Revolution and the Evolution of a Man

Klaus Uhltzscht is an angry young man. Born at one of the more depressing junctures of modern European history, the night of Aug. 20, 1968, when Soviet tanks were passing through East Germany on their way to invade Czechoslovakia, Klaus sees his life as dominated by a powerful triumvirate of politics, his parents and his penis. The story of the latter, he brags early on, is intertwined with the story of the toppling of the Berlin Wall. Klaus’ megalomania instantly captures the reader’s attention and sets an ambitious satirical tone for Thomas Brussig’s “Heroes Like Us,” which its publisher is presenting as the first novel to address the collapse for the former East Germany by someone who grew up with the Berlin Wall.

Cast in the form of a first-person confession, “Heroes Like Us” owes an obvious debt to Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint.” Where Portnoy spoke to Dr. Spielvogel, a psychiatrist, Klaus confides in Kitzelstein, a New York Times reporter. Like Portnoy, Klaus is resentful and mocking of his upbringing, sexually frustrated and autoerotically experimental (with a raw chicken substituting for Portnoy’s memorable piece of raw liver). Yet these arrogations--or homages--lack their model’s brilliant integration of setting, character and voice. “Heroes Like Us” is a riff whose outrageousness tends to feel more forced than funny.

At the same time, the novel manages to take the Western reader into a world that, while no longer actually shrouded from view, does still remain obscure to us. Brussig’s Klaus reports from the trenches of iron-curtain adolescence, whose demons turn out to be fairly universal, if with an exaggerated totalitarian tincture. Demon father is a cold, enigmatic man who does undisclosed work at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, while demon mother is a sanitary inspector. This “goddess of hygiene” keeps separate bars of soap at home (blue for hands, red for genitals) and joins with Klaus’ father in creating a family life of considerable repression and near hopelessness. “My father had given up on me,” Klaus says in a pithy summary, “my mother hadn’t given up on me yet.”

Klaus tumbles out of this world and into an uneasy adulthood, where he undergoes two educational journeys. The first is sexual. Klaus is a teenager at summer camp when he learns about the procreative act, which naturally he cannot imagine his parents performing. When he masturbates, he expects to be reported to the police. During his first sexual encounter, he contracts gonorrhea; undeterred, he develops a fascination with various forms of sexual perversity, including exhibitionism and (attempted) rape. Nearly all of his experiences with women are puerile or misogynistic or both.

Clearly Klaus’ sex life is not meant to be taken completely at face value. “I became a pervert,” he explains dryly, “in order to promote the triumph of socialism.” Klaus’ perversion functions in part as an indictment of the socialist strictures he lives under. Indeed, Klaus’ political evolution is colored throughout by the absurd and tangled machinations that have accompanied depictions of bureaucracy from Kafka on. Klaus goes to work for the Stasi, where he is assigned to the Accounts Department of Periodicals Postal Subscription Service. He learns about the “negation of negation”; endures long, aimless stakeouts; and becomes an ineffectual burglar, kidnapper and pursuer of post-structuralists and other phantom enemies.

Some of Klaus’ most penetrating observations are made when he falls out of voice, and speaks with a maturity and perspective that feel distinctly authorial. “If you really want to peer into the abyss, ask us what human rights are,” Klaus tells Kitzelstein at one point. “We know them as blind people know colors, by hearsay alone.” “No, the system wasn’t inhumane, but it was misanthropic,” he says elsewhere. “It didn’t disregard human nature, it contravened it.” Ideologically oppressed though Klaus (or Brussig) may perceive his countrymen, however, he is blisteringly impatient with revisionism and hypocrisy: “No one will admit to having conformed, everyone was in some way ‘anti,’ ” he rails, “yet . . . the Wall continued to stand.”

Eventually, Klaus’ sexual and political journeys merge as, following several complex plot turns, Klaus undergoes surgery in which his penis becomes phenomenally enlarged. Since his operation coincides with the first public demonstrations that lead to pulling down the Berlin Wall, the novel can be said to conclude in a double surge of potency. While the author’s metaphorical ambitions may turn a little, well, limp by this point, he never sentimentalizes or simplifies the fall of Communism. “We East Germans owe it to the world and ourselves to hold a debate,” Klaus cautions; with “Heroes Like Us,” Brussig has at least contributed a few incisive opening remarks.