Coming to Terms – The Narrativity in Sigrid Combüchen's Tale Parsifal.

<p>The frame story<br>
takes place in a dystopian Europe, possibly some kind of European Union around 2050 – in a state of conflicts and decay. The protagonists are a retired general, Piscator (cf. Fisher King) and a former journalist, Perle Vaus (cf. Perlesvaus/Perceval/Parsifal). She lost her home because of a new genderrelated law and stays homeless with others, covered by the Saxon bridge.
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Perle used to write editorials – so called "Phoenix-plans" - recommending "short cuts" for city renewals. Now Piscator hired her to interview him for his memoirs. At the same time she undertakes an adventurous journey in Piscator's dreams, on a river boat into the jungle - a story with mythical as well as heteromedial implications.
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The Topic of the concluding dialogue<br>
relates to a shameful incident: Piscator's soldiers hunted and killed a group of innocent schoolgirls. The general claims his innocence: "I was asleep". Perle's maieutic questions lead Piscator to a narrative strategy, where fiction and cultivated digressions shadow the facts.
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Reading the tale<br>
The many time layers constitute an "All-Tid" (cf. 'Paspresture'; 'Vergegenkunft'). To open up the narrative I constructed terms, influenced by Combüchen's tale, and supplemented by Bakhtin and his German contemporary Ernst Bloch. Outsidedness, Obdachlosigkeit, "sleeping/dreaming" and "a heart of Gold" constitute with the concept openendedness codes for a heteromedial reading and for transhistorical and ethnographic openings.
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The story is grounded on the medieval Grail Quest (Chrétien de Troyes et al.). The heteromediality serves both the manifest themes (gender, myths, warfare) and the underlying theme (Grail Quest). The openendedness of the last chapter leads towards 'die Grundfrage' in Ernst Bloch’s philosophy, in Das Prinzip Hoffnung (1959) designed in differentiated experimental figurations (Versuchsgestalten).
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