Innocence and Its Opposite

The longest work of gay literature—In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust—begins with an adolescent falling asleep. He tosses and turns, reflecting on the day past. “A sleeping man,” he writes, “holds in a circle around him . . . the order of the years and worlds. He consults them instinctively as he wakes and reads in a second the point on the earth he occupies, the time that has elapsed before his waking; but their ranks can be mixed up, broken.” Sixty-six years later, to open one of the shortest book-length works of gay literature—the newly translated smalltownnovella by Ronald M. Schernikau—an adolescent wakes up, broken. Much has elapsed before his waking. He embraces himself, comes to in bed before a day of school he’s dreading.

Andrew Holleran once described male homosexuality as “a boarding school at which there are no vacations.” The alternatingly brutal and tender entanglements of privileged schoolboys, and the men they eventually become, fill the pages of gay literature. Most faggots are working class, yet gay literature has been mainly interested in boarding schools, and the penthouses and discos which the boarding school faggots fill after graduation. Alternately, these novels track the self-exile of the gay bourgeoisie into chic lofts, where they await the civil rights that make those lofts more valuable speculative assets than their parents’ Dutch Colonials ever were. (Many of these novels, it must be said, are among my favorite works of literature. The bourgeoisie, to which I belong, has its discreet charms.)

From the beginning, a counter-literature including writers as different as Leslie Feinberg and James Baldwin has explored queer lives as they are actually lived by most people, which is to say, without enough money and in cramped apartments. This work understands homo- and transsexuality as a question of what people made strange by systems of sex and gender can teach us about how those systems create everyone, and how sex-gender systems are themselves co-constituted with systems of production, exchange, and racialization. Now, thanks to the work of Lucy Jones, Ronald M. Schernikau takes his place in an Anglophone understanding of that counter-literature.

Schernikau was born in 1960 in Magdeburg, in East Germany. When he was six, his mother Ellen smuggled him across the border into the West. They were planning on joining his father, who had fled to the neighboring West German province of Lower Saxony. Upon arrival, Ellen discovered that Ronald’s father was married and had become a neo-Nazi. She raised Ronald as a single mother in a Lower Saxon town called Lehrte. West Germany in the mid-1960s had not yet built its social welfare state, and the twenty years after the war had seen Germany ruled by the grim-faced Konrad Adenauer and his cabinets full of ex-Nazis. Adenauer’s motto was “No experiments.” His response to male homosexuality was imprisonment: he sent more gay men to prison for sodomy than the Nazis had, with some even sent back to jail directly from concentration camps. His response to the Holocaust was silence. His preferred explanation for how the Nazis had come to power was public immorality and excessive indebtedness. The country he built in his image was provincial and reactionary, especially in matters of sex and gender. East German women, even in the context of Stalinist dictatorship, had significantly more freedom to work, to abort, and to live self-determined lives than West German women, who were expected to be dutiful housewives.

A poor single mother in West Germany and her effeminate son were therefore objects of pity, derision, and aggression, especially when the young Ronald defied his class position by winning admission to a German “gymnasium,” or grammar school. The German educational system remains tuition-free through the post-graduate level. Nevertheless, complex mechanisms of social control ensure that people have less social mobility than in places where education costs money. While still in primary school, students are split into different educational tracks. Only those selected for “gymnasium” are eligible to study at university. Everyone else is sent into the trades. This system neatly reproduces existing social hierarchies while allowing Germans to conceive of their society as meritocratic.

Another gymnasium student in Lehrte at the time was a young woman named Ursula Albrecht. An heiress, the great-granddaughter of South Carolina slavers and Hanseatic cotton merchants, she was also, by the time the two were finishing school, the daughter of the governor of Lower Saxony. She entered politics, became a confidante of Angela Merkel, and served in her cabinets. In 2019, she was appointed to the presidency of the European Commission. This was the type of student the Lehrte Gymnasium was intended to educate. When Schernikau writes of CDU keychains on low-slung jeans, he may well be describing a teenaged Ursula von der Leyen.

Gymnasiums are, in theory, intended to impart a comprehensive humanistic education, what Germans call Bildung. Alexander von Humboldt described Bildung as “the linking of the self to the world.” Bildung could also be a noun describing the massacre of the spirit necessary to transform a human child into a German adult. Bildung, in midcentury West Germany, was intended to create a type of man (some, like the young Ursula, took advantage of social transformations their class bitterly opposed in order to become this type of woman) who would wield power and influence in the new transatlantic capitalist order. The term Bildungsroman, a German word for novels of education and development—tales of children becoming adults—remains untranslated in English. smalltownnovella is a novella of both kinds of Bildung: both the linking of the self to the world and the institutional destruction of feeling necessary to produce subjects who will manage and govern.

“i wrap my arms around myself,” says the narrator, b, a student; the final sentence reads, “i embrace you.” The fractured self is made whole; through an education, the self is linked to the world. This education, though, has little to do with the dull school lessons. No saintly, handsome literature teacher inspires this schoolboy to greatness in a mahogany-paneled library pregnant with confused desire and significant glances. Instead, the narrator receives an education in how the world actually works—in who it is designed to protect, in how class is reproduced, in how boys become men, and in how to use the system to try to seed its destruction. The crucial stylistic decision to write in all lowercase lends the English-language text an air of 1970s informality but in German does something even more radical. German nouns are all capitalized: objects cruise through a sea of description and action like Prussian battleships in the Baltic Sea. Forcing everything into lowercase has the effect of confusing objects and actions. It emphasizes process; it radically destabilizes.

Lowercase prose is only one of the stylistic choices and structural considerations that make smalltownnovella both formally rigorous and satisfying. Hopefully, paired with Schernikau’s undeniable political commitments, this experimental yet rigorous engagement with craft can help put to bed the twinned vapid arguments that, on the one hand, “craft” is complicit with the systems of violence and destruction that govern our world, and, on the other, that there is currently “too much politics” in literature and art. Craft is an ethically neutral tool. Killing people, taking their land, and building a house on it is a crime. The craft of housebuilding, however, is not complicit in that crime. Why should we assume there is something radical about doing things badly, or that there is something politically suspect about the architectural precision of a well-executed sentence or a poem? It is because we can describe that we should endeavor to describe well—and this includes a consideration of the ideologies of form, and the awareness that the writer cannot simply free themself from their context. Equally reactionary is the discourse about overly political art and literature, the privileging of apolitical literatures as more complex or worthy of praise—that whole sloppy middlebrow critical apparatus that Tobi Haslett has diagnosed as “a McCarthyist . . . boredom with social critique.”

Both of these positions posit a supposed opposition between political commitment and aesthetic values. They depend on parched concepts of politics and aesthetics and, in confusing the two for one another, prevent us from understanding either. People love mentioning Kurt Weill’s aside to Berthold Brecht that he “[could] not set the Communist Manifesto to music,” but neglect to mention that Erwin Schulhoff did so in 1932, and rather well. If politics are aesthetics––if we confuse the look and feel of resistance with the actual labor of organizing, which has a lot to do with craft, in its own way––then nothing is politics, and nothing is aesthetics either. We rob ourselves both of our ability to act and to create, of our ability to organize and to describe.

Schernikau knew that literary creation and political engagement are intimately related in unpredictable ways. He knew this despite being taught that “all the political writers were awful, with no exceptions.” Part of Bildung as conceived of by a school designed to produce Ursula von der Leyen is the division of art from politics, the enshrinement of artistic production in a separate sphere from the material. Part of Bildung as Schernikau’s narrator conceives of it is learning that this view of literature is impoverished, insufficient, and fundamentally useless.

No, this narrator’s Bildung doesn’t come from the school’s lessons. Even the progressive teachers at the half-reformed school come in for a mix of pity and scorn; lirus, a “beardy-weirdy who . . . sometimes reads marcuse in class” stands in for a weak, fundamentally liberal avant-garde; “liberalism as a teaching method: sure! but: facing a machine that’s crushing you, it’s suicide.” Teachers at the Lehrte Gymnasium convey disembodied facts. “if people never learn about contexts,” b asks, “how can they assume there were any?”

Formal education is part of the machine; rather than connecting the self to the world, b perceives it distancing, separating, removing:

what remains? there’s no solidarity: it is prevented by deep wounds on both sides. those emerging from this fight, with ringing slaps around the head and silenced, are damaged. in the same way that physical floggings produce the idiocy they claim to combat, stress and inhumanity yield work machines and self-destructive robots. they fit in.

With chilling concision, Schernikau describes the function of locker-room banter: “this is where men are trained to beat up faggots and rape women. this is where the systematic destruction of happiness takes place.” The narrator perceives both the violence that this form of masculinity, part of official West German Bildung, will do to the world it will govern, as well as the violence it does to its perpetrators. The narrator separates himself from these men, desires these men, refuses their fate. The boy he briefly loves refuses his embrace, refuses his invitation to a different life, returns to his fate: “what leif can expect from life is blissful normality, achieved by doing nothing, no matter what.”

In 1992, Monique Wittig wrote that “lesbians are not women”; in 2024, Kay Gabriel wrote that “faggots are women.” Schernikau also perceives this:

b is feeling under pressure and when a nurse from the hospital boasts of her new hairdo: the competition never sleeps, b laughs, unnaturally loudly, realizing: that’s me, forced to play along, i’ll never get anything in life for free. . . . don’t accuse gays of acting unreasonably in an unreasonable world! what’s the difference between a thirty-six-year-old gay man and an eighteen-year-old girl? when it comes to innocence and its opposite? what b sees in the discos of both scenes is shockingly similar.

Patriarchy must be engaged with rather than simply refused: being gay won’t exempt b from men’s violence, or from their desire, or from his desire for them.

The friend with whom b falls in love is named leif garrett. Leaving aside the compact poesis of this name choice—one can’t read that name without thinking of the angel-faced, blond-locked teen idol, and his embodiment of the long-haired, pouty masculinity of the late 1970s and early 1980s—the boy is presented as an unremarkable product of the class and sex-gender systems of the time. Their dalliance is understood by everyone involved—from b, to leif’s shocked parents, to the school authorities whose intervention is framed entirely around the idea that b bears the responsibility for what occurred, that he corrupted leif’s morals—as a temporary interruption of leif’s journey to the kind of manhood that Lehrte’s Bildung aims to construct and that Schernikau, and his narrator, see as a fate worse than death. For b, it is precisely leif’s proximity to class-gender reproduction that makes him attractive: “who is leif? a member of the group, the joiner in persona, the longed-for happiness.” When the narrative voice briefly enters leif’s head, what it narrates is the automatism of becoming-man, and the threat that dalliance with b poses to that becoming:

somewhere in leif’s mind, this experience exists too, he knows it from his own reactions, from school, from his parents, drill is everything, everything is drill, it goes right through me. i’m seventeen and a man, and there’s no need to crack the whip to teach me . . . what leif can expect from life is blissful normality, achieved by doing nothing, no matter what.

It is not a coincidence that leif envisions this becoming-man, this Bildung, in terms—“drill is everything, everything is drill”—borrowed from Goethe’s Faust, one of majoritarian German Bildung’s most revered literary texts. It is literally on these terms that leif becomes the kind of man who, dead-eyed and plundering, rules the world.

These systems and structures govern even the private lives of students. The tribunal to which b is subjected “will be a lesson—even for the slowest in the room—in how everything is biased, in how every formulation and incident involves subjectivity.” There are no easy answers here. Engagement with the world on its terms doesn’t precisely work: b runs for class offices and makes himself known in student politics, but never earns the respect automatically granted to a boy like leif who comes from the right kind of family and whose youthful rebellions don’t threaten his Bildung.

Youthful rebellions are part of a subcultural 1968 politics toward which the novella is in general tremendously unfriendly. Describing a classmate on his way to joining what would become the German Green Party, Schernikau writes that he is

a progressive student who belongs to an equally progressive clique. the guy smokes dope, dyes his hair, has nothing against his neighbor’s homosexuality, nothing against leftists, nothing against being sensitive or feminism . . . at some point, he’ll have his hair cut short like all the others . . . if you’re not a communist by seventeen, you have no heart, but if you’re still one when you’re thirty, you have no brains.

This precise path, from small-town autonomist youth to urban liberal, is one of the most well-trodden in German politics. As Nicolas Becker once said of the Greens, they are “opportunistic, vegetarian, Protestant.” Schernikau’s narrator wears a keffiyeh in the novel; he would presumably have been disgusted by these opportunists’ recent turn toward a muscularly nationalist xenophobia blaming Muslim immigrants for the Jewish blood staining Germany’s hands.

And yet the novella ends in thrall to the specific subculture of gay Berlin: that’s where the narrator escapes, despite knowing the escape will be incomplete. It is no use to pretend that there is anything other than the world, rather the task is to link the self to it: “it is absurd to retreat into a private life that is only allowed to exist because it contributes to public life . . . my experiences and my people exist, advertising and school exist, and therefore i exist: socialization.” The exhilarating rush of realizations with which the novella ends, its evocation of a new life, is framed by a vision of the old life, populated by apparitions of everyone the narrator has ever loved, including leif. Even the hapless teachers from the Lehrte Gymnasium are extended this benevolent embrace.

When smalltownnovella was published, it sold well and made Schernikau a regular TV talk show guest. He moved to West Berlin, studied German and philosophy at the Freie Universität, and joined the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Westberlins, an East German-funded and supported Communist Party. Disillusioned once again by the subcultures into which he’d fled (his later book so schön describes life in West Berlin’s 1980s gay scene) he began writing more political journalism. The naivete of his style only intensified, as did his insistence on taking things seriously, on noticing details, even or especially when reporting on parts of the East German system that seemed the most ridiculous. In 1986, Schernikau began a two-year program of study at the East German state writers’ academy in Leipzig, one of the few Westerners who would ever study there. While there, he wrote The Days in L.: On the Fact That East Germany and West Germany Will Never Understand Each Other, Least of All Through Their Literature. Published in West Germany by konkret, the book was too critical of the East German state to be released on the other side of the Berlin Wall.

Nevertheless, in 1989, Schernikau decided to emigrate to East Germany. His citizenship was approved in September of that year. Two months later, the wall fell. Schernikau became the last Westerner to defect. At the final conference of the East German national writers’ association, Schernikau berated East German intellectuals for having accepted a Western counterrevolution as “freedom.” He warned that the capitalist system, free from competition or threat, would demand “subjugation . . . from every single one of its inhabitants” that even subjects of dictatorship could not comprehend. Then, he died.

He died, in October 1991, of AIDS-related illness. The diagnosis came only after his emigration to the East. As a politically engaged gay writer, Schernikau had tangled with the crisis: his two most famous essays about it are entitled “fickt weiter” (“keep fucking”), a 1984 polemic urging gays to not allow the crisis to separate them from their sexual liberation, and the more somber essay “das personal” (“the staff”), a touching exploration of the lifeworlds of the doctors, nurses, and patients at an AIDS ward in a Munich hospital. When he died, he left behind legende (legend), a ten-part, thousand-plus page magnum opus.

Five of the book’s ten parts, legende proper, focus on the inhabitants of “The Island,” a fictionalized West Berlin which, like the real city, sat “like an egg yolk” in the middle of a foreign country. This island is ruled over by gods (Klaus Mann, Ulrike Meinhof, Therese Giehse, and Max Riemann), and the text is written in biblical form, in books, chapters, and verses. The other five chapters, presented as “inserts” into the main text, are various unrelated texts Schernikau was unable to publish in his lifetime, including Irene Binz, a consideration of his mother Ellen. The epigraph to legende reads:

You must remind yourself with every self-indulgence that you find here that I was almost entirely unsuccessful for ten years when I wrote this. You must consider that I was forced to deliver my late work in my thirties. If you are reading this book, then I am famous, a stroke of art, but now! If you are reading this book, then I am already long dead. Hopefully! The times past! The joyful farewell! How funny and odd are those things which lift us above our toil.

Then, he died.

Before he died, he wrote: “the only thing that interests me is to be able to praise something. I hate negation.” We may live in dark times, we may see world-historical defeats on the horizon, but we should keep living, keep fucking, keep refusing to let the light go out. Writing and thinking well are not acts of resistance any more than subculture is automatically resistant. They are not sufficient—but they are certainly necessary. I embrace you.

Excerpted from smalltownnovella by Ronald M. Schernikau, translation © Lucy Jones (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025).