Materialisierte Entfremdung. ,Schöpferisches Verfahren‘ in Marlen Haushofers Die Wand

Abstract

The central subject of Marlen Haushofer's famous novel The Wall is the
reflection of alienation as “relationship of relationshiplessness” (Rahel Jaeggi). It
reflects on this by resorting to a metaphor for alienation that has become topical: the
glass wall. The novel's innovative literary effort is that it takes this metaphor literally in
the form of a wall that suddenly appears and extends endlessly into the world. This
literalization of the metaphor, however, does not result in overcoming alienation in
the sense of liberating the nameless main character. Rather, it is part of a genuinely
creative procedure – a procedure that Deleuze and Guattari, following Franz Kafka, call
“way out”. And a procedure for which the protagonist must pay the price of an
inescapable ambivalence.