Revolting Families: Toxic Intimacy, Private Politics, and Literary Realisms in the German Sixties by Carrie Smith-Prei (review)

In Revolting Families, Carrie Smith-Prei considers the way writers of New and Black Realism in late 1960s West Germany came to terms with the atmosphere of bodily and sexual repression that continued to linger from the Adenauer fifties. Specifically, she looks at how New Realists Dieter Wellershoff and Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and Black Realists Gisela Elsner and Renate Rasp wrote texts that, through their portrayal of “negatively coded bodies” (3) either form a critical dissent to or satirize systems of repression and authoritarian control then still operational.

Smith-Prei chooses texts from these four authors for their particular portrayal of bodies, the time at which these texts were written (on the cusp of 1968), and for the modes of Realism in which these texts were produced. Smith-Prei focuses on texts produced proximate to 1968 for that year’s symbolic capital, which reflects “the politicization of the private sphere and the mobilization of literature and art for immediate critical change” (4). According to Smith-Prei, the forms of realism engaged by these authors “use the negative workings of the body as a narrative aesthetics through which to express socio-political concerns related to the 1960s private sphere” (3). In order to undertake this critical analysis, she develops “a theoretical apparatus for approaching the appearance of negatively coded bodies, an apparatus that is sensitive to bodies’ narrative-aesthetic potential and to their attunement to a historical present that is located in a specific moment of cultural change” (3).

According to Smith-Prei, the texts under consideration here “attend to the social and psychological effects of authority, excess, and repression of the 1950s on the private sphere in the 1960s. They critically comment on these effects through the negative workings of the body, intending that the reader be mobilized by the resulting negativity” (14). In this consideration, she relies on concepts of negativity in art as developed by Iser, Adorno, and Marcuse. Smith-Prei states that the animating principle of “the negative and negation” in texts is that they are “oppositional positions, countering dominant thinking, normativity, or passively accepted practices; the negative and negation destabilize the status quo” (14–15). Her choice of texts that focus not only on the presentation of bodies in the private sphere, but particularly in the private sphere of the family, reflects the fact that “The New Left and the members of the student movement considered the family as an authoritarian structure that perpetuated the repression of sexuality” (30).

In analyses of Dieter Wellershoff’s novel Ein schöner Tag, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann’s short story “In der Grube” and collection Die Umarmung, Gisela Elsner’s novel Die Riesenzwerge, and Renate Rasp’s novel Ein ungeratener Sohn and select poems, Smith-Prei shows herself to be a generally superior reader of texts and, most particularly, of visual imagery present in those texts. In the chapter on Wellershoff, Smith-Prei demonstrates how the novel Ein schöner Tag “charts the physical ramifications” of “private psychic disturbances resulting from repressive social expectations” (43). I found the analysis of Wellershoff’s novel to be utterly convincing. In her interpretation, Smith-Prei analyzes the deterioration of the protagonist Günther. As such, she illustrates how “Günther exemplifies Wellershoff’s interest in the social roots of individual neurosis and psychosis; throughout the three chapters narrated from his perspective, Günther charts a course from neurosis towards an ever-increasing loss of connection with reality that ends in a near-comatose psychosis” (57). Smith-Prei’s illustration of this course of psychic deterioration is flawless.

Smith-Prei’s analysis of Renate Rasp’s harrowing novel Ein ungeratener Sohn is similarly convincing. She explains that Elsner’s and Rasp’s texts fall under the purview of Black Realism, as opposed to New Realism, elaborating that “Black Realism, as indicated by the two parts...