Rhythm, Form, Critique: Kathrin Röggla's wir schlafen nicht (2004)

For Kathrin Röggla, the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the financial crisis in 2008 was marked by an ideological, political, and cultural inertia. Taking Röggla's remarks on the (im)possibility of narrative action under these conditions of stasis as its starting point, this article explores narrative motion in her experimental documentary novel wir schlafen nicht (2004). Commonly read as a text about managerial discourse, what the book calls “bwler‐deutsch,” this article exposes a hitherto unexamined aspect and argues that wir schlafen nicht renders the new economy as two contrastive motional forces on the rhythmic level: while the fast speech of the protagonists performs their restlessness (echoing economic productivity), the characters themselves remain stuck in the ever‐same patterns of thought and speech. Moreover, the article contends that wir schlafen nicht also reflects on and negotiates the place of literature vis‐à‐vis the economization of language and the social.