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  • We Are the Machine: The Computer, the Internet, and Information in Contemporary German Literature
  • Joseph W. Slade (bio)
We Are the Machine: The Computer, the Internet, and Information in Contemporary German Literature. By Paul A. Youngman. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2009. Pp. xv+171. $70.

Among the virtues of We Are the Machine: The Computer, the Internet, and Information in Contemporary German Literature, an astute study of literary and cultural responses to information technologies, are brief chronicles of IT industries in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Each nation developed computers early—the Z3 (Germany) in 1941, the Mailüfterl (Austria) in 1958, and the ERMETH (Switzerland) in 1956—although they were subsequently marginalized by aggressive marketing of American models. As a result, [End Page 427] writers in those countries quickly sensed the threats posed by digital devices to what Paul A. Youngman calls “the liberal human subject,” itself a somewhat romantic construct.

Youngman’s postwar benchmarks here are Heinrich Hauser’s Gigant Hirn (The Great Brain [1948]) and Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Elektronische Hirne (Electronic Brains [1958]). Both were science-fiction fantasies spurred by predictions, most notably that by John von Neumann, that organic and artificial intelligence would coevolve and eventually merge. The unease displayed in those dystopian works, now heightened by intelligent software, ubiquitous networks, and the rearticulation of Neumann’s speculations into the Singularity thesis, continues to surface in German-language literature. According to Youngman, later writers have added worries about the reality-altering potential of networks to the old specter of control by anthropomorphic machines. He downplays hyperbolic human-machine scenarios, however, avoiding fevered jargon in favor of reflections by critics such as Katherine Hayles, Pierre Lévy, and Donna Haraway.

If modern literary examples are less likely to evoke Terminator-style androids and conscious Skynets, they focus instead on the personal and social dangers of floods of decontextualized information unleashed by the internet and on the collapsing boundaries between physical and electronic spaces. In Gerd Heidenreich’s 1995 Die Nacht der Händler (The Trader’s Night) and Barbara Frischmuth’s 1998 Die Schrift des Freundes (The Friend’s Writing), for example, characters must cope with mediated perceptions of “reality” that subordinate individuals to the data formats of cyber-worlds, despite or because of the ease and speed of digital communication. Rushes of information fragment understanding and isolate individuals. Here Youngman argues for historical perspective, pointing out that the internet’s blurring of public and private spaces has precedent in the effects of eighteenth-century postal systems on social classes and relationships. In the eternal present of the web, however, humans lose sight of history.

Written at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Erich Loest’s 2001 Reichsgericht (Supreme Court) and Günter Grass’s 2002 Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk) deal with the frightening ability of digitally savvy individuals to use the web to manipulate and falsify the past. Instant accessibility and enormous volumes of free-floating information, construed as bits without meaning, challenge human powers of interpretation and memory. René Pollesch’s 2003 drama world wide web-slums revives fears of a digital take-over as humans themselves become machine-like in their acceptance of information patterns they can barely comprehend. Finally, Christine Eichel’s 2004 Im Netz (In the Net) and Daniel Glattauer’s 2006 Gut gegen Nordwind (Good against the Northwind) fictionalize cyber-eroticism that digitally reconstructs public and private spaces into shadow realms of virtual desire. Here digital technologies menace because they redefine human perception and perhaps human nature, biological as well as psychological. Against [End Page 428] such assertions, Youngman wisely notes that humans have long since been transformed by successive stages of mediation. Ambivalence is all to the good, but demystification of IT, not casting it as deterministic, is the only option.

In the four years since the last of these works was published, the rapid integration of computing and connectivity into daily, national, and global life has raised concerns ranging from the decline of social skills, the rise of attention-deficit disorders, and the increase in addictive emailing and web-surfing to digitalized political factionalism, economic duplicity, and cyber warfare. Although German writers have sometimes been ahead...

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