DIE GERMANISTIN: Riveting Forays into German-Language Literature by Sheridan Marshall. ULRIKE DRAESNER: On Swimming, Myth, and the Body’s Knowledge
On the publication day of her latest book, penelopes sch( )iff, Ulrike Draesner is radiant. The German poet and novelist greets the camera from her Berlin study, surrounded by piles of research on ancient Greece and women’s voices across centuries. What she terms her “post-epic” reimagines The Odyssey from Penelope’s perspective – not as the faithful wife waiting at home, but as the powerful ruler and strategist she must have been. “She was a successful queen, an astute politician, and someone who knew how to enjoy life,” Draesner says. “When Odysseus returns and proves unfit to rule, Penelope sets sail with her daughters and one hundred other women in search of a new world.”
It’s a thrilling premise: Penelope and her companions – free and enslaved women alike – navigating a sea of trauma and possibility. In Draesner’s retelling, hierarchies collapse and new forms of community emerge. “They must learn to relate to one another differently, to build a society beyond violence,” she explains. “There’s a utopian moment here, without denying the presence of death and suffering.”
While penelopes sch( )iff takes readers into the mythic past, Draesner’s Channel Swimmer (Kanalschwimmer, 2019), newly translated by Rebecca Braun and published by Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc., is a story of the contemporary human body – its endurance, its fragility, and its longing for connection.
The novel follows Charles, a middle-aged man who decides to swim the English Channel as his marriage falters. “I’ve always been interested in nature writing,” Draesner says, “and in how physical experience transforms our perception. Channel swimming struck me as the perfect metaphor – an act of pure endurance, somewhere between madness and revelation.”
The book took nearly twenty years to complete. The idea first surfaced in the 1990s, when Draesner conceived of writing four novels, each devoted to one of the classical elements: air, water, fire, and earth. But Channel Swimmer resisted closure. “I got Charles into the water,” she laughs, “but for a long time I didn’t know how to get him out again.”
The breakthrough came when she realised that there wasn’t just one possible ending. “You either make it, you don’t make it, or you die. That’s the truth of it,” she says. “So I decided to tell all three endings simultaneously.” The resulting novel is a daring feat of form, fusing precise nature writing with an almost musical sense of rhythm and repetition.
Although Draesner is not herself a swimmer – “I only ever waded in to my knees in Dover,” she confesses – the novel’s visceral immediacy impressed even long-distance swimmer and fellow writer John von Düffel. “For me, writing has always been a way of experiencing adventures I couldn’t or wouldn’t live in reality,” she says. “That’s the great freedom of literature.”
Channel Swimmer is Draesner’s first full-length work of fiction in English, and she speaks with evident joy about its translation. “Rebecca Braun has captured the melody of the language so beautifully,” she says. “In English, the love story somehow shines through more clearly – perhaps because of the Anglo-American tradition of combining story and style. When Michael Eskin, my publisher, said that Charles was ‘swimming home’, I knew exactly what he meant.”
Draesner’s interest in borders – between languages, nations, and selves – runs through all her work. “I’ve never believed in fixed identities,” she says. “Maude and Charles, my protagonists, are mixed in every sense: culturally, geographically, emotionally. The Channel has always been both barrier and bridge. It connects Europe and Britain, even when politics tries to divide them.”
This sense of porousness extends to her larger philosophical concerns. “I’m fascinated by embodied knowledge – how our bodies think,” she explains. “We don’t just have a brain in our head; we have one in our spine, in our gut. Knowledge can live in our muscles. What does it mean to be a human body? To have one? To write from it?”
Her next novel will explore another kind of genius: the forgotten brilliance of mathematician Emmy Noether, whose equations made Einstein’s theory of relativity possible. “Einstein became the popstar of physics, while Noether was almost erased,” Draesner says. “It’s time to bring her back.”
Listening to Draesner speak, one senses the same qualities that animate her fiction: intellectual curiosity, lyric precision, and an unwavering attention to the human pulse beneath it all. Whether she is rewriting Homer or reimagining the Channel, her gaze remains fixed on what it means to move – through history, through language, through the waters that both divide and unite us.
By Sheridan Marshall
Sheridan Marshall works as a translator from German into English, and as Editorial Consultant for New Books in German. She was Deputy Editor of The Austrian Riveter.
Photo of Ulrike Draesner by Melliw Wang
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