From Kafka to Sebald: Modernism and Narrative Form edited by Sabine Wilke (review)

With Kafka and Sebald in the title as well as an alluring black-and-white photograph—taken from Sebald’s Austerlitz—on the dust jacket, this book immediately captures one’s curiosity. From Kafka to Sebald pays tribute to Richard T. Gray, professor of German at the University of Washington, by bringing together nine contributions on German-language modernist fiction. Framed by the broader perspective of narrative form, the volume places an emphasis on Franz Kafka and his contemporaries: Walter Benjamin, Yvan Goll, Sigmund Freud, Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, and Arthur Schnitzler, as well as on postwar authors: Walter Kappacher, Robert Menasse, Christa Wolf, and W.G. Sebald. As Sabine Wilke outlines in her introduction to the volume, the nine articles trace specific developments in German-language fiction of the twentieth century and present a variety of approaches (gender, performance, and trauma theory) and perspectives (comparative, deconstructive, historical). Four sections structure the volume, and each individual contribution focuses on a different author and text or set of texts. Taken together, the essays challenge the notion of narrative as a “universal structure” (2) and illustrate how the “critique of narrative” (3) encapsulates one of the defining aspects of twentieth-century modernist narrative forms.

The volume opens with a section on “Kafka’s Slippages,” that is, the way Kafka’s works resist being subsumed by one totalizing concept. Stanley Corngold elucidates the episodic nature of Kafka’s Das Schloß, identifying what he calls “Kafka-memes,” or “particles of Kafka’s earlier writings” that reappear, are remembered, or even “re-membered” as they are applied to multiple characters in Das Schloß (12). Imke Meyer convincingly presents Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” as an allegory for bourgeois subject construction. Challenging the way in which this character has often been read as a quintessential outsider of bourgeois culture, Meyer highlights the “oscillat[ion] between the poles of autonomous art and paid profession, between purity and commerce, between ‘Berufung’ and ‘Beruf’ ” (36) in Kafka’s story.

The second section on “Kafka Effects” offers two articles on the effects interwar Europe had on Kafka’s contemporaries. Jens Rieckmann explores the political and personal crisis experienced by Hugo von Hofmannsthal at the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, his resulting feelings of exile and alienation, and their reflection within Walter Kappacher’s 2009 novel Der Fliegenpalast, which Rieckmann terms a “fictional biography” of Hofmannsthal (50). Rolf J. Goebel focuses on cultural crisis in Yvan Goll’s Die Eurokokke, reading the text through the “conceptual framework” (66) of Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk and identifying several points of connection between the two works and their authors: besides the shared setting of nineteenth-century Paris, both works deconstruct “the notion of the autonomous subject” (67) and represent a suffering “modernist flâneur” (68). The relationship between Benjamin and Goll is not a one-way street, however, as Goebel shows how these works “supplement one another” (75).

Three contributions make up the third section on “Narrative Theory.” Drawing on the distinction Dominick LaCapra makes between “writing about trauma and writing trauma” (82), Gail Finney reveals the correspondences between narrative theory and trauma theory by analyzing Arthur Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else with and as a “continuation” of Sigmund Freud’s Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. Heidi Schlipphacke points to the links between Robert Menasse’s critique of Austrian national identity and his explorations of masculinity, focusing on Menasse’s use of transvestism as a metaphor in his novel Don Juan de la Mancha, oder die Erziehung der Lust (2007) and a collection of short stories entitled Ich kann jeder sagen: Erzählungen vom Ende der Nachkriegsordnung (2009). Judith Ryan’s close reading of Sebald’s annotations and markings in selected volumes of his working library, held at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach, strives to reconstruct both Sebald’s understanding of narrative theory and the significant influence French novels had on his own fictional prose.

In the...