Taking Stock: Relational Happiness and Female Midlife in Doris Knecht's Eine vollständige Liste aller Dinge, die ich vergessen hatte and Judith Hermann's Daheim

This contribution focuses on the search for wellbeing at a time of the profound crisis of the Anthropocene, which demands that we move away from concepts of personal happiness and begin to imagine a more sustainable, relational wellbeing that includes both human and non-human partners. It argues that in this context female midlife is a fascinating terrain, which highlights the tension between the idea of happiness as a product of individual choice and the indisputable fact of our dependence on others. This article takes two recent German-language novels and explores the contrasting ways in which they figure their protagonist's search for happiness in midlife. Austrian writer Doris Knecht's Eine vollst & auml;ndige Liste aller Dinge, die ich vergessen hatte (2023) centres on a female protagonist who has experienced personal challenges and seeks to find greater happiness in middle age. Although Knecht's novel reveals happiness as a social construct, it ultimately remains entangled in the inward-looking logic of happiness and a good life as the product of individualist optimization. By contrast, German author Judith Hermann's Daheim (2021) situates the protagonist's search for happiness in midlife as part of a broader context of social and environmental crisis and tentatively suggests the potential for a relational wellbeing based in an awareness of the interdependence of humans and the natural world.