The Ends of Satire: Legacies of Satire in Postwar German Writing by Daniel Bowles (review)

In March 2016, the German satire program extra 3 aired the song “Erdowie, Erdowo, Erdoğan” aimed at Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Shortly thereafter, satirist Jan Böhmermann broadcast his infamous poem “Schmähkritik,” thus fueling the fire of diplomatic disgruntlements that had ensued between Germany and Turkey following the extra 3 broadcast. Erdoğan brought criminal as well as civil action against Böhmermann: while the most recent civil lawsuit banned Böhmermann from reciting certain parts of the poem, the criminal proceedings against the satirist eventually ended in October 2016. Two months later, on 1 December 2016, French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo published its first German issue. Considering these examples of the power that satire holds, one could justifiably argue that it is currently celebrating its comeback on the map of contemporary media landscapes. It is therefore not only timely but intellectually stimulating to read an exploration of satire like Daniel Bowles’s The Ends of Satire: Legacies of Satire in Postwar German Writing that leaves preconceived notions of the term and dares to venture into new, epistemologically illuminating territory.

The guiding question of Bowles’s study is seemingly simple: “What is satire?” It is sometimes these apparently easy questions, though, that call for the kind of intricate answers that Bowles delivers over the course of his book. Setting out to fill the gap that opened up in literary scholarship by “the virtual absence of satire in serious academic studies of twentieth-century and postmodern literature in general” (6), The Ends of Satire certainly achieves this goal. Notably, though, the study also goes beyond its specific research focus of satiric practices and contains rewarding passages on intertextuality and the interrelationship of reading and writing that will be of interest to those readers unfazed by the aforementioned gap in academic writing.

Contrary to common notions of satire that predominantly focus on the historical, social, and political context of (not only) literary works that currently causes a resurgence of political satire, Bowles chooses a semiotic approach and accordingly favours formal and textual aspects over content. Put in different terms, satire appears not as a genre but rather as “a mode of writing and reading constituted by a set of semiotic practices” (8). Three such semiotic and satiric practices—inversion, mythification, and citation—lie at the core of the study and allow the author to lend his book a well-defined and accessible structure. The first semiotic practice, inversion, might be the one that strikes the casual reader as the most self-evident with regards to satire as it is concerned with overturning hierarchical orders that structure not only the political set-up of society but the very way we organize knowledge. Tracing the inversion of signification back to the works of Jean Paul, Bowles supports his subsequent explorations with a necessary historical grounding that allows him to take the practice of inversion several steps further, both in a conceptual and temporal sense. Engaging in close readings of such markedly different texts as Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World (1965) and Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters (1984) and Extinction (1986), the study exemplifies how the carnivalesque in Bakhtin and the inversion of narrative perspective and narrated time in Bernhard are related, thus offering the first glimpses of an “alternate history” (9) of satire that Bowles sets out to delineate in his analysis. Creating dialogues between diverse texts turns out to be not only one of Bowles’s methodological practices but one of the biggest strengths of his book. This is particularly evident in those passages that provide the reader with lucid readings of texts that at first sight appear to have very little to do with satire. The analysis of one such text, Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (1957), reveals that mythification, the second practice investigated in the book, bears indeed many semiotic similarities to satire in the sense...