Der Fall Esra. Ein Roman vor Gericht. Über die neuen Grenzen der Literaturfreiheit by Uwe Wittstock (review)

Esra is the title of a novel by Maxim Biller published in February 2003. In the text, situated in Munich around 2000, a first-person narrator of Jewish and German-Czech descent named Adam, but otherwise bearing a remarkable resemblance to Biller himself, tells the story of his four-year long and rather tumultuous relationship with a Turkish-German woman named Esra. Neither Adam, Esra, nor her family come off very well in the novel. Adam is impatient, egocentric, at times paranoid, and prone to exaggeration, as he occasionally manages to admit to himself. Esra is portrayed as unreliable, a bad communicator who lets her family, and especially her authoritative and authoritarian mother, make decisions for her while simultaneously denying her (then) boyfriend to have a say in important matters in her life. Things are complicated by the presence of a child from one of Esra’s previous relationships who needs frequent medical attention.

Biller’s novel would have entered and remained in the annals of contemporary German literature more or less unnoticed, if it had not been for the fact that the text became the object of a series of lengthy legal proceedings, lasting from just after its publication in 2003 until 2009. On February 28, 2003, a former girlfriend of Biller and her mother filed a disposition against the novel asking for an immediate halt to bookstore sales. On March 3 (only about two weeks after publication), the district court in Munich followed up with a provisional deposition barring the novel’s further publication, advertising and sale. The ensuing judicial drama arguably constitutes the most important legal process concerning a literary work in Germany since the 1966 banning of Klaus Mann’s novel Mephisto (an unfavorable fictional portrait of the actor Gustav Gründgens). The battle about Esra also created new standards for what authors can and cannot do, and Uwe Wittstock demonstrates this in his meticulous reconstruction of the case (that also includes some of the original legal documents).

At the core of the process about Esra is a conflict between personal rights (Persönlichkeitsrecht) and artistic freedom (Kunstfreiheit). Judges are willing to limit artistic freedom if a text, even a fictional one, is perceived to infringe on personal rights. Wittstock shows that this was the case for Mephisto as well as for lesser-known texts. The plaintiffs in the Esra case argued that most of the novel’s narrative was based on specific events in their lives. Judges focused mostly on two passages when they decided to ban the novel. The first passage mentions the Bundesfilmpreis that Esra receives at the age of 17 for playing the lead role in a film about a Turkish-German girl; the second refers to Esra’s mother receiving the Alternative Nobel Prize for her environmental activism in Turkey. Both of these passages permit a “not inconsiderable group of readers” (“nicht unbedeutender Leserkreis”)—a term used in the process about Mephisto—to recognize the real-world identities of the models for Esra and her mother. This argument, as Wittstock points out, is paradox for two reasons. Bringing their case to court is precisely what brought the plaintiffs’ identities to the public’s attention in ways that would have never happened had there been no trial. Also, the plaintiffs’ argument that narrative material in Esra was taken from their biographies is at odds with their claim the novel is meant as defamatory. The initial verdict paid very little attention to the literary nature of the work under consideration. Not all factual claims used in the verdict were correct: in Esra no specific years are mentioned, for instance, for the Bundesfilmpreis and Alternative Nobel Prize awarded to the two characters, even though judges, following claims by the plaintiffs, asserted this to be the case.

What is remarkable about the Esra case is that both the media in general and institutions that...