Jakob Hein: “The Hypnotist” – Culture

Arthur Schopenhauer’s motto, which Jakob Hein put in front of his GDR village novel “The Hypnotist”, is more tricky than it seems. “One is never as happy in the realm of reality as one is in the realm of thought,” he says, as simply as it is vague, but Hein is concerned with this happiness, however it arises.

Schopenhauer, however, for whom the world emerged from will and imagination, was not so naïve as to regard reality and thought as two separate realms that had nothing to do with one another. And neither is Jakob Hein. Rather, it shows how ideas are able to open up the narrow world and what power they could take on in a closed society like the GDR. Thoughts are free and they are real. What else? Reality becomes greater when it also includes ideas.

Hein doesn’t need much for his experimental setup. The action takes place in the fictional town of Soldin, which is in the Lower Oder Valley on the Polish border, i.e. on the extreme edge of the closed GDR. There the cranes stand on the river meadows and tell of distant journeys. The few people who have never left their area know and stalk each other, waiting for something to happen.

And something happens: Micha, a young man who is a bit disturbed after three years in the NVA, moves into his grandmother’s yard, who soon dies. He is holed up here after he had to drop out of his psychology studies because, in a seminar paper on Schopenhauer, he brought Schopenhauer’s theory and the Workers’ Party’s ideas of reality into an unfavorable connection.

Micha is lacking in drive and lets the farm go to waste. And yet a flourishing company soon developed here, because word got around that he was familiar with hypnosis and was able to fulfill the wishes of his clients – mostly women from Berlin who found him – in hypnosis. Most of them want to travel: to Paris or to the south or, like Peggy, to a concert by the clash to London, at least to places that in real socialist reality would not be allowed until retirement age at the earliest.

On the one hand, Hein’s novel describes how the hypnosis business developed, how energetic women moved into Micha’s farm and turned the small world upside down. This shows the power of an idea in a very concrete and direct way. The questions about the reality content of the hypnosis experiences are more tricky. The journeys presented, which arise from the most pressing desires of the visitors, have the virtue of being much more beautiful than they ever really were.

The questions in this novel are not of a political, but of a philosophical nature

There are no mishaps, no bad weather, no lost passports, and anyone who, like Anika, who has strong desires, imagines meeting Alain Delon on the plane, will do so. So what speaks – quite apart from ecological and material advantages – against the principle of traveling in one’s own head?

However, the state authorities are also asking themselves this question, and as it soon turns out, the Stasi is not standing idle. Are mental journeys dangerous to the system as long as there is no freedom to travel? Are travelers returning home? And in what reality? Or do you, like Anika, not find your way back to your old life as a secretary at VEB Lacke und Farben Berlin?

These questions are less of a political nature than of a practical and philosophical nature. Hein plays with them more than seriously discusses them. He creates a small utopia that doesn’t refer directly to the change in circumstances, but subtly unhinges reality from one’s own imagination.

What happens in hypnosis misses the Schopenhauer motto by a hair’s breadth

Nobody in this setting would think of quoting Schiller’s exclamation from “Don Carlos”: “Give freedom of thought, sire!” It’s not about the political level, but about escaping the grasp of the political. But how this desire leads to the emergence of a flourishing rural commune in the deepest province is a beautiful, dialectic point of the story. The movement out of the world leads right into it.

Hein tells the story from different perspectives, an old woman from the neighborhood speaks, then the secretary of the LPG chairman, whose desk is used for all activities in the village. Only Micha, the central figure, doesn’t get his own chapter. He is only ever seen by others. Oddly enough, the largest chapter on Anika is written in authorial narrative form, while all the others are perspective-bound. That makes the book a little awkward, especially since the first person doesn’t always work out, even if everyone in the village claims to know everything about everyone else.

What happens in hypnosis misses the Schopenhauer motto by a hair’s breadth, because what happens is not mental work, but results from the switching off of thinking. Only when you succeed in wanting nothing and abandoning yourself completely to the unconscious world of ideas does something happen. This wanting is not a specific wish, but an open letting of the unimagined.

“The Hypnotist” is an easy, but certainly not shallow novel

Traveling in the realm of hypnosis should not be quite as mechanical as Hein portrays it. Micha speaks of “guided relaxation”. It’s more like that. And maybe there is a tricky potential for resistance in it, even if the state power doesn’t quite know how to deal with it.

Hein’s “Hypnotiseur” is an easy, but certainly not shallow, novel. He recalls the absurdities of the reality of the GDR, a society in which used cars cost more than new cars and in which a fictitious, imaginary job was enough to survive.

But “The Hypnotist” is more than that: the successful parody of a utopian novel as well as an elegant variant of the currently so fashionable village novel, especially in East Germany. Above all, however, it is a playful and humorous philosophical novel about the dimensions of reality, which, by making the possible strong, spreads enormous optimism.