Zelda Biller begins her review of Katharina Volckmer’s debut novel The Appointment, by claiming that it tells “a story that no German publishing house dared to publish.”1 The assertion is correct, but not in the way she intended it. Blinded by Volckmer’s deliberately obscene and transgressive narrative, Biller concluded that the issue was sex. If so, that issue resolved itself when a German publishing house decided to publish a German translation of the original English edition as if to prove that “all of the sexually inhibited German editors” who turned down Volckmer’s manuscript were somehow unrepresentative of the German publishing industry. So, it wasn’t about sex after all. Volckmer’s book is, however, most definitely about taboos, and she is clever enough to hide those very real taboos behind sexual taboos which disappeared a long time before she was born. No publishing house, either English or German, would have published this book if their editors understood what Volkmer is really saying about the real but hidden taboos which dominate Germany at this moment in time.
The Appointment begins by describing sex in a way that has become typically German in its deliberately transgressive crudity. The nameless narrator/protagonist is being examined gynecologically by a surgeon who is taking the lay of the land in anticipation of doing a sex change operation. Biller summarizes the situation by telling us that: