books i've read for my german oral exam (introduction)

** I wrote this in preparation for my oral exams **

For my oral exam in German, I've taken on a list of books and theoretical texts. I started with Stiller by Max Frisch, a novel that delves into the question of identity—how it's constructed, how it can be both liberating and constraining, and how humans try to escape from it. The protagonist, who calls himself Mr. White, is arrested while crossing the Swiss border, accused of being a once-famous sculptor who had disappeared long ago—namely, Stiller. However, Mr. White denies this, and thus begins the book: "I am not Stiller!" he shouts from his cell. To prove his identity, he chronicles his entire life in two notebooks, recounting his increasingly bizarre and absurd adventures and travels. Yet simultaneously an intimacy develops with this Stiller: Who was this man, how did he live his life, what desires, pleasures, fears did he have? What did he leave behind when he vanished that day? It doesn't take long for Mr. White's and Herr Stiller's identities to become almost indistinguishable.

Frisch often grapples with the problem of portraiture (ger. Bildnisproblem); that every image one has of a person is false. "Thou shall not make an image for thyself," it says. A command, a mandate—the fear of not being seen because seeing occurs two-dimensionally, superficially, because seeing is a violent act against the self.

I moved on to the next book. While in Stiller the Homo Ludens takes center stage, the playing human who creates and explores new identities through imaginative stories, in his Homo Faber—as the title suggests—stands the Homo Faber, the maker who uses his surroundings as a toolbox. The protagonist Walter Faber is an engineer, a pragmatist, a rationalist, a reductionist, but his stance is increasingly challenged as he becomes subjected to a sequence of absurd events that defy logical explanation.

This technophilic attitude of Mr. Faber can somewhat be understood as a defense mechanism, shielding him from uncertainty and his own ignorance. All tragedy and fate are categorized as cause and effect, uncontrollable feelings dismissed as figments of the brain and hormonal nonsense. Faber is thus portrayed as a stoic, neutral observer of his circumstances. Yet, this attitude is a mere illusion, as humans cannot distance themselves from themselves, can never escape their subjectivity. But the human image of Homo Faber gives him the opportunity to distance himself, to slip into a prescribed role, that of the technician, thus finding order and security, seeing the world soberly, finding simplicity in everything.

In her work The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt precisely saw this as the problem of technology, especially the rapidly advancing space technology of the time. She argued that with humans in space, an illusion would emerge that humans are free from the forces that keep them on Earth, that with the help of technology and science an objective worldview would emerge, one that transcends our own consciousness: The God's eye view.

In truth, this way of seeing is not neutral because vision itself cannot be neutral. What happens here instead is a violent ordering of the world, consisting of separated, discrete, and instrumentalized pieces of information.