The Yellow Flower of Norway: Trauma and Repetition in Hans Henny Jahnn's Perrudja

Despite the technical brilliance and philosophical resonance of his dramas and novels, Hans Henny Jahnn (1894-1959) remains a neglected figure in AngloAmerican Germanistik. Jahnn positioned himself as a literary outsider both in his earlydramas, inwhich heexploresthemesinvolving brutality andhomoeroticism,as wellasinhislifeasanexileandpacifist.Jahnn'sunfinished novelfrom1929revolves around the eponymous anti-hero Perrudja, who is defined by his own outsider status. The world's richest man, with no knowledge or memories of his parents, he lives alone in the mountains of Norway, isolated by his great wealth and unfulfilled romantic yearnings.Perrudja (1929) is a bewildering novel consisting of constantly shifting narratological strategies that make it difficult to retain the roten Faden of the primary narrative. This red thread is essentially the story of how Perrudja pursues romantic absolution by seeking the hand of Signe, the most beautiful woman in the Gespenstertal. Having obtained her hand but failed to consummate the marriage, Perrudja then seeks to convert his great wealth into a pan-national political movement that will promulgate one last war, after which a peaceful utopia will be inaugurated.Jahnn both establishes Perrudja as an anti-hero and warns the reader against identifying too strongly with his anti-hero in the opening pages of the novel. He introduces his protagonist as a man possessing "viele starke Eigenschaften, die dem Menschen eigen sein konnen-eine ausgenommen, ein Held zu sein" (7). This inability to act heroically will define the conflicts to which Perrudja is subject throughout the novel. Jahnn continues this meta-narrative by stating that "wir gros Unrecht tun, indem wir einen Masstab aufrichten, der nur die Gestalt abbildet, die wir sein mochten, eine Puppe, ein Gotze, auch wenn wir ihn Gott nennen" (8), thus warning the readerthatPerrudjawill fail tolive up toany expectationsthathesetsfor himself orthatthereaderbringstothetext.Bydoing so,Jahnn humanizes Perrudja's inability to act heroically, through an apriorisubversion of genre expectations.In this essay, I argue that Perrudja's status as outsider is the performance of a repetition compulsion that has its roots in trauma. This trauma, which inhabits Perrudja's unconscious, is symbolically rendered in his consciousness via his self-identification as a "gelbe Blume," an identification that condemns him not only to loneliness and alienation, but also to compulsive neurosis. Perrudja repeatedly performs his own alienation within a homosocial triangle, in which, despite obvious material advantages, he always plays the role of vanquished rival. It is only with respect to his special relationship with animals that Perrudja is able to overcome the ritualized compulsive repetition of repressed trauma and to live authentically.This study fills a gap in studies of Jahnn, as no scholar has examined Perrudja's adult neuroses from the perspective of childhood trauma. While Joachim Wohlleben and Breon Mitchell situate Perrudja in the canon of international modernism, Thomas Freeman concerns himself with how Jahnn demonstrates his fascination with myth within the structure of the novel, while reconciling opposing creative and destructiveforcesviahisSchopfungsprinzip(Mythisch31).Dirck LinckseesPerrudja asan "Anti-Entwicklungsroman" (183) in which theauthor givestheherono familial background because he considers the family structure to be an agent for the "Domestizierung zur schlechten Vernunft" (170). In Die Kunst der Uberschreitung, Reiner Niehoff investigates Jahnn's tendency to transgressmoral, societal, and literary convention. Roger Kingerlee, on the other hand, reads Jahnn's anti-hero as a failed model of masculinity and a "critique of male destructiveness" (360). Kingerlee refers to Perrudja's "traumatic upbringing" (253). However, none of these scholars investigates the roots of that trauma in order to elucidate Perrudja's adult neuroses, which I aim to do in the following. …