ABSTRACT
The success of Marcel Beyer’s second novel Flughunde is further evidence that there can be little suggestion of the National Socialist past having been put to rest by the events of 1989, within German literature and a wider reading public. In the two years after its initial publication the book sold 25,000 copies and was widely translated. Flughunde is a narrative in two voices. One belongs to the sound technician Hermann Karnau, the other to Helga Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister’s eldest daughter. Through his obsession with sound, recording and the human voice Karnau gets involved in SS experiments on human beings. Flughunde is a novel about the ‘Alltag im Faschismus’ a book about the last days of the war in the Führerbunker, a story about the murder of Goebbels’s children. flughunde explores the consequences of National Socialism for the human voice and the human body; the intrusion into the mind is analogous to the sound-wave intrusion into the body.
