Journalist, novelist, and poet, Lin Hierse is one of the most exciting emerging voices in the German-language literary scene. A long-time contributor to taz with a background in Asian Studies and Human Geography, her biweekly column “Poetical Correctness” ran from 2020-2023. Lin’s debut novel, Wovon wir träumen [What We Dream Of] (Piper 2022) tells the story of a young woman endeavoring to understand her own life in Germany through her family’s maternal legacies. Das Verschwinden der Welt [The Disappearing World] (Piper 2024), Lin’s sophomore novel, investigates the many intersecting lives in an old apartment house in Shanghai—illuminating the changing function of such sites of memory, the ongoing entanglements of Chinese and German history, and the complex threats and promise of renewal. The following interview took place via email correspondence during the month of September 2024.
JC: In both of your novels, you trace out China and Germany’s entangled histories. In Wovon wir träumen [What We Dream Of], you investigate the disappearance of Hamburg’s Chinatown; in Das Verschwinden der Welt [The Disappearing World], you point to other legacies of the Second World War. These are things which are largely absent from the dominant German narrative: stories that have been forgotten or ignored. In this sense, can your writing be understood as an attempt to combat this kind of forgetting? Or more as an attempt to retell history differently? Or is it both?
LH: Writing is always also a means of holding on. I didn’t exactly sit down with the intention of writing against ignorance or against the tendency to look away, but my work does depict a different normality: a different perspective than that of mainstream German society. China and Germany are intimately entangled with one another for me, and yet even so, it still took a long time for me to learn about the Nazi persecution of Hamburg’s Chinese community or the Jewish ghetto in Shanghai. These historical connections and the gaps in our collective memory are something I’ve thought about a lot. It was important for me to process them literarily.
JC: In The Disappearing World, the house itself is also one of the narrators. One could almost say the building is a sort of anthropomorphized protagonist. Can you talk about this authorial decision? What, for example, can a house say that a human character can’t or shouldn’t? And what can these kind of narrative choices contribute against the disappearances your novel contends with?
LH: The house as narrator is a vessel in which all the desires and stories of its many occupants have been collected. It has the advantage that it can know more than all the human figures in the novel who can only tell about themselves and reveal their own stories. The house is not omniscient, but it knows more: It’s almost 100 years old. It’s seen the most disparate residents come and go; it’s experienced so much social upheaval. As a constant observer, it can get very close to the different characters. The house is always there, even when the individual characters are alone. And when they’re alone, they reveal things they don’t show the rest of society. As long as the house remains, the stories of the past century are there with it: the biographies, the scenes, the memories. And the secrets, too.
JC: In your first novel, What We Dream Of, the Chinese language plays a substantial role in the text and the topic of translation is a central part of the story: The mother as a simultaneous interpreter, the daughter as someone who is always translating between languages, families, cultures, and (hi)stories. Could you speak a little bit about the development of your own specific sense of language? Does translation play a role in your life as an author (also metaphorically speaking)?
LH: Translation for me is one of the most difficult and exciting undertakings in life. Because even if we speak the same language, it’s always a complex and often challenging task to understand what another person wants to say. It’s like a muscle that you need to train, a muscle that can also atrophy. And in this age of capitalism and hyper-individualization, I worry that we are increasingly convincing ourselves that this effort is simply a burden. Examining your own thoughts, being aware of your own feelings, practicing empathy: these are the foundational pillars of a functional and minimally unified society. On an interpersonal, but also on a political level, it’s extremely negligent for us to become less and less willing to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes and try to understand them. And in that sense, each free, artistic space becomes that much more important because these are places of translation. In order to create believable characters, you have to be prepared to ask questions: What is this person doing and why are they doing it?
JC: The locations in What We Dream Of—whether in China or in Germany—remains clear, even when the borders between dream and waking life begin to blur. In The Disappearing World, however, many characters and places are described in such a deliberate way as to make it difficult to attribute a particular identity or origin to them. How did you arrive at this decision?
LH: The Disappearing World is my utopia, in a way. I’m so incredibly exhausted, jaded, and bored by the way identity and origin are discussed in the German public sphere. Of course, this doesn’t mean that these topics are unimportant by any means, or that I somehow dream of making such differences go away. The different biographies of my characters become more apparent as you read. But my first priority was to show them as people: human beings who have experienced loss, who have lost their grip on the world around them, who are overwhelmed or paralyzed by the task of holding onto memories and living a good life at the same time. Being human means both the individual and the collective. I wanted to create a space in which the simultaneity of experience was given priority, where it could become apparent that you don’t need to know much about somebody else to feel connected to them. And that doesn’t work as well when identifying anchors like origin, appearance, or conduct are set in stone from the beginning. I love subtleties: uncertainty, irritation, fluidity. It keeps our thinking flexible and is far closer to our lived reality than you might think.
JC: For me, as a reader, these kinds of narrative choices make it so that I can see myself much more vividly in the text. I see this old house, and the disappearing world, too, in my own life. The house could be in San Francisco, Oakland, or Detroit. Berlin is also a place that’s really threatened in a fundamental way by this kind of disappearance and erasure. Do your own experiences with “disappearing” play a role in this sort of narrative murkiness?
LH: 100%. When I was first getting started with this novel, I had my own personal experience of loss. My auntie in Shanghai told me over the phone that she’d sold her old apartment and would be moving into a new, smaller place. Her husband had died unexpectedly the previous year, and her daughter had convinced her that she needed a restart. My heart broke far more than I would have expected. I’d spent something like my Chinese childhood in that apartment, or to put it differently: Every memory of staying in Shanghai was intimately bound up with this place. So much so that, at first, it didn’t even seem possible that this place would cease to exist for me and
that I would not even be able to take proper leave from it due to the distances. In retrospect, I know that might sound very dramatic, but who am I—who are we—when the places we feel most at home in disappear? These questions only repeat on a larger, more existential scale in the context of war, forced migration, or the climate crisis.
JC: To return to the topic of translation: The graduate students in my translation seminar at University of Michigan recently translated a passage from What We Dream Of as an exercise: A conversation between the narrator and her mother in which the narrator describes her mother’s career choices. The graduate students noticed how you frequently switch between the gendered word endings when describing the mother’s different possible careers, something that largely disappears in English translation. This was certainly a conscious decision on your part. In general, how do you approach gendered language as a part of your literary repertoire and how has this developed in your second novel?
LH: Language shapes realities, and for that reason, it’s only logical that language is contested. I think it’s a good thing that language changes and is increasingly called upon to become more inclusive and more just. Devices like the gender star, underscore, or colon are not the answer to everything, but they’re part of a political process that is at least creating new forms of visibility. I make use of them in my journalistic writing, but I can’t align them completely with the aesthetic demands of my literary work. So instead, I think much more deliberately about my use of gender and whom I wish to address in a specific sentence and maybe whom I don’t. And I see this awareness as a victory. Honestly, I think it’s completely absurd for authors to try to brand considerations about gender as some sort of literary threat when at the same time we’re the people who spend hours racking our brains over adjectives and syntax.
JC: Building off this answer for my final question: You work as both an author and a journalist. Writing is a big part of your professional life—writing is your profession. But, of course, you write differently and for a different readership depending on your medium. Whom, on the one hand, do you hope to reach with your journalistic writing that you can’t reach with your literature and whom do you hope to reach with your literary writing that you can’t reach through your journalism? Why?
LH: I’m not sure that I would divide things up this way. At least regarding literature which—unlike journalism—does not necessarily have a direct mandate, so to speak. With literature, I think relatively late (if at all) about who is going to be reading my work. I think I probably like the notion best that each of my texts has the potential to reach people, but on different levels.
Read Jon Cho Polizzi’s sample of The Disappearing World
Read Jon Cho Polizzi and Elisabeth Sun’s sample of What We Dream Of
Lin Hierse Lin Hierse was born in 1990 in Braunschweig, and read Asian Studies and Human Geography. She lives in Berlin and since 2019 has been an editor with the German newspaper taz, publishing a regular column on ‘Poetical Correctness’.
Dr. Jon Cho-Polizzi is a Collegiate Fellow and Assistant Professor of German at the University of Michigan. He received his PhD from UC Berkeley in the fields of German and Medieval Studies. His research focuses on contemporary literature, literary translation, migration, poetry, translingualism, and radical diversity in the German-speaking world. Jon is the winner of the 2024 Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize. He lives and works between Michigan, California, and Berlin.
