A Necessary Novel

ILIJA TROJANOW’S DER WELTENSAMMLER (The collector of worlds, 2006),a novel in three long chapters about the Victorian explorer Richard F. Burton, was welcomed in the review sections of the highbrow German-language press. In fact, its author, already well known for his travel writing and journalism, soon came to be feted as a new literary star. Ilija Trojanow has good looks and well-developed communication skills and is ready to take sides in public debates. A further selling point is his fascinating and unique personal backstory, which is often summarized on book covers and in newspaper profiles. Born in Bulgaria in 1965, his family fled the communist regime when he was seven years old, finally settling in Nairobi, Kenya, where he attended first an English-speaking school, then the Deutsche Schule, where he learnt German for the first time and took his Abitur (graduation diploma). After studying in Munich, he lived in Bombay and Cape Town before settling recently in Vienna. Contemporary cosmopolitan Germany is tempted to see an ideal image of itself reflected in such a writer. Austrians are reminded of a time when the peripheries of the Habsburg Empire produced many of their most celebrated poets and thinkers. Trojanow’s Der Weltensammler was a novel that all the German-speaking countries perhaps needed to read in 2006. It was received both as an original Abenteuerroman (adventure novel, the term that appears most frequently in reviews) and as a contribution to discussions about race and identity in the wake of the American “war on terror” and particularly of the ongoing German debates about immigration and the value of culturally heterogeneous societies.

What was missed in the broadly positive assessments of the novel and its unlikely hero for a German-language novel is that it enacts the opposite of contemporary liberal thinking on interculturality. Trojanow’s Burton is not the role model for interaction between East and West that he appears at first sight to be. In fact, by the end he has more or less failed. In this chapter, I wish to focus on a specific and as yet unexplored theme in the novel; namely, the body as a source of metaphor and identity. A discussion of the body will highlight a feature that has not been fully recognized in critical discussion of the novel hitherto.