SOURCE: Taberner, Stuart. “Martin Walser's Halbzeit: Stylizing Private History for Public Consumption.” Modern Language Review 92, no. 4 (October 1997): 912-23.

In the following essay, Taberner analyzes the implications of cultural models in the psychological development of Anselm Kristlein, the protagonist of Halbziet, discussing the thematic significance of Kristlein's mimetic tendencies and the “fictionalization” of his personal and paternal biographical failures.

Martin Walser's Halbzeit is typically considered to capture the mood of the early history of the Federal Republic, namely the 1950s and the Wirtschaftswunder. Indeed, critics regard Anselm Kristlein, the novel's protagonist and narrator, as the embodiment of the materialist values of that era; Stuart Parkes, for instance, compactly refers to him as ‘the archetypal “economic miracle man”’.¹ Correspondingly, Anselm seems to lack personality, and merely to ‘mimic’ the dominant mores of his environment as a means of gaining social and economic success. He appears to perfect the transformation staged...