The German Pícaro and Modernity: Between Underdog and Shape-Shifter by Bernhard F. Malkmus (review)

Bernhard F. Malkmus begins his insightful study of the modern German picaresque novel by tracing the origins of the genre to early modern Spain. Two events in the year 1492 were to prove decisive in the subsequent development of picaresque fiction: the discovery of the New World and the expulsion or forced conversion of the Jews. The voyages of Columbus and subsequent explorers transformed the Spanish economy in ways that led to the impoverishment of low-level rural nobles, or hidalgos, while the converted Jews (conversos) remained the targets of widespread prejudice despite their public embrace of the Christian faith. The picaresque novel emerged in sixteenth-century Spain as the genre of what Malkmus terms these "half-outsiders," figures on the fringes of society who are part disenfranchised victims and part opportunistic tricksters. Unlike the protagonists of the Bildungsroman, who - ideally, at least - exhibit psychological depth as they develop towards a unique sense of self and integration into an affirmed society, the picaros remain role-playing mimics on the margins of the social order they seek to exploit even as it is ready to reject them.

Malkmus devotes the majority of his study to the analysis of five German novels that extend the genre into the modern era. His choices combine canonical texts (Franz Kafka's Der Verschollene, Thomas Mann's Felix Krull, and Günter Grass's Die Blechtrommel) with the less familiar (Robert Walser's Jakob von Gunten and Edgar Hilsenrath's Der Nazi und der Friseur). Kafka's protagonist seeks a new beginning in the New World, only to bounce from one failure to the next as he drifts through the phantasmagoric American landscape. Jakob von Gunten and Oskar Matzerath display a Nietzschean willingness to affirm life as aesthetic existence. Felix Krull parodies the autobiography and the Bildungsroman as he hovers between narcissism and playful self-invention, while Hilsenrath's controversial novel troubles the distinction between victim and perpetrator in the Holocaust in its portrait of a character who seeks but fails to find forgiveness for his crimes.

Between the close readings of the individual texts, Malkmus adds three excurses that relate the literary figure of the modern picaro to various theoretical discussions of modernity. In the first, Malkmus introduces Michel Foucault's concept of the heterotopia as a way to characterize the picaros' journeys through spaces that are simultaneously part of and apart from the social order, in keeping with the characters' tenuous place on the margins of society. These modern figures capture the sense of shock and discontinuity from tradition that Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin view as central to the experience of the modern. The second excursus discusses the picaros' liminal position in terms of Reinhard Koselleck's sociology and Niklas Luhmann's systems theory, while the third draws on Giorgio Agamben's concept of the homo sacer to describe the picaro's paradoxical role as both insider and outcast, "shape-shifter and underdog" (158). At times the number of names and theoretical concepts that Malkmus employs can seem a little overwhelming in relation to the individual authors and works of fiction discussed, yet on the whole they add nuance and intellectual depth to a book that makes a convincing case for the picaro as a paradigmatic figure for modernist German fiction. Malkmus has written a theoretically sophisticated and historically grounded study of the picaresque novel that makes a valuable contribution to German Studies from a comparatist perspective.