Product Description

With years of abuse behind her and a bleak future ahead, a young German woman dreams of her country's colony in South-West Africa. When she learns of the women being transported to the colony to attend to the needs of male settlers, Hanna X takes the leap. In Africa she is confronted with the harsh realities of colonial life. For resisting the advances of a German officer, she is banished to Frauenstein, a phantasmagoric outpost that is at once a "prison, nunnery, brothel, and shithouse." When the drunken excesses of visiting soldiers threaten the young girl who has become her only companion, Hanna revolts. Mounting a ragtag army of women and native victims of brutality, she sets out on an epic journey to take on the German Reich. Combining the history of colonialism with the myths of Africa, this is an exquisitely written tale of suffering, violence, revenge, and, simply, love.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1153467 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Acclaimed South African novelist Brink (The Rights of Desire; Devil's Valley; etc.) paints a harrowing picture of German South-West Africa (modern-day Namibia) in his latest novel, focusing on a German initiative to import hundreds of women to Africa for the colonists at the turn of the last century. Hanna X is an orphan who spends her early years in Germany trying to catch on as a domestic with a number of families, only to have the sexual advances of various libidinous husbands ruin her efforts to find a stable situation. Hanna thinks she has escaped the world of male domination when she receives permission to emigrate to South Africa, but her escape backfires. Raped and mutilated by brutal German officer Hauptmann Buhlke, she is taken to a horrific outpost known as the Frauenstein, where the abuse continues. The book's surreal, fragmentary first half, in which the events of Hanna's childhood are interspersed with the harrowing details of her arrival in Africa, is followed by a riveting second half, in which Hanna escapes the Frauenstein and tracks down Buhlke with the help of another abused woman, Katja, and a Herero tribesman, Kahapa, whom the two women rescue from a savage German farmer. The trio quickly become a small vigilante posse as they journey to Windhoek to find Buhlke, and their efforts to turn the tables on the Germans succeed when they murder a small troop of soldiers and then wipe out a larger group at a garrison. The relentless violence occasionally turns Hanna into a one-dimensional character, but the imagery from this haunting novel will stay with readers, as will the frightening allure of all-consuming hatred: "So beautiful. So singular. So utterly pure. So abundantly full of life."
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Hanna X is a young German woman who, after years of abuse in a Bremen orphanage, escapes to her country's colonies in southwest Africa, only to be even more badly brutalized--mutilated, even--by the men she has volunteered to serve. Disfigured and mute, she is banished to Frauenstein, a desert asylum for broken, unwanted women. When Hanna saves frail young Katja from the violent advances of a drunken soldier by beating him to death, her silent rage comes alive and the tenor of Brink's story shifts from suffering to revenge. Forming a militia from the scarred victims of colonial oppression, natives and immigrant women alike, Hanna declares war on the Reich itself, organizing attacks on German desert outposts and ultimately coming face-to-scarred-face with the persistent shadows of her childhood--as well as the man responsible for her horrible disfigurement. This is familiar territory for Brink, a South African whose explorations of violence, memory, and apartheid have won him praise and media attention. His latest proves provocative by evoking these themes within the unconventional setting of German colonialism. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
Acclaimed South African novelist Brink (The Rights of Desire; Devil's Valley; etc.) paints a harrowing picture of German South-West Africa (modern-day Namibia) in his latest novel, focusing on a German initiative to import hundreds of women to Africa for the colonists at the turn of the last century. Hanna X is an orphan who spends her early years in Germany trying to catch on as a domestic with a number of families, only to have the sexual advances of various libidinous husbands ruin her efforts to find a stable situation. Hanna thinks she has escaped the world of male domination when she receives permission to emigrate to South Africa, but her escape backfires. Raped and mutilated by brutal German officer Hauptmann Buhlke, she is taken to a horrific outpost known as the Frauenstein, where the abuse continues. The book's surreal, fragmentary first half, in which the events of Hanna's childhood are interspersed with the harrowing details of her arrival in Africa, is followed by a riveting second half, in which Hanna escapes the Frauenstein and tracks down Buhlke with the help of another abused woman, Katja, and a Herero tribesman, Kahapa, whom the two women rescue from a savage German farmer. The trio quickly become a small vigilante posse as they journey to Windhoek to find Buhlke, and their efforts to turn the tables on the Germans succeed when they murder a small troop of soldiers and then wipe out a larger group at a garrison. The relentless violence occasionally turns Hanna into a one-dimensional character, but the imagery from this haunting novel will stay with readers, as will the frightening allure of all-consuming hatred: "So beautiful. So singular. So utterly pure. So abundantly full of life."
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. 
(Publishers Weekly )

The fifteenth novel by a prize-winning South African author takes as its point of departure a German program at the turn of the twentieth century whereby women were shipped out to Germany's colonies in South-West Africa (now Namibia) to be wives—or, failing that, sexual fodder—for the colonizers. Brink's protagonist, Hanna X., an abused orphan from Bremen, is eager for the imagined romance of the desert, but life in the colonies turns out to be even worse than what she has known before. After she is raped and disfigured by a German officer, Hanna turns to murder, assembling a "sad menagerie" of other downtrodden people in a crusade of vigilante vengeance. Brink's powerful and brutal story is an effective response to those who suspected that the end of apartheid would leave him without a subject, and a shrewd meditation on the dehumanizing power of hatred.
Copyright © 2005 (The New Yorker )

 at its best, The Other Side of Silence is a novel of unforgettable power. At one point Hanna is cared for by tribal women, who nurse her body with herbal medicines and calm her spirit with their legends, assuring her that ''there is no pain and no badness that a story cannot cure.'' In the context of the novel, this statement can only seem ironic: Hanna's story certainly cannot cure its own pain and badness. Brink's purpose, however, is not to cure the evils of colonialism -- no novelist could do that -- but to probe to the deepest part of their core. (The New York Times-Ruth Franklin )

Customer Reviews

"Vengeance is mine" saith Hanna X.
And she says it in a big way.
This novel takes place in the early years of the 20th Century, among the German-occupied colonies of South-West Africa. From her earliest years as an orphan, Hanna X, the main character in Brink's novel, suffers incredible amounts of abuse. First off, there is the unreasonable strictness of Frau Agathe to deal with. Beatings are a regular thing at the orphanage "because it is a Christian place where evil will not be tolerated." Then there is the lecherous priest, Pastor Ulrich, who violates her physically and spiritually. Then, a series of transitional periods where the young Hanna is shipped from one place to another, and these experiences always result in trauma, disappointment, disillusionment. Her life becomes characterized by alienation, loneliness, pain, loss, and denigration.
Throughout all of this, Hanna hangs on to a fleeting childhood memory, something she refers to as "The Time Before"... in which she remembers meeting an Irish girl named Susan at the beach of the Weser in Bremen. Susan gave Hanna a shell, and told her to listen to its inner sounds. Hanna keeps this shell, and for her it comes to represent the "silence which she carries deep within her, from the lost time before she ever arrived at the orphanage..."
When Hanna hears that hundreds of women are regularly being shipped from Hamburg to the remote African colonies to serve as wives for the men stationed there... she signs up. What could be worse than what she is presently experiencing?
She arrives at Swakopmund, and ends up at an extremely remote secular nunnery known as Frauenstein.
Here (and on the way here) she will learn that there are places worse than the orphanage. Much worse.

What follows is a very dark story. Do not be mistaken, this is a story difficult to read for its brutal depictions of torture and violence, but written in a style and with an imagery that is evocative, unmistakingly vivid, even beautiful.
However, this is in no way a beautiful story where all is resolved at the end. Where justice has its day, where all is made right. One ought to be prepared for this fact.

It shows the most absolutely horrid aspects of human nature, and always face-up, in the full light of the hot sun. Not only are the perpetrators of crimes against Hanna (the heroine) shown in all of their shameless ghastliness, but she herself becomes nearly as brutal in the latter half of the book. There comes a time when Hanna says "No more" and understandably, we want her to succeed in her plans for vengeance against the greatest of crimes that have been commited against her. She assembles a ragtag band of vigilantes, those who have suffered injustices of their own, and together they set out on a quest to reclaim dignity, with Hanna as their (mute) leader.

This is a difficult book, but only because of its subject matter. The way it is written makes me want to read more by this wonderful author.