If one is impelled to summarize Helene Hegemann’s Axolotl Roadkill, one can say that it is a metaphor of a society the refuses to grow up and accept the abyss that their parental negligence has created for their children. Mifti, a sixteen year old teenager immersed in a world of drugs and sexual excesses, writes in her diary about what has turned her life into a whirlpool of lavishness: a schizophrenic and destructive mother and her absent father, a well-off artist hardly present in her life. Adrift and neglected by her father and abused by her mother, she experiences the club scene of Berlin which offers Mifti hardcore drugs including cocaine, heroin, and ecstasy, among others.

About her «schizophrenic, obsessive-compulsive, neurotic, sadistic» mother she adds that «putting up with her corporal punishment was a relatively bearable state of affairs because then our roles were clearly defined and my position was clear-cut: just being the weak one for a change» (172). Mifti even goes far by saying: «I am less than existent in German culture. I’ll just let you know you have your world and you let me have mine» (177).

And so we witness page after page how the lack of care of a generation of parents have pushed their children to immerse themselves in an underground world that seems to be the everyday life of contemporary Berlin. For Mifti, Berlin’s pop culture is the club scene, drugs and sex, but she does not forget to mention what pop culture was for her parents’ generation, references that are made throughout the novel in which we find the names of Bob Dylan, , Madonna, Donnna Summer, Roberta Flack, etc.

If we live in world in which ideas flow back and forth and end up affecting everyone’s lives, there is an immediate antecedent to Mifti, more specifically a character found in the Swedish trilogy Millennium, published in 2005 by the late Stieg Larsson: Lisbeth Salander, who survived a traumatic childhood and was declared incompetent by the Swedish State and is then appointed to Nils Bjurman, the guardian who sodomizes her and is one of the key reasons why she abuses drugs and lives a promiscuous life.

Taking one step back in time and with the strong argument the literature has reached a transnational level that crosses borders, time and space, it is difficult not to mention another antecedent to Hegemann’s novel: Julio Cortázar’s short story «Axolotl», a story that literally let the world know about this Mexican animal unknown in other countries. Here, we find it quite impossible that Helene Hegemann did not hear about Cortázar’s short story particularly because she is the daughter of Carl Hegemann, a well-known dramaturg and Cortazar’s story had been translated into all European languages including German, and some of his other stories were made into movies.

In describing the Mexican pink salamander as she looks at it in an aquarium (again the flow of ideas in a mass media controlled world), Hegemann’s description reads as follows: «It has funny little tentacles, beady blue eyes and the friendliest smile I’ve ever seen… it’s really low-maintenance and it reaches sexual maturity without ever undergoing metamorphosis out of the amphibian stage – it just never grows up» (133).

Cortázar’s protagonist also contemplates the salamander in a Parisian aquarium. For several weeks of perhaps months he visits the aquarium until one particular axolotl attracts his attention. He realizes that the animal feels sad and this feeling allows him to create a bond with the animal. At the end of the story we realize that the narrative voice belongs to the axolotl as if in the bonding process man and salamander have exchanged consciousness.

Such a transit of a consciousness, from one being to another, regardless of time, space and physical constitution, although considered a trademark in Cortázar, could be traced to Romanticism, when the poet claimed that intuition was a state of consciousness in contact with nature and the divine forces.

Diminished, reduced in Cortázar’s story to a transit between a specific and rare animal and a human, this romantic consciousness dies in Hegemann’s Berlin. Only a metaphor remains in her novel. Mifti sees a possible symbiosis between the axolotl that never grows up with a German a generation of parents that does exactly the same.

Julio Cortázar’s narrator states that «In the library at Sainte-Geneviève, I consulted a dictionary and learned that axolotls are the larval stage (provided with gills) of a species of salamander of the genus Ambystoma. That they were Mexican I knew already by looking at them and their little pink Aztec faces and the placard at the top of the tank». But unlike Cortázar’s protagonist who becomes an axolotl himself, Mifti is unable to escape, even through an axolotl, from her consciousness and therefore, from her rage and pain.

Even more: You can say that the exchange of consciousness in Cortázar is either denigrating or humoristic, but the fact is that the narrative voice keeps its integrity until the last word of his short story. Salamander or human, the voice narrating the story does not suffer changes: we feel the same loneliness, same discreet, stoic, curious and objective tone. Mifti, the heir of the unified Berlin, born in one of the most developed countries of the planet, can narrate her story of fragmentation but to a certain point only where actions become dislocated and her voice sinks and disappears inside them.

With obvious differences, Mifti’s contemplation of the axolotl in a Berliner aquarium resembles Cortázar’s protagonist pondering on the same animal and this intertextuality seems to be a salutation to the renowned Argentine writer. About the uproar caused by the accusations of plagiarism in Hegemann’s novel, it is always a good idea to look back in history and learn that in the Middle Ages the notion of originality did not exist. We see stories like the life of Alexander the Great and Tristan and Isolde being written in different countries and in different languages but what was important in each version was not originality itself but the nuances that the author brought to a preexisting story.