Contemporary German Crime Fiction: A Companion ed. by Thomas W. Kniesche (review)

German-language crime fiction long remained virtually unknown outside the German-speaking world. Yet accessible academic surveys of German crime fiction have appeared in English in recent years and advanced this work appreciably. Published only three years after Katharina Hall’s edited volume Crime Fiction in German: Der Krimi from 2016, Thomas Kniesche’s Contemporary German Crime Fiction marks another recent effort to introduce this genre to a broader audience.

The volume focuses on German-language crime fiction after 1945, which it addresses through country-specific chapters, ones on key themes, and then portraits of noteworthy authors. The editor himself contributed approximately a third of the content, including a substantial essay on memory discourse. Eleven other contributors—including prominent scholars of crime fiction such as Jochen Vogt, Sandra Beck, and Thomas Wörtche—supplied essays, author portraits, or both. In deference to readers outside German studies, all essays provide translations of German citations and book titles and indicate consistently whether primary sources have appeared in English.

Although Hall’s earlier volume undertakes a broader chronological survey than Kniesche’s, some overlap exists between the two with respect to featured epochs and themes. Both works devote chapters to Austria and Switzerland, women’s crime fiction, and historical crime fiction. In these instances, Kniesche and his co-contributors nearly always pursue impressive new lines of inquiry. Quite apart from those efforts, the volume distinguishes itself from Hall’s through dedicated chapters on the Soziokrimi (sociological crime fiction), regional crime fiction, the status of German crime fiction within the literary field, teaching the genre at American colleges and universities, and the aforementioned author profiles.

Kniesche’s opening chapter offers a brief history of German-language crime and detective narratives that spans seventeenth-century case studies to the period after World War II. He makes a convincing case for the sustained popularity of crime-themed literature and the existence of a literary tradition from the days of broadsheets to today. Underpinning this argument is a more accommodating view of the trajectory of the genre, one that recognizes its inextricable link to international phenomena while also accounting for distinct features. For instance, Kniesche shows that a diversity of narrative types and frequent pedagogical bent were characteristic of early forms (5–7).

Gonçalo Vilas-Boas’s essay focuses on two Swiss authors in particular, Friedrich Glauser and Friedrich Dürrenmatt. Given the approach of most other chapters in this volume, it is surprising that Vilas-Boas decided against a more comprehensive survey. Indeed, though he notes that “[i]t was only in the 1980s that the genre began to play an important role in Switzerland” (17), one does not gain insight into how it has evolved since this pivotal moment, nor learn the names of relevant Swiss authors from these decades. Instead, Vilas-Boas focuses primarily on providing plot summaries of Glauser’s and Dürrenmatt’s novels. Unfortunately, at times the analysis in this chapter is inconsistent and the information inaccurate. To cite two examples, Glauser’s Schlumpf Erwin Mord appeared as The Thumbprint in English, but the English translation provided here neglects this detail and turns the suspected perpetrator into a victim (“The Murder of Schlumpf Erwin,” 23). Later, Vilas-Boas observes: “Glauser published most of his books as novels in the 1940s” (28), yet the author died in 1938. For greater insight into Glauser’s and Dürrenmatt’s influence on contemporary Swiss authors, Martin Rosenstock’s essay in Crime Fiction in German does yeoman service. In the present volume, Kniesche’s essay on Austrian crime fiction models more successfully how past authors influenced present ones. After identifying six recurrent features of Austrian crime fiction, Kniesche offers brief examples that often include a handful of authors or novels; at the conclusion of the chapter, he turns to in-depth analyses of two representative works.

As the first distinctly ‘homegrown’ subgenre of crime fiction in West Germany, the...