LAUREN ELKIN, ANGELA MERKEL, ÉDOUARD MANET Seen & Read – by Isabelle Graw

Lauren Elkin, Scaffolding

Lauren Elkin, 2022
This book has everything it takes to keep me spellbound and reading: from a protagonist (Anne) who works as a psychoanalyst and is attempting to understand her complicated love life with the help of Jacques Lacan’s theory of desire, to her detailed descriptions of Paris’s Belleville district, where Anne spends days on end sitting behind scaffolding in her apartment while her building is being renovated. It also features a younger neighbor, a queer-feminist activist named Clémentine, who occasionally borrows books from Anne and challenges her with a criticism of Sigmund Freud’s patriarchal ideas. It eventually emerges that Clémentine’s current boyfriend, Jonathan, is Anne’s ex, whom she never got over and now begins meeting again. Anne has sex with both Clémentine and Jonathan in turn, while her husband pursues his career in London. Their relationship hit a rough patch following a traumatic miscarriage, after which Anne, unable to work, canceled all her patients. Each day she visits a nearby bakery, where a stranger pays for her baguette. These repeated encounters with an older man from the neighborhood, in particular, recall André Breton’s surrealist dérive in his novel Nadja (1928). Unlike Breton, however, Elkin repeatedly pulls her protagonist out of her somnambulist wanderings and back into hard reality; as a result, Anne seeks the regular advice of her therapist, Esther, who offers dry but helpful commentaries on the difficulties she is experiencing. While there’s naturally no happy ending, those involved in the story do all end up reaching a sort of resigned state of maturity: Anne starts working again and has a child with her husband after deciding to stay with him, while Clémentine and Jonathan move out of the apartment building, whose scaffolding is fittingly also removed.
Paris serves as more than just the setting for this novel – the city itself is made into a protagonist of its own, offering an incisive view into how history lives on in architecture and urban structures. The descriptions of the sex scenes also manage to be pleasantly restrained rather than voyeuristic. Beyond this, the book is a page-turner that skillfully succeeds in combining challenging psychoanalytical reflections with a plot and a quaffable writing style more reminiscent of a breezy light novel.
Random House/Chatto and Windus, 2024, 400 pages.
Angela Merkel and Beate Baumann, Freiheit. Erinnerungen 1954–2021

Angela Merkel, 1991
It has often been said that Angela Merkel’s memoirs are very extensive and at times difficult to read. For me, too, there were places where I felt as if I were reading the slightly excessive notes recording her daily life as German chancellor; the more detailed and technical these accounts are, the greater the temptation to skip a few pages becomes. While some editorial tightening would have been helpful here, the accusation (repeatedly leveled at the book since its release) that Merkel is insufficiently critical of her own actions throughout is entirely unfounded. It’s actually the opposite: it feels as if every third page finds her regretting formulating a particular phrase in a way that seems imprudent to her in retrospect. Or she considers whether, from today’s perspective, she should have acted differently at certain times, such as when choosing not to publicly identify herself as a feminist, or (even more problematically, in my view) not to vote for gay marriage. She thus shows a high degree of self-reflection in this book while being careful to avoid self-righteousness, which also makes it interesting to those who, like me, largely reject her politics and those of the CDU more widely. Merkel’s unsparing view of the selling-off of the GDR, and of the brutal devaluation of numerous working biographies and dissolution of companies by the Treuhand authorities following German reunification, are evidence of her willingness to distance herself from her earlier positions. The recollections of her years as chancellor also make it clear how much opposition she faced from within her own party, especially following her decision to open Germany’s borders to refugees in the summer of 2015. Merkel makes it clear that it was primarily SPD politicians whose support she could count on at that time; as a reader, one repeatedly reaches the conclusion that she was simply in the wrong party. Horst Seehofer’s attempts to remove Merkel from power due to her policy on refugees are described in detail. It’s impressive to hear how she, as a powerful woman, endured and fought off the pent-up aggressions of the men in her party, who felt symbolically castrated by her.
Her private life is also addressed in the book, if only fleetingly: the end of her first marriage is dealt with in a few words, while all we learn about her second husband, Joachim Sauer, is that he was present at certain events and often saw their holiday plans interrupted due to various political crises. However, Merkel makes more detailed reference to the bouts of trembling she suffered in public, which her osteopath declared were tremors of relief, triggered by her decision to retreat from politics. Her taste for colorful outfits also gets a mention, with Merkel attributing her weakness for bright colors to the sense of joy she felt at having escaped the monochrome dreariness of the GDR. Women from her circle are also honored throughout, including Beate Baumann, a long-term employee and coauthor of the book, and her make-up artist, who still does her hair and make-up to this day.
Merkel also offers her extensive insight into the events leading up to current conflicts like the war in Ukraine, and into the tough negotiations she held with Putin before the invasion of Crimea. It’s clear she sees politics as partly a matter of negotiating compromises, including with unpopular autocrats where necessary; instead of breaking off contact, she always made efforts to maintain communication with them. The fact that Merkel was driven by objective necessities, and only rarely by her own sensibilities, seems positive – particularly in the face of an increasingly widespread style of politics in which affect replaces prudence and self-interest makes the idea of responsible “service” to the state a thing of the past. Even if I often didn’t agree with her policies, reading this book made me wish we could see a return of Merkel’s political understanding, and especially her professional expertise across numerous fields.
Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 2024, 736 pages.
Édouard Manet, Dans la Serre

Édouard Manet, “Dans la Serre,” 1879
For a podcast, I was recently asked to pick a painting from the Nationalgalerie’s collection. I chose Édouard Manet’s Dans la Serre (In the conservatory) – a painting from 1879 that I have visited time and again, as I do on this dark and gloomy January day. The painting depicts a young couple: an elegantly dressed woman who could have come from a fashion catalogue, staring into space, and a male figure who stands behind her and seems to be seeking her attention. The woman sits on a long bank bench, which stretches across the image and structures it horizontally. Lush plants fill the background. The ring on the woman’s finger tells us she is married. The finger of the man, who bends over the woman in a way that could be interpreted as indicating either harassment or intimate conversation, also bears a ring. His hand holds a cigar, which points in the direction of the woman and appears as a symbol of phallic power. The fact that this a portrait of the Guillemets, a real married couple, does nothing to change the ambiguity of this scene, which a cartoon published in the Journal amusant at the time correspondingly exaggerated as an attack by a seducer on his innocent victim.
Exhibited in the Paris Salon in 1879, the work met a largely hostile reception. In my view, however, it combines all of the aspects I value so much in Manet’s painting. He was among those painters who oriented themselves toward the laws of fashion, and so it’s no coincidence that Monsieur Guillemet was the owner of a prestigious fashion boutique. His wife, Jules, was considered one of the most elegant women in Paris. Typical of Manet’s interest in the lifeworlds of women, he devotes himself to the details of her fashionable styling in this painting: her feathered hat is painted in fluffy shades of yellow, while her refined gray dress with its skirt spreading out in folds across the bench is given Manet’s full painterly attention – and captured using brushwork that underlines the materiality of the gray-white paint he used. With her blank expression and studied posture, the female figure demonstrates how social norms and pressures shape the body; Manet’s figures are always visibly staged, their vitality always a studied one. I’m particularly impressed by how the painting depicts the difficulties men and women can have communicating with one another: while the woman seems as if she were absent, the man is attempting to make contact with her. The fact this male figure displays a certain resemblance to Manet himself is further proof that his interest here is in a particular type of man – the amorous type, who tries in vain to force his way into the worlds of women. As so often with Manet, this painting, a portrait that is simultaneously almost a landscape due to the lush plants in the background, combines different genres. At the same time, these plants appear domesticated, with a graphic, wallpaper-like quality that suggests they have been used for purely decorative purposes. As in so many of Manet’s paintings, the conservatory this fashionable couple poses in is an intermediate space – a place where interior and exterior flow into one another. Manet’s interest as a painter is in how the outside – in the form of conventions, norms, and pressures – appears on the inside, and conversely in how his figures appear to anticipate a judgmental gaze from outside. Another reason why I value him so immensely.
Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, “Art of the 19th Century,” permanent exhibition.
Isabelle Graw is the cofounder and publisher of TEXTE ZUR KUNST and teaches art history and theory at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. Her most recent publications include In Another World: Notes, 2014–2017 (Sternberg Press, 2020), Three Cases of Value Reflection: Ponge, Whitten, Banksy (Sternberg Press, 2021), and On the Benefits of Friendship (Sternberg Press, 2023).
Image credit: 1. © Rob Kulisek; 2. © Sophie Davidson; 3. © IMAGO / HärtelPRESS; 4. Public domain, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie