The German novel ‘Bei den bieresch’ by Klaus Hoffer as a postmodern rebus

This research paper analyzes the postmodern novel Bei den Bieresch by the Austrian author Klaus Hoffer. The reception of the Russian translation of the novel is noteworthy. The reader is entrusted with the task of solving a complex text rebus puzzle while the researcher is offered an opportunity to re-address the origins of German postmodernism. The paper studies the intertextual structure of the novel as hypertext referring to literary and philosophical texts (F. Kafka, S. Beckett, M. Heidegger, J. Baudrillard etc.). The genre characteristics are studied: it is a travel novel with a distinct ‘educational component’. The novel inverts the traditional model of being. Two modes of human existence - everyday life and travel - are acted out here. The daily life is portrayed as an unstable form of being: the fluidity, interconversion and discontinuity are emphasized. On the contrary, the protagonist’s initiation journey has an explicit directional vector and is determined by its milestones (seven mentors). The novel reveals the mnemonics of the crazy Kafka-andBeckett-world of absurdity and confusion. The ‘cognitive journey’ of the protagonist reminds of moving around a wax museum. In this memory theater, the speaking figures of the mentors broadcast to him the basic knowledge about the world in the form of tales, riddles, or puzzles. The novel problematizes the key points of postmodern culture: the split subject, the ‘floating identity’, self-identification, the sacred word, circulation of texts, ‘empty signs’ and the topos of ‘vain search’. The phenomenon of ‘potlatch’ is seen here as one of the ‘anti-structure’ manifestations, which also correlates with the world of postmodernism.