"Hoping without Hope": Positive Pessimism in the Literary Works of Marlen Haushofer Sibylle Berg

This dissertation offers a reading of select texts by literary writers Marlen Haushofer and Sibylle Berg as "positively pessimistic". Via three chapters, I engage in close textual analysis and place Haushofer’s novels Die Wand and Die Mansarde into conversation with Berg’s Vielen Dank für das Leben and Der Mann schläft. The goal of this project is to challenge the prevailing reception of these texts, which deems them utterly hopeless or dystopian in their outlook. In particular, I argue for the positive messages inherent in the novels’ engagement with topics of deviance, isolation, confusion, and despair, drawing also on theories of psychoanalysis, gender, and existentialism. By critically discussing concepts such as progress, rationality, subjectivity, hope, and happiness, I re-evaluate and deconstruct common societal understandings of and approaches to the notions of "good" and "bad" as these are projected onto the novels’ depictions of the human condition that is deemed fundamentally helpless. The analysis concludes that the novels’ respective radical content and disconcerting tone actually call for an absolute commitment to goodness and love, and a sensory reconnection with the surrounding world that can be achieved by gaining distance from symbolic pillars of identity, as well as by cultivating an awareness that life’s meaning remains enigmatic and that one is both alive and is also going to die. What results from this worldview is an enhanced gratitude for being alive, a playfulness towards the everyday, and the possibility for an intense contact and genuine connection with others and the natural world. I argue that the authors can only convey these positive messages by previously uncovering and foregrounding the timeless destruction and emptiness that lingers at the core of the social order and that frames nearly every aspect of human life. For this reason, I qualify Berg’s and Haushofer’s uncompromised commitment to unsentimental portrayals of negative feelings, decay, and destruction "positively pessimistic".

Department dc:contributor.department

Germanic Languages and Literatures

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Lange, Elisabeth

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Fenner, Angelica

• german
• marlen haushofer
• pessimism
• sibylle berg

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1807/145135

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/145135