Intimacy and Resonance: Visions of Love in Hanns-Josef Ortheil’s Liebesnähe and Ronja von Rönne’s Wir kommen

Abstract

Since the millennium, representations of intimate relationships have become one of the major trends in contemporary German fiction. This article examines two novels, Hanns-Josef Ortheil’s Liebesnähe (Love’s Closeness, 2011) and Ronja von Rönne’s Wir kommen (We Are Coming, 2016) as examples of two oppositional modes of representation of modern love relationships. Starting from an exposition of the configuration of love in social theory (Niklas Luhmann, Eva Illouz) as a compensatory mechanism for the fragmentation of social roles in modernity, the article reviews two concepts that describe love from a perspective of plenitude, Hartmut Rosa’s “resonance” and Francois Jullien’s “intimacy”. Reading Ortheil’s and von Rönne’s novels against Rosa’s and Jullien’s concepts, the article argues that while von Rönne’s representation of intimate relations falls squarely within the social theoretical parameters outlined by Luhmann and Illouz, Ortheil’s novel presents a fictional alternative to the “unhappy consciousness” of modern love, echoing Rosa’s and Jullien’s ideas.