The Lingering Effects of History
This book is a love story with a thirty-year age gap between the man and the woman. They come from two different epochal eras in German history. The man has been shaped and fashioned in part by the memories of Nazi fascism whereas the young woman knows only life behind the Berlin Wall. The effects of historical oppression on the psyche informs their psychological fragility. They each must deal with the impact of national history upon their own personal engagement with another person. The story illuminates how external societal pressures impact private motivations in ways that we often do not recognize or understand.
Dominance and Submission
When the romance begins, the older man is in a position of dominance over the innocent and inexperienced younger woman. He becomes physically and psychologically domineering. As the relationship continues, however, other differences in their circumstances begin to create a shift in power. The older man is married and has a son and this domestic situation creates a vulnerability that becomes every bit as important to the status of their relationship as the initial divergence in ages. For the young woman, the relationship gives way to a loss of innocence and accumulation of experience which turns the tables. She eventually becomes the dominant member the coupling and exerts retributive justice for the ways in which he mistreated her when their positions were reversed. This theme of dominance and submission is set against the backdrop of the broader historical situation of Nazism and Iron Curtain politics.
Search for Identity
While one might assume that this them applies more concretely to younger woman, it actually is fairly even distributed. Even though he is middle-aged, Hans does not have a firm grasp of self-identity. This is in part because his life has spanned the two epochs of fascism and communism as the defining ideological dimension of Germany. The story is taking place at the time of the collapse of a divided Germany just shortly before the Berlin Wall comes down. Thus, the issue of self-identity for the Katharina is related to the concept of the imposition of identity breaking down and the enforcement of personal identity being established. The issue of the age gap also plays an important role in the expression of this theme, of course, since the two main characters are associated with two vastly different generations.
