Hooks for the Hanging on of Dreams
Title: Hedwig and Berti
Author: Frieda Arkin
List price: $23.95
Amazon price: $23.95
Frieda Arkin’s novel Hedwig and Berti is a compelling interweaving of stories of loss. All of the the interestingly-drawn characters deal with loss of home and the loss of dreams. Physical displacement is mirrored by a loss of dreams as goals and ideals, an intricate part of each person‘s sense of existential displacement. Waking nightmares instigated by war leads to the loss of dreams which, in turn, leads to lives that feel like nightmares.
With the fall of Nazi Germany, Hedwig, a strong-willed and opionated person, comes to be consumed with excoriating rage about the loss of Home, which was Germany. When she flees her homeland, she unknowingly embarks upon the life of being a permanent Displaced Person. She wants what can never again be: her home as it was before the War. Nothing in the present ever again matches her memories of the past. She hates every situation and place in which she finds herself. When she finally does return to Germany, she finds that absolutely everything as she knew it has has been physically destroyed. There is no external Home for her. In such circumstances of dislocation, her dreams, her sleep dreams, her goals, her ideals also become dislocated. The nightmare of life is reflected in the nightmarish quality of characters‘ dreams.
The narrator offers an elegant and picturesque summary of the disorienting and tantalizing nature of sleep dreams. "Dreams go beyond waking logic, containing utter impossibilities.“ They "leap upon [us] and seize on reality, as thought it were a flat sheet of paper which … dreams bunch up and crumple, so that surfaces normally separated by time and space become suddenly and impossibly contiguous, even superimposed on one another. A thing the waking mind cannot contain.“ The infinite possibilities of sleep dreams, like the infinite possibilities of waking life, make anything and everything continguous. It is only our rational minds that insist upon the discontinuous nature of the world.
One of the novels characters reflects: "How absurd and stark a person’s life is … – rather like a set of hooks for the hanging on of dreams and fantasies.“ In our Disneyland culture, we tend to view dreams as smily-faced, rainbow-colored pleasantries. This novel reminds us that the dreams are much more profound than this, that the realm of dreams, like life, spans all of existence, from the dark to the light.
