Texturen der Zeit. Zum Wandel ästhetischer Zeitkonzepte in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur von Johannes Pause (review)

Johannes Pause’s book is an ambitious yet careful study of time as both a central theme in contemporary German literature and a crucial condition for the development of narrative subjectivity. Though the focus of the study is largely on works of German fiction, Pause draws on texts outside of German literature by authors such as Borges, Nabokov, and others to argue that, contrary to the prevailing thesis that the paradigm of time (Zeit-Paradigma) has been replaced by a paradigm of space (Raum-Paradigma) since the 1970s, contemporary German authors have, in fact, been keenly interested in exploring and problematizing time by exposing ruptures and discontinuities that challenge historical and social understandings of time as well as notions of linearity and progress towards a controllable future. In doing so, Pause asserts, the authors whose works he investigates have called into question the use of time to impose structure on events through their choices to record some narrative possibilities while leaving others “unused” (9).

After problematizing time consciousness (Zeitbewusstsein) and summarizing the state of the research in his introduction, the first section of Pause’s study surveys the larger social and cultural shifts that have informed changing conceptions of time and how authors reflect on it through their writing. Here Pause makes effective use of historical scholarship to ground his discussion in a number of developments that he identifies as central to changes in western time consciousness: the division of the world into twenty-four time zones in 1884 (39), new practices of dividing and measuring time (e.g., work time and family time, 41–42), and the increasing integration of science and technology into modern life, through which future time became available for “use” (Verfügbarmachung der Zeit, 50). Nineteenth-century “time culture” (Zeitkultur), in which time was rationalized and understood as completely linear and tied to notions of progress, in turn affected the articulation of subjectivity. Turn-of-the-century literature provided a critical response to these developments, as Pause demonstrates in his analysis of modernist works by Rilke, Beer-Hofmann, Hofmannsthal, Musil, Borges, and Nabokov, for example.

In the second section, Pause concentrates on contemporary literature, arguing that time remains an important thematic entry point for literary critiques of the limitations placed on the “subjective experience of time” (subjektive Zeiterfahrung, 118) in works by Peter Høeg, John von Düffel, Juli Zeh, Michael Wallner, Urs Widmer, and Botho Strauß, among others. Referencing Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Pause reads contemporary novels for a new “pluralism of time” (Zeitpluralismus, 119). In distinction to the critique of time evident in high modernist texts, however, contemporary fiction presents us with a subject who occupies different “times” (e.g., Echtzeit, Eigenzeit, Weltzeit, Zeitzonen, Zeitinseln, 118) in a society that is no longer characterized by a strictly linear notion of time as measurable and perfectible. Most interesting in this regard is Pause’s inclusion of audiovisual and digital media in his analysis, which expands the relevance of his study to scholars interested in hybrid media, communications, and issues of intertextuality.

The third and final section of the study consists of close readings of three recent novels: Daniel Kehlmann’s Mahlers Zeit, Helmut Krausser’s UC, and Thomas Lehr’s 42. Pause’s choice of these three texts is based on similarities in the ways in which the three authors approach time. In all three works, time is not linear but rather proceeds by way of “Sprünge, Brüche, Standbilder oder zirkuläre Verschlingungen” (240). These “deformations” (240) call into question the perspective of the protagonist, as the reader cannot be certain whether breaks in time are the product of insanity or are, in fact, part of the “narrated reality” of the novels. The works themselves provide no “objective” reality for the reader to judge by, only the “personal past” (persönliche Geschichte, 240) of their protagonists.

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