Lyn Marven, Stuart Taberner, eds. Emerging German-Language Novelists of the Twenty-First Century. Rochester: Camden House, 2011. 288 pp. $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-57113-421-9.
Reviewed by Susanne Rinner (University of North Carolina at Greensboro)
Published on H-German (September, 2015)
Commissioned by Chad Ross
Contemporary German Fiction Writing in a Global Context
In this volume of fifteen essays, editors Lyn Marven and Stuart Taberner and their co-contributors aim to introduce emerging authors who write fiction in German and to interpret in depth one of their major literary works. The authors included in this volume are not necessarily new in the sense of being unknown, but are promising writers with in some cases an already distinguished record of publications and noteworthy contributions to the public discourse in contemporary Germany and beyond, as many of their texts have been translated into English.
The volume is a welcome addition to the critical literature that attempts to provide an analytical frame for the flourishing literary market of contemporary fiction written in German. It provides sound analysis and discussion of fifteen authors and their major works and hence will serve as a basis for future writing of literary history. Furthermore, the volume provides a snapshot of the diversity of approaches to reading German fiction, in a setting that is truly global in reach. Each essay serves to introduce one author and one of his or her literary works. Therefore, all essays can be read independently from each other, given that all essays are carefully edited and follow a similar basic structure. Read together and in their entirety, the essays provide a solid introduction to novels published at the beginning of the twenty-first century. All interpretations are theoretically grounded and emphasize that many of the literary texts contain a reflection on theoretical approaches to culture and often specifically literature. Furthermore, all readings connect contemporary fiction written in German with more canonical German, European, and world literature. A web of literary texts, public discourse, and theoretical analysis emerges that assigns fiction new meaning and heightened relevance in the complexities of navigating the effects of global interactions at the local level.
The very helpful introduction efficiently contextualizes this volume within current trends in literary criticism. Marven takes stock of the state of fiction writing in German at the turn of the millennium and twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and German unification. She argues that the selected authors and their writing demonstrate how, in subject matter and setting, and in style and narrative, German fiction is defined by globalized and transnational characteristics. Fittingly, globalization, and its relation with the local, is problematized in a variety of ways in the essays. Globalization is understood as a continued border crossing of people, goods, and ideas; as an investigation of cities as places of lived global identities and cultures as well as local histories; as processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization; and, ultimately, as a way to reformulate concepts of Heimat.
Marven provides a thought-provoking discussion of the diversity in the plethora of literary publications in German. The diversity and breadth of German literary publications pose a challenge to writing a coherent literary history that is based on the paradigm of a national literature. The current literary market seems to rely on literary awards, the ones established to recognize the best German fiction as well as the ones that mark the inherent diversity of German literature, such as the Adelbert von Chamisso award for writers with a multilingual and multicultural background, in order to establish a list of writers and works worthy of inclusion in the cultural canon. The volume’s essays and their authors repeatedly theorize the problematic nature of writing in German. Many of the contributions thoughtfully reflect on the fictionality of the voices and the, at times presumed, autobiographical stance in the novels. Marvin proposes to understand this contemporary fiction as "postidentity literature" even though, as many contributions point out, the author, and the literary characters as the figures through which the author speaks, is ever more important in the context of the literary market. Many authors contribute to the public discourse, often by using new and social media with a wide reach, and hence promote autobiographical readings of their literary works.
This volume successfully addresses the increasingly urgent concerns of questions of language, identity, and inclusion and exclusion that exist at all levels of the literary discourse, within the texts, and amongst the authors and their critics. Furthermore, the success of authors who write in German increasingly hinges on the availability of their works in languages other than German, often through the adaption of their writings in other mediums such as film. Therefore, this volume deserves recognition for drawing attention to the fact that quite a few current German-language novels are already available in translation and make fiction written in German accessible to a broader, more global audience.
This volume deserves praise for ensuring coherence among the fifteen contributions. All of them include a brief biographical introduction to the author and contextualize his/her work with the literary themes and styles that serve as organizing principles for this volume, among them genre, narrative voice, gender and sexuality, and identity. Many of the essays also provide some cross-referencing to related themes in other essays, which makes the volume extremely reader-friendly, and several provide insightful readings that reference often more canonical works of German, European, and world literature. Furthermore, in their theoretical orientation, all of the contributions show that German literary studies is a flourishing field of literary criticism that draws on and contributes to numerous other theoretical and methodological discourses, in particular gender, the body, memory, Jewish studies, anthropological diaspora studies, and the study of space, to name but a few. In addition, wherever applicable, contributions highlight the versatility of the authors, who often write in multiple genres and work as journalists, in film, and use new and social media to express themselves and to create fiction. The authors’ educational and professional experiences impact their writing. For example, Julia Zeh's legal training informs her choice of literary subjects. Among other indicators, these experiences challenge the notion of the supposed or real elitism of fiction and instead anchor fiction writing in today's complex world.
Marven reads Ulrike Draesner's novel Mitgift (2002) in the context of science, gender, and critical theory. The novel deals with the embodiedness of the character's experiences and hence the theoretical discourse that Marven applies in her interpretation informs the novel itself. The discourse of science plays an increasingly important role in German fiction, as other contributions, such as Rebecca Braun's essay on Daniel Kehlmann's Die Vermessung der Welt (2005), emphasize. Yet, it is not a representation of scientific discourse as a way to learn more about science and scientific discoveries and advances. Instead it is the literary engagement with science and scientists in order to investigate ways of knowing, ways of knowledge creation, and ways of interrogating what can be known that shapes the literary discourse of and about science. Sonja Klocke provides an insightful reading of Kathrin Schmidt's novel Du stirbst nicht (2009) by focusing on the challenges that the individual encounters when confronted with a medical establishment that mirrors other oppressive and authoritarian hierarchies.
Stuart Taberner's reading of Vladimir Vertlib, Das besondere Gedächtnis der Rosa Masur (2003) challenges the representation and appropriation of all things Jewish. Taberner contextualizes his reading by convincingly arguing that this discourse is often misunderstood as a (mythical) German-Jewish symbiosis in order to define the non-German, an attempt that forms a stark contrast to the supposed or real inclusiveness of today’s "normal" Germany. The novel ends with an outlook on developments beyond the national context, specifically multiculturalism, Europeanism, and transnationalism. In a similar approach, Anke S. Biendarra reads Terézia Mora's novel Alle Tage (2006) as the story of a migrant whose ending undermines the notion that transnational mobility indicates or possesses liberatory power.
Stephen Brockmann's interpretation of Zeh's Spieltrieb (2006) provides a dystopian view of contemporary and future society. Brockmann contextualizes the novel within European literature and engages a particularly noteworthy discussion of the role of education and specifically teachers in today's seemingly valueless world.
Rebecca Braun's analysis of Kehlmann's Die Vermessung der Welt focuses on the two main characters as celebrities and in so doing understands celebrity as a contemporary social issue as well as a textual phenomenon. Fame, or rather the cult of the author and, by extension, the literary characters, is also a prominent theme in Frauke Matthes' analysis of Clemens Meyer's novel Als wir träumten (2007). The novel focuses on young people, specifically young delinquent men in postwar Leipzig and thus thematizes masculinity and violence, specifically gang violence as well as ghetto and prison culture. Similar themes appear in Barbara Mennel's interpretation of Alina Bronsky's Scherbenpark (2009). The novel tells the story of a teenage migrant girl in the Russian ghetto of an unnamed German city. Mennel convincingly argues that literature's dependence on language necessitates a reliance on the local but responds to, incorporates, and partakes in global networks of production and circulation of culture.
Julien Preece provides a critical reading of Ilija Trojanow's Der Weltensammler (2009). Preece suggests that the main character's body serves as a source of metaphor and identity. His greatest success (in the eyes of his author) has been to elude all definitions, in itself a Romantic affirmation of individual uniqueness and as such an important contribution to the discussion of identity construction in the twenty-first century, a discussion that weaves through all essays more or less explicitly. In her analysis of Yadé Kara's Cafe Cyprus (2010) Kate Roy suggests that the main character frees himself from all group identities and instead adopts a personal style that enables him to use his various identities to respond flexibly to a globalized society. The novel is seen as a response to the citizenship debates that marked the period immediately following German unification.
Numerous essays reflect on the relationship between historical events and their effect on fiction writing. Brigid Haines discusses the so-called Eastern turn in Saša Stanišić's novel Wie der Soldat das Grammofon (2009), in which a child narrator bears witness and experiences the loss of innocence. Emily Jeremiah's interpretation of Sibylle Berg's Die Fahrt (2009) situates the text between notions of Germanness and globalization. Her reading foregrounds aesthetic considerations in the context of "glocal" literature, and like Mennel, and to a certain degree Matthes, she utilizes the category "popliterature" to understand the text's bleak outlook on the world.
Valerie Heffernan places Julia Franck's Die Mittagsfrau (2009) within the larger public discourse on contemporary German fiction writing. She argues that this autobiographically inspired novel uses the historical backdrop of the German twentieth century in order to investigate contemporary motherhood. Heike Bartel's reading of Karen Duve's Taxi (2010) understands taxi driving as a metaphor for postmodern life, and the mode of writing ranges from the real to the literary, from the autobiographical to the fantastical.
Andrew Plowman suggests understanding Sven Regener's novel Der kleine Bruder (2010) as a response to Ostalgie in order to foreground West German experiences before the fall of the Berlin Wall, specifically the experiences of Kreuzberg, an important microcosm for students, immigrants, and the working class in West Berlin in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Furthermore, Plowman argues that Regener’s success with his Lehmann trilogy facilitates a debate about the readability of current fiction and functions as a probe into whether German literature can also be a source of entertainment, a category that is not typically associated with highbrow German literature.
The volume concludes with brief translations to make accessible two of the contemporary German-language novels that have not yet been fully translated, Das besondere Gedächtnis der Rosa Masur (2003) by Vladimir Vertlib, translated by Jamie Lee Searle, and Meyer's Als wir träumten, translated by Katy Derbyshire. The editors also included an index, making the volume user-friendly and accessible as a reference guide to fiction written in German in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The index reinforces the impression that German literature is an expression of and a contribution to the process of globalization, with the German language as a tool of self-expression for a diverse group of writers as exemplified by hyphenations such as Jewish-German or Turkish-German, with a geographic reach from Abu Ghraib to Yugoslavia, and with a time span from the Bible and Greek mythology to 9/11.
Two themes that stood out for this reviewer were the topic of violence that was present in most of the novels and that was addressed at least cursorily in all of the critical readings, and the topic of education, specifically language learning as a skill, an intercultural competence, and as a way to make human connections, as Anke Biendarra convincingly shows. Since all contributors to this volume work outside Germany (in the United States and in Great Britain), maybe it is not surprising that the question of language and linguistic competence plays an important role in their attempt to produce a differentiated picture of emerging German-language novelists in the twenty-first century.
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Citation:
Susanne Rinner. Review of Marven, Lyn; Taberner, Stuart, eds., Emerging German-Language Novelists of the Twenty-First Century.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
September, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=37811
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