Administering Exclusion: Statelessness, Identity Papers, and Narrative Strategy in B. Traven’s The Death Ship (Das Totenschiff, 1926)

Abstract

Once an international best-seller but mostly unknown today, B. Traven’s novel The Death Ship (1926) presents a scathing critique of state bureaucracy and raises questions about the nature of authority, identity, home, and belonging in communal life. Reading the novel alongside relevant texts from political theory, I examine Traven’s text in the light of the history of bureaucracy and statelessness that surrounded and drove its production. Traven will be shown to provide a compelling critique of modern structures of communal organization, both on the level of content and in his multi-layered, non-linear style which runs counter to the more confined consecutive exposition of traditional forms such as the biographical novel. By disrupting established ways of narrating the dynamics of individualization and belonging, The Death Ship reveals some of the complex elements of bureaucratically administered exclusion, as carried forth in objects such as the passport.