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  • Bedtime stories: Award-winning author Theresia Enzensberger on insomnia under capitalism

Books

Bedtime stories: Award-winning author Theresia Enzensberger on insomnia under capitalism

Theresia Enzensberger is one of German literature’s most interesting young voices. Her new book, 'Schlafen', examines the deeper meaning of sleeplessness.

Photo: Christian Werner

Theresia Enzensberger is one of German literature’s most interesting and multi-talented young voices. Having originally studied film in the US, the Munich-born Berlinerin has established herself on home soil as an in-demand journalist and critic, as founder of the literary magazine BLOCK and as an award-winning novelist.

Her 2017 debut Blaupause, published in English as Blueprint in 2019, reimagines the interwar Bauhaus milieu from the perspective of a (rare) female student. Her 2022 follow-up Auf See (“at sea”) takes on the dark side of libertarian utopianism.

Her newest work, Schlafen (“sleeping”), is a book-length essay about a human activity that is as ubiquitous as it is under-discussed. Mixing memoir with social and literary analysis, Schlafen builds on Enzensberger’s own sleep problems to explore neoliberal society’s fantasies, fears and contradictory demands when it comes to nodding off.

Schlafen is a brilliant little book. Has it been in the works for long?

Yes and no. I have always had trouble sleeping, and what comes with that is a bit of an obsession with sleep. In 2016, I wrote a reportage that involved me going to a sleep lab. I also read Jonathan Crary’s wonderful book 24/7, which has followed me around over the years. So yes, it has been germinating. But then my publishing house, Hanser, asked me to contribute a book for this anthology series of book-length essays on major themes. So the direct impulse came from them. 

The book’s structure mirrors the sleep cycle itself: after the falling-asleep intro, it moves into light sleep, where you discuss politics and theory, then it proceeds to deep sleep – a section that mingles your own experiences with cultural conversations about sleep and its adjacent realms– and last comes REM sleep, with a dreamlike little story. What made you decide on this?

Since sleeping is such a big topic, I felt that my book would need some sort of clear structure. And I have always liked the idea of form imitating content. There was something about the physiological stages of sleep that made me want to take it as a guardrail – to have it guide my form.

It shifts from grinding your teeth and the consolidation of memories in light sleep, which seemed like a good place for a political essay, through to the in-between stages: if you get woken up during deep sleep, you’re going to be stuck in between for a while, and some people take minutes to become fully conscious and remember what has happened.

And the last one, for REM, the obvious association is dreaming. Since I am also a fiction writer, I thought, why not a short story?

On the surface, sleep seems like something solitary and private. But you argue convincingly that it relates to a whole range of broader social, political and economic forces…

Yes, I was very interested by the contradiction between sleep being a private thing – a private problem, a personal problem, a biological one – and all the societal influences on how we sleep and what it means.

You can never quite solve that contradiction, because it’s always obviously both. That contradiction is reflected in how we talk about sleep. It is also connected to how our society thinks about weakness and illness, which is also considered private, in a sense – although health is obviously also determined by societal factors. Nowadays, there is the expectation that sleep should not be standardised and normalised. Other human needs, like food and sex, have been made into individual consumer product areas; with sleep, people aren’t encouraged to talk about their preferences at all.

Our society is not structured in a way that is conducive to having sleep preferences – you are supposed to sleep from a certain hour to a certain hour for a certain amount of time. There is not much room for individual preferences or needs.

The book is framed, in part, by your own experiences with sleep – first as an over-sleeper, and then as an under-sleeper. You describe yourself as an “insomnia veteran”…

Yes, and I said veteran for a reason. If you have insomnia, it can often be like what people with chronic health issues experience: whenever you tell someone about it, they try and tell you what the cure is or what things you need to try. By using the word veteran, I wanted to say, listen, I’ve tried everything (laughs), I’ve been dealing with this for a while.

How does that kind of estrangement – that kind of self-studying, while being out of sync with other people’s sense of time – relate to writing? Is it a coincidence that so many writers are interested in insomnia?

I actually think it’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation. Writers do write a lot about insomnia – but that might be because they are writers, so they can tell us about the experience [in ways] other people cannot. I don’t know if writers more often do have insomnia. Then again, if you think a lot about yourself, perhaps that does make you more prone to insomnia, so maybe writers are more prone.

Our society is not structured in a way that is conducive to having sleep preferences.

You bring so many other interesting thinkers into the book, from 19th-century scientists to Arianna Huffington to Berlin’s own Haytham El-Wardany. Did you find any of these fellow sleep-talkers particularly inspiring or illuminating?

Everyone I quote, I found inspiring. But I found that El-Wardany’s Book of Sleep was really very beautiful, and very poetic. It was actually hard to use because, for each of the little lyrical essays that make up the book, I just wanted to quote it in full (laughs). And that’s not really how things work. So I just recommend that everyone read his book. 

Schlafen argues well that capitalist society is all messed up about sleep. What would a sleep utopia look like? 

In thinking about utopia, I find it quite helpful to actually think about dystopia, and one of the things I mention in the book is this catalogue of sleep disorders, which includes jet lag sleep disorder and work shift sleep disorder. But these are not pathologies. Calling them pathologies confuses ‘pathology’ with the fact that, if you don’t sleep, you get sick. It is simply describing what happens when people are not able to sleep at the times they want to. So sleep utopia, for me, would just be a world in which everyone gets to sleep whenever the fuck they want.

You studied in the US, you speak fluent English, and your book effortlessly moves between German and anglophone cultural references. Does living between these two spheres have an influence on your work?

I really enjoy that I have the opportunity to listen in on two discourses – two kinds of political stuff, sure, but also just how the conversations are different. Almost all the podcasts I listen to are in English, I have to admit (laughs). And I love American literature. So I would say I am heavily influenced by all that. But mainly it’s nice to have the opportunity to access both worlds, the German-language and the English-language. 

You’ve already published two novels. Were you tempted to write about sleep in fiction rather than nonfiction? And how do you know whether an idea is going to become a novel, a reportage, an essay?

That’s an interesting question, because I feel that my novels are very much influenced by nonfiction – by political reading, by theory. Hopefully that is not apparent enough to make them boring (laughs). I think the main advantage of writing fiction is that when you’re dealing with abstract questions, you don’t have to find an answer. But it also means that people might not quite understand what you’re trying to say if you actually are trying to say things. So it was liberating with Schlafen to just have opinions and write them down and say my conclusion.

Can you tell us what you’re working on now?

Yes. I’m writing a work of nonfiction about [autonomous] communities. And I’m writing a crime novel.

You seem quite drawn to playing with form, and especially with genre: historical novel in Blueprint, dystopian Gothic in Auf See, now a Krimi

Definitely. I think one of the reasons is that in Germany the divide between high and low is much more strict and old-fashioned than it is in the States. So this is a way to break it up a little bit. I consider it a success whenever there is somebody desperately saying, ‘Ah, I don’t know where to put this in the bookstore!’ (laughs) That’s kind of what I’m aiming for. But the other thing is that, on a formal level, I like the way genres offer all these rules and motifs and things that you can then just fuck with. 

You can’t break the rules if you don’t have rules…

Exactly. And there’s often some element of pop culture in genre, which I enjoy. I like books that are entertaining, books with a plot – which is another thing that German intellectuals do not get. In the US, they are more positive towards entertainment. But they are also not all that, you know, intellectually positive. So something’s gotta give each way. 

  • Schlafen is out now from Hanser Verlag