta, who died half-naked immediately before the first sexual encoun-
ter with her new lover while her husband was absent abroad. The frustrated lover, 
Victor, is the homodiegetic narrator of the story, who reflects on the necessity of 
persuading his dead lover’s sister of the painful and implausible events of some 
weeks ago. As a potential narrator he comes under pressure. Whereas he has no 
identity within the surroundings of the dead woman (because he is unknown, 
has no name, no face, no story), he himself has a precarious identity. It becomes 
central to reveal this, or his, ‘true’ identity.
As in Roth, there is an aspect of confession in the story. Victor has to tell 
Marta’s sister that he was with her before she died and left her young son alone 
with the dead woman. There is no doubt that he, as the possessor of a mystery, 
has power (Marías: 1994, 270f), but only narrating it enables him to reveal and 
neutralize the symbolic power of his narrative. It is a painful situation in which 
the listener, Luisa, the double of the dead sister, is assigned the role of moral 
authority or judge. So it becomes decisive to tell the painful story about the events 
of that night in such a way that his attractive vis à vis – the gender relations play 
an important role in the process of narrating – does not find him guilty. Through 
true storytelling he is able to establish a common narrative community à deux, 
which is based on the idea that only these two persons know the real story about 
what happened. They have a secret in common (Marías 1994, 278–295). His con-
fessions evoke further confessions from other people, firstly Luisa’s, and secondly 
the confession of the dead wife’s husband. 
Like Roth’s text, Javier Marías’ novel is self-referential. It is a literary piece 
on the complex logic of narrating, otherness and a common symbolic space that 
is established by a type of narrative which has a mystery at its centre. Sameness 
and otherness, selfhood and alterity are intermingled in this story. As the rep-
resentative of Victor’s conscience, Luisa functions as an abstract other, but she 
has her own story and her own personal and collective identity as a heterosex-
ual woman – that is, her symbolic alterity to the man. The abstract process on 
 Identity, Alterity and the Work of the Narrative   17
the level of idem is overlapped by their reciprocal erotic attraction to each other. 
There is an interesting detail in the novel. Luisa refuses to allow Victor to tell his 
version of her sister’s last night alive in his own flat (Marías 1994, 278). The spaces 
of man and woman are separated in this case, because they have different posi-
tions within the symbolic field. So a neutral third space has to be found. This is 
the restaurant. After they have told each other their version of what happened, 
Luisa accepts Victor’s invitation to continue the talk at his flat. And in the end, 
she also accepts his offer to have a drink with him.
Although there is some sort of cultural difference in this embedded process 
of narrating, I doubt that one can say that Victor and Luisa live in separate cul-
tures. They may have different positions in one and the same cultural space, yet 
they share not only a common language (also metaphorically), but also a middle-
upper-class background and the values, attitudes and habitus of a Spanish post-
modern individualistic culture. 
British Cultural Studies has taught us to understand culture with regard to 
the trinity of race, class and gender. Each of these three symbolic margins can be 
part of a specific national culture with all its subcultures. I would like to propose 
using the term cultural alterity only for those phenomena in which differences of 
language, religion, tradition and history, manners or mentalities play a central 
role. In all other cases (gender, sexual orientation, life-style, profession, milieu, 
generation), I would prefer the term symbolic alterity, because all these differ-
ences refer to implicit but varying and changing positions within one society. The 
person from another national culture, however, traditionally only has one pos-
sible position: the position as a figure at the edge, at the margin. It is true that 
globalisation suggests that this difference between inside and outside has been 
cancelled. Yet I am not sure if this is true.
If Luisa and Marta were young women from the Middle East or from West 
Africa with a Muslim background, or if Victor were not a writer but a carpenter 
from South America, it would be a totally different novel. It is not certain whether, 
in these hypothetical cases, Victor’s confession could take place and, moreover, 
would lead to such a peaceful end as in Marías’ text. The narratives of new inti-
macy Luisa and Victor have in common are part of the same symbolic house-
hold of an enlightened, Western European, postmodern, national culture. They 
share these values, although they might have different opinions about the details 
because of symbolic alterity (gender, age or life style). 
18   Part 1: Culture and its Narratives
VIII.
On our journey with the travelling concept of identity, we started with the philo-
sophical suspicion that identity is a symptom of that kind of a crisis that we call 
modernity. In different philosophies, identity exists twice; abstract and non-nar-
rative, and particular and narrative. The discourse on identity in sociology and 
psychologytends to the statement that identity goes hand in hand with a process 
of integration. Modern cultural analysis, postmodern philosophy and (post-) 
modern literature offer two different figures of alterity – as the Other and as the 
stranger – figures that do not have a visible place in disciplines such as sociology, 
psychoanalysis and traditional philosophy. Thus, the constitutive aspect of the 
Other for creating identity is a basic and important contribution of contemporary 
narrative cultural analysis.
I accept that all these differentiations I have proposed throughout my pro-
grammatic literary reading are not binary and exclusive oppositions, but overlap-
ping phenomena, as is the case in Ricœur’s distinction between sameness and 
selfhood. It is the work of analysis to differentiate between otherness, symbolic 
and cultural alterity. It is the work of narrative to mingle and connect them in the 
chains of events, in the emplotment, in the characters of the figures, which con-
struct identities. Narrating is the art of the impossible, connecting substance and 
process, timelessness and time, constancy and change, and transforming them 
into a new artificial unit. It is literature that makes it possible to overcome binary 
oppositions and shows how they are fitted together or broken in the narrative 
process itself. With regard to cultural alterity, one might argue that the narrative 
is the symbolic process in which a human being or a group finds his/ her/ its sym-
bolic place by displacing others.
Identity is a space that is empty and crammed at the same time, and the nar-
rative is not only linked with all forms of identities but also links the tautological, 
non-narrative and empty aspect of identity with the symbolically filled one. The 
figure of the Other is inscribed at the empty and abstract level of identity, whereas 
heterogeneity (“hybridity”), the mixture of identities (e.g. in language, ‘race’ or 
gender) takes place in the “location of culture” (Bhaba 1994, 225f, 251). Identity 
is the result of an all-embracing and regulating system in which the identity of a 
subject is produced through the act of narrating, as Warning writes in his essay 
Forms of Narrative Construction of Identity in the Courtly Novel (Warning, in Mar-
quard, 553). Identity is always a double. 
If narrating is also a form of creating personal and collective identity, of 
building symbolic spaces, then the development of post-traditional models of 
identity and alterity depends on innovative forms of narrative in which the Other 
in a double sense (the principal Other as the counterpart of the idem, and the cul-
 Identity, Alterity and the Work of the Narrative   19
tural Other as the antipode of the ipse) is not automatically displaced, but gains a 
positive function in an open narrative structure.
The Hidden Narratives
Latency, Repression, Common Sense
Not all the symbolic material which is present and available in a culture (for 
example, in the field of schools, universities and the media) is in reality narrative; 
neither mathematical and scientific formulae (including those of the computer), 
nor the arsenal of manual and technical skills (which Hannah Arendt has ana-
lysed in her book Vita Activa) are narrative, neither is music nor a considerable 
part of the fine arts. These all constitute symbolic forms which are not contingent 
on space and time in that specific way which is characteristic of the narrative 
genre. Narration means finding oneself in a split time frame which cannot be 
made congruent: one is in the time which the narrative describes (erzählte Zeit), 
and also in the time in which the narrative is given (Erzählzeit). This distinction, 
which has been clearly formulated by Günther Müller, is not only valid for literary 
narration, but also for all forms of non-artistic narration – witness statements in 
court, re-constructions of life-stories in psychoanalysis, self-presentation in the 
media and the telling of stories in the family context.¹ All the other discrepancies 
arise from this particular one, which cannot be circumvented – the division of the 
person (identity) and that of space.
In contrast to the infinite recurrence of numbers, narration has an emphatic 
beginning and a conclusive end. These mark out the act of narrative from all other 
systems of action. Narration highlights a clearly defined portion of our lives, 
which of course is different to the ‘novel’ because it has no beginning to which we 
can return, and no definitive end. Narration also means declaring a past action 
finished and so making it stand out against the horizon of our ‘lived’ life. Of 
course, such finality can be denied: for instance, by starting the narrative again 
and by ending in another way. The whole teleology of an imagined community, of 
a social group or of an individual can thus be changed. We constantly do this: for 
example the former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer with regard to his 
own student past, the Austrian nation since 1989, husbands and wives in therapy, 
and Shakespeare too, who was dissatisfied with the first version of Hamlet, where 
the character resembled his father rather too much, and who decided instead to 
create a modern archetype.² 
1 Sports reporting is an exception here, because in a live transmission erzählte Zeit and 
Erzählzeit seem to coincide. But this a construction.
2 See for example Harold Bloom, Shakespeare. Die Erfindung des Menschlichen (2000, 
559–632).
 The Hidden Narratives   21
To narrate – or to listen to a narrative – means in the end to place oneself in 
a world in which people act between a beginning and an end which form the two 
poles of a teleology into which the story is fitted; it means following a common 
thread and passing through sequential tension, which suddenly breaks off at the 
end. The completion of such narrated events always implies – in contradiction to 
the categorical imperative of the ‘pure’ text upheld by literary criticism – a com-
pletion of lived life, which we model and construct according to similar patterns.
It can be shown that the mathematical world, without doubt a symbolic 
cosmos that is numerate but not narrative, is abstracted from space and time. That 
is also true nota bene for those natural sciences which use almost exclusively this 
body of rules, for example large parts of physics and chemistry.³ It would there-
fore be a mistake to draw the line which divides narrative and non-narrative sym-
bolic systems between the natural sciences and the humanities: modern cosmic 
physics (the ‘Big Bang’ or chaos theories) is organised as a narrative, and so is the 
theory of biological evolution. All these theories meet the criteria of the narrative 
that have been given: the division of the temporal, the exclusive position of the 
narration and the teleology of the course of events. Indeed, because they are open 
towards the future, such theories employ a technique which is familiar to us from 
the short story: the open end.
The many differing forms of life and of production are non-narrative, because 
they are very evidently iterative – that is, marked by repetition: cooking, the cul-
tivation of wine, the art of love, horticulture, engineering skills and rhetoric are 
all essential components of culture in the sense of the Greek word τεχνη. They all 
contain human goal-directed behaviour, but not one which possesses the exclu-
sive uniqueness produced by narrative.
The non-verbal arts have however certain features in common with the genre 
of literary and non-literary narrative, although they are not for the most part in 
a concise sense of the word narratively shaped. Music is, certainly, an art placed 
in time, subject to the law of irreversibility as narration is; it also has because of 
its sequentality an arch of tension and definite beginnings and ends (which is 
why it is suited as a ‘background’ to the theatrical production of epic art – from 
the Indonesian gamelan orchestraand the musical settings for the theatre in the 
nineteenth century to the cinema, from the modest beginnings of the pianist who 
3 Cf.: Markus Arnold/ Roland Fischer (2000). Particular reference is made here to the essays of: 
Roland Fischer, ‘Mathematisierung als Materialisierung des Abstrakten, ibid., 50–58; Christa 
Koenne, ‘Die Chemie und ihr Einfluß in einer Entscheidungsgesellschaft, ibid., 67–76; Helga 
Stadler, ‘Kann mann/ frau Physik verstehen?’ ibid., pp. 77–82 – further literature may be found 
there.
22   Part 1: Culture and its Narratives
accompanied the silent films right up to the sophisticated film music of today.) 
There is however no ‘temporal division’ here, nor an exclusive narrator, nor a 
world of action on which the sequences of sounds comment. But because the 
image, as well as the music, contains factors which are constituent parts of the 
narrative form, the image, music and text blend together in the manner of a 
Gesamt kunstwerk, in opera and film, and in the diverse genres which radio, tel-
evision and the new media have created. 
The world of symbols in mathematics and science, the whole ensemble of 
techniques used in a community and the non-verbal arts  – all these represent 
without doubt an indispensable element. Is narrative therefore an important 
element in every culture just as those systems of symbols and bodies of rules just 
mentioned are (the fields of law and economics also belong of course to them), 
but only one part, not even a pars pro toto? But then narrative would lose the 
special place accorded to it by the title of this study.
Only if it can be shown that narratives occupy a very strategic place in culture 
can their exclusive part in constituting cultures be justified. This exclusivity con-
sists in the central contribution which narrative makes to the forming of every 
kind of cultural identity. It is certainly true that not all the symbolic material in a 
culture is of a narrative nature, but no culture can do without a narrative ground-
ing. The deeper this foundation, the more symbolically rich the fabric of the cul-
tural identity in question: it is ultimately this richness which distinguishes for 
example Vienna, the metropolis of a relatively small state, from Birmingham, the 
second city of a leading European power. Kaliningrad is symbolically less impres-
sive than Königsberg, so it is no surprise that there have been attempts in Kalin-
ingrad to incorporate the history of Königsberg. In order to be somebody, one 
must be able to tell a story. The state of innocence is that in which nothing has yet 
happened, no disaster, no crimen, no event, no departure, no escape. Rousseau’s 
fantasy of the natural state is the narrative vacuum of the individual and of the 
collective.
On Whit Monday, 1828, a young man aged about 17 was found in Nurem-
berg. His origins were completely unknown, his past a mystery and his name – 
Caspar Hauser – was foisted upon him. In a surprising coincidence with Maurice 
Halbwachs’ theory, whereby an essential precondition of individual memory is 
always a social framework, the young man was unable to reconstruct his life-his-
tory from the darkness of his cave, the place of his imprisonment. The supposedly 
authentic, uncorrupted man, the ideal of late Romantic, post-Rousseau Europe 
and its cultural codes and narratives, is a being who according to a contemporary 
medical record
 The Hidden Narratives   23
‘… knows nothing of his own kind, does not eat, drink, feel, or speak as others do, who 
knows nothing of yesterday or tomorrow, who does not understand time nor is aware of his 
own self.’ (Wassermann 1983, 14)
This unknown person with the borrowed name that was not his own and who 
hid his past became famous. For anthropologists  – whose science was still at 
that time in its infancy  – it seemed like an opportunity to study closely homo 
sapiens as such, a human being without society or culture, man as he naturally is. 
What escaped this longing for objective essentiality and authentic objectivity was 
however the fact that a human being without the codes of symbolic systems and 
without a social context is in fact not human at all but an extreme phenomenon 
in any theory of culture. Friedrich Daumer, who was a fervent Rousseauist and a 
protagonist of idealistic theories and Romantic practices such as Mesmerism was 
convinced that natural man was to be encountered in the wilderness of his own 
culture – that is, man who has not been corrupted by society, as Rousseau had 
described in his educational treatise Emile. 
The man with the made-up name has at the same time a story made up for 
him, the story of a man who has sprung from a fairy tale, who comes from nowhere 
and is the first representative of a new and innocent humanity, a second Adam. 
Daumer makes this emphatic pronouncement in Jakob Wassermann’s novel:
When one speaks about him, one can never exaggerate, because language has no words to 
express his being. It is an ancient legend, this appearance of a fairy-tale creature out of a 
dark void; nature’s pure voice suddenly speaks to us and a myth turns into reality. His soul 
resembles a precious jewel, as yet untouched by a covetous hand; yet a noble purpose justi-
fies my wish to grasp it […]. (Wassermann, 1983, 4)
A person without the thread of an individual life history is a borderline phenom-
enon, just as is Chamisso’s man without a shadow, who as it happens also lives 
in narrative darkness. And just as it is impossible – to Daumer’s great disappoint-
ment – for him to remain a ‘natural’ man in his new environment, so he cannot 
remain a man without a history. All the activities that surround him consist of 
attempts to endow him with a history. In this way, the man with the zero-story, 
the creature with a narrative vacuum gives rise to a mass of fantastic rumours. 
This is, incidentally, to describe the way in which a mystery functions. Daumer 
the Romantic rejects any investigation into Hauser’s ‘true’ life-history, because 
this would undermine his Romantic narrative, which strategically preserves the 
mystery of the situation and presents the secret as a wonder. But at the same time, 
the others, who have chosen Hauser as the object of their research, start looking 
for the lost life-history of the young man with the pseudonym. In particular, Presi-
dent von Feuerbach, who functions as a detective in the novel, the detective being 
24   Part 1: Culture and its Narratives
he who is able to throw some light on the mystery and illuminate the hitherto 
unknown narrative. With stubborn meticulousness, Feuerbach reconstructs the 
story behind the narrative vacuum. He does this in a detailed memoir showing 
him to be the abandoned crown prince of the House of Baden-Zähringen, thereby 
using mythic material just as Daumer does, not that of the ‘natural’ man without 
original sin, but the disowned son who is seen as a danger by his own family 
(Joseph, Oedipus). The nameless man without a life-history has exerted an endur-
ing fascination, as the many literary adaptations from Wassermann to Handke 
prove, as well as attempts to use the methods of modern genetic engineering to 
examine this and other hypotheses. In contrast to Handke’s interpretation, in 
which the man without speech is manipulated and socialised through linguistic 
training, Hauser’s problem is that he ‘possesses’ no history. This border marks 
that threshold of the frightening, which makes the population react aggressively 
towards him. But before he has been given a life-history which he is required 
to put on like a set of symbolic clothes, he falls victim to an assassin. This act 
destroys the unprepossessing man with the immense aura of mystery, but not 
the question of his past. The dimension of fantasy in Feuerbach’s narrative corre-
sponds with the intensity with which the narrative refuses to step out of the dark-
ness. Because the narrative vacuum is so absolute, the imagination permits itselfa ‘sovereign’ resolution of the story. The mystery becomes a condition of absolute 
inaccessibility and thus a place where an essentially uncontrolled imagination 
celebrates itself, one in which the impossible has become probable.
It can be concluded ex negativo from this that the concept of an original 
humanity established by Rousseau’s discourse on individual ‘natural men’ as 
well as on the noble savage derives from a fantasy that is constructed as a nar-
rative: it is the story of the fall of a humanity without time or history into a time 
which is the conditio sine qua non for the divided nature of man himself. But this 
story like all others is retrospectively constructed; it is a story which painfully 
marks the distance between the earlier presumed innocence of ‘childhood’ and 
the guilty present. (cf. Alefeld 1996) That the paths of Daumer and the foundling 
diverge is not least because the myth that Daumer establishes has no need of a 
tangible, if strange life-history. Increasingly disappointed by the ‘humanisation’ 
of his pupil, Daumer tries his utmost until the end to put a stop to the young 
man’s dreams of his mother in a fairy-tale castle, because this would endanger 
his own narrative plan. What makes the case of Caspar Hauser so attractive for 
a narrative-based theory of culture, over and beyond the exemplary reference to 
the inescapability of narrative, is the fact that one is situated here in a construct 
in which identity is produced. It is about a story in the story: how a man is sym-
bolically brought into the world by giving him a mysterious life-history. What dis-
 The Hidden Narratives   25
tinguishes narrative from discourse is not so much the level of abstraction as the 
temporal and goal-directed dimension. 
It is science, law and literature (in the form of Wassermann’s novel) which 
produce, distribute and determine identity. Culture can be understood as the 
process which strives to silence that which is frightening and terrible. The 
deepest motivation of all those who think up stories about the young man with 
the false name is precisely this: if the story were to be found and with it the right 
name which symbolically marks the unique and individual role in the course of 
unknown, mysterious events, then the intolerably frightening could be removed 
or at least put to rest. 
A vacuum of this sort is just one example of a state of hidden presence and 
inevitability of narrative. Others are conceivable: the pre-supposed and the sup-
pressed narrative or the self-evident narrative, which must not be expressed in 
order to be anticipated: in respect to culture, the most important narratives are 
probably those which are normally latent, and are only made into central themes 
(or make themselves central) under special circumstances. 
The cave paintings of Lascaux, which people of very differing provenance 
have intensively studied – for example artists and anthropologists – can only be 
reconstructed in a similarly ambiguous and fantastic way as the life-history of 
Caspar Hauser, because we do not know the narratives of the culture on which 
these paintings are based. But even the iconography of the Bismarck column in 
Essen from the year 1900 may pose some riddles for the non-specialist observer. 
A culture which has forgotten the basic content of the Christian narratives has dif-
ficulty decoding the stories represented in church windows and on altars.
‘Classical’ modern abstract painting constitutes a special case in this context; 
it abstains from any sort of visual representation and of course from any narra-
tive component. But both Kasimir Malewitsch’s Black Square and Barnet New-
mann’s Who’s afraid of Red Yellow and Blue are based on stories which one must 
know in order to understand the paintings in question. Those people who angrily 
attacked these ‘decadent’ paintings (not only in National Socialist Germany, but 
also in democratic America, as Danto reports) are not familiar with the narra-
tives on which this art is based; in the case of Newmann that is, for example, 
the Jewish mystical Gnosis of the Kabbala, in Malewitsch’s case the Christian-
Orthodox concept of the magic of the pictorial image. Their anger is not without 
foundation, but is rooted in the panicked fear of a bottomless adventure. On the 
whole, the uncomprehending in their helpless anger have in part not understood 
that all these paintings of classical modernity do not just represent an exegesis 
of the Kantian aesthetic questioning the conditions of the possibility of fine arts, 
but also with an aesthetic radicalism enforce the ban on images (as demanded 
by God in the Old Testament) against a background of an exploding flood of pic-
26   Part 1: Culture and its Narratives
tures. It should also not be forgotten that the art of classical modernity has been 
influenced by the modern ‘master stories’, in Danto’s sense.
Even Andy Warhol’s postmodern Brillo Box or Duchamps’ Urinoir cannot be 
understood just from the objects themselves but reveal their enigmatic and pro-
vocative meaning through knowledge of the discourses, narratives and life histo-
ries on which they are based. They produce new, possibly inaccessible offers of 
identification.
It can therefore be argued that cultural manifestations which are not in them-
selves structured in space and time as narratives do nonetheless form part of the 
narrative ensemble of a culture and presuppose certain stories. I would like to 
categorise such latent narratives as ‘presupposed’ because they are necessary for 
the decoding of ‘silent’ objects; unfamiliarity with them sets alternative narra-
tives in motion: for example, the story of swindlers who take other people for 
fools, or of people who are simply unable to paint. (Cf. Danto 2000)
Stories can be empty and this is the extreme case, which brings about the 
horror vacui; They can be ‘presupposed’ and they can also be suppressed. In con-
nection with Sigmund Freud and Critical Theory, Mario Erdheim has discussed 
how the unconscious is not at all a work of nature, but is culturally produced. 
Erdheim interprets culture as a process carrying on above people bringing more 
and more individuals into interdependence.
Freud’s concept of culture is, in Erdheim’s opinion, a dynamic one in which 
it is understood as a movement and a history and much less as a structure. Seen 
in this way, and not just in its authoritarian or totalitarian versions, culture is a 
global machine of censorship:
In the service of the ruling power, the individual has to renounce the fulfillment of his 
wishes, not least in order to make room for the pressure of social wish-fulfillment. Instead 
of realising his wishes, he renders them unconscious (Erdheim 1984, 217).
Culture allows people to formulate symbolically their common interdependency; 
the forbidden stories I have identified correspond on the symbolic level to the 
renunciation of instincts on the psychological level. To extend the ideas of Freud 
and Erdheim, such stories do not need to be primarily sexual at all; they can 
also be of a political nature. Forbidden stories in the former Yugoslavia were, for 
example, the diverse national narratives of the Serbs, Croats and the Slovenes; 
other forbidden stories (narrating them constitutes in many countries a breach 
of law) are for instance all revisionist stories whose purpose is to show that the 
Shoah was an extraordinary fraud perpetrated by world Jewry. Other political 
narratives have emerged in the meantime in postmodern market societies – for 
instance, those which claim capitalism to be the final and unsurpassable histori-
 The Hidden Narratives   27
cal form of society. The misleading term of the ‘unconscious’ should admittedly 
be used here with caution. Even the way Freud speaks of the unconscious is mis-
leading, for it is precisely those mental layers which can be brought back into a 
state of retrospective recollection through the cultural technique of psychoana-