Between Portugal and Germany: Maria, the protagonist of Stephan Thome’s novel Gegenspiel

Abstract

In his novel Gegenspiel (2015) the German writer Stephan Thome presents the readers with the same diegetic world of his previous work, Fliehkräfte (2012). Both novels narrate the marriage of Hartmut Hainbach – a Philosophy Professor at the University of Bonn – and the Portuguese Maria – who went to Berlin in the 1980s to study Drama –, focusing particularly on the crisis the couple faces after twenty years together. However, even though the plot is already known, there is an important difference: while in Fliehkräfte the point of view was Hartmut’s, Gegenspiel now takes up Maria’s perspective.
For the most part, this paper adopts an intercultural frame of reference and approaches the hybrid identity of Maria’s character to show her as mirroring figure of both German and Portuguese contemporaneity.