Writing the New Berlin: The German Capital in Post-Wall Literature (review)

Much of the discussion about German reunification and its literary consequences has focused on Berlin as the crucible of the reunification process, and Katharina Gerstenberger's volume functions as a summation to this discussion. If, as seems likely, Gerstenberger is correct that the immediate post-unification period is now over in both social reality and literature, then Gerstenberger's volume also offers, for the first time, an overview of Berlin's literary role in the reunification process as something that is no longer ongoing but rather part of history. This historicization of Berlin and of the reunification process is new, and it constitutes a major contribution to discussions of German literature in the context of national reunification. Whereas earlier treatments of both reunification and Berlin in literary scholarship were predicated on the notion that both subjects were in a state of flux, Gerstenberger suggests that the period of uncertainty and change experienced in Germany, and in German literature, in the first fifteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall is now over, and has in fact been over since about 2003–2004. In other words, Gerstenberger implies, we are no longer living in the post-unification era but rather in an as-yet undesignated post-post-unification era.

Gerstenberger asserts that "the search for the definitive Berlin novel is over" (170), and she argues that contemporary Berlin itself "is no longer the transitional city of the 1990s" (170). The search for the Berlin novel is over not because any one novel was actually found that summed up all the transformations of the New Berlin but rather because the search itself proved fruitless. The lesson of post-unification Berlin literature is not a unified master narrative of the kind implied in the search for the novel of reunification but rather a multiplicity of different voices and viewpoints. Gerstenberger argues that Günter Grass's 1995 attempt to provide the definitive novel of Berlin and reunification, Ein weites Feld, failed. It failed partly because of problems internal to the book itself—excessive length and ponderousness—but also, more crucially, because the literary public sphere in Germany is no longer interested in such definitive, unifying narratives. Instead, it encourages a proliferation of younger voices who no longer claim to have a universally valid interpretation of contemporary reality. Among other things, Gerstenberger's study is also an analysis of generational change in contemporary German literature, suggesting that the post-unification period marked a transition from the era of Günter Grass and his immediate literary successors—a generation represented by writers like Uwe Timm and Peter Schneider as representatives and remnants of the cultural ferment associated with 1968—to a newer generation of writers born shortly before, in, or even after the 1960s. It is to this newer generation of writers that Gerstenberger devotes most of her analysis: writers like Tanja Dückers, Inka Parei, Christa Schmidt, Zafer Senocak, Thomas Hettche, Katja Lange-Müller, Wolfgang Herrndorf, and many more. This younger generation, Gerstenberger argues, has a more individualistic and playful approach to literature than the preceding generations. It is no longer overwhelmed by the problem of the Nazi past, although it continues to be interested in exploring that past. The younger generation also tends to think in terms more of individual than of group identity. Politics has not disappeared for this generation, but it has become less a rigid moral commitment than a personal choice.

Where does this leave notions of German identity, or of literature as constituting a central core of national self-reflection? Although Gerstenberger notes that both notions have come under attack in the last decade or so, she nevertheless suggests that the newer generation of German writers still subscribes to notions of German identity, and of literature as forming part of that identity. However, whereas German identity prior to the arrival of the newer generation may have been conceived in relatively rigid ethnic or cultural terms...