The Novel in German since 1990 (review)

Since the eighteen chapters of this anthology were commissioned specifically to provide an overview of the novel in German as it developed after German unification, there are some inherent potential perils in this project. One concerns the selection of authors and novels that the essays are to be written on. Presumably, the novels that are subjects of study should be representative of certain cultural or aesthetic trends, or perhaps just more popular than the ones not included. The other predicament lies in the nature of any overview, and may be compounded by the fact that each chapter attempts its own minisurvey while also seeking to tackle relevant themes. This concerns the positivistic and uncritical stance that an overview must, by necessity, also take. Hence the critical question for this volume is whether the individual contributions succeed at engaging their respective works in ways that allow for in-depth, analytical engagement while also providing much-needed plot summaries.

Stuart Taberner himself does a beautiful and convincing job of addressing the first issue in his introduction, in that he invites readers to supplement the choices he has made with their own, to continue his project. The selections he has made seem wise and well balanced. His choice includes writers of the older generation (Grass, Walser, Wolf) as well as younger (Kracht, Kara), female writers, minority and migrant writers, and German and Austrian Jewish writers. This yields a broad and balanced mixture of themes and topics that are, in fact, relevant in today’s Germany. The one issue I would quibble with concerns the decision to make Günter Grass the only writer who is represented with two texts; while it is true that he is a celebrity in the contemporary German literary scene, he is no longer the only living German-language Nobel prize winner, since Elfriede Jelinek and Herta Müller have received this prize as well, and while he has written a lot, it is debatable whether his writings are indeed so relevant as to grant him double status. On the other hand, the inclusion of Zafer Şenocak’s Gefährliche Verwandtschaft is a brilliant move, and one that recognizes the novel’s import and international success in spite of its relative absence from the German literary scene.

The second concern is one that the individual chapters need to answer. To cut to the chase: all of the contributions skillfully integrate the necessary plot summaries with deep and penetrating cultural analyses. I am especially struck by how well the writers’ backgrounds as well as the cultural and thematic circumstances resonate with the critical discussions of the works. Helmut Schmitz opens the volume with a sensitive reading of Schindel’s Gebürtig, in which he highlights the differences between German and Austrian Jewish relations. Rebecca Braun’s discussion of Grass’s Ein weites Feld appropriately traces this text along the theme of lateness, although the reader is left wondering if in fact Grass himself came “too late” to the ambitious undertaking of writing the German “unification novel.” Anna Saunders’s interpretation of Brussig’s Helden wie wir stands out because she not only contextualizes Brussig’s novel with contemporary American writers, but also takes the public reception in Germany into consideration. The attention that many of these contributions devote to the reading public is a major strength of the volume. Georgina Paul masterfully contextualizes Wolf’s Medea: Stimmen with the author’s oeuvre writ large, and also within the debate around Wolf’s involvement with the Stasi. Moray McGowan pays exceptional attention to narrative innovation and the triangular Jewish-Turkish-German experience in Şenocak’s Gefährliche Verwandtschaft. Like Saunders, he points to the significance of the lack of attention that this novel has attained in Germany. Katharina Gerstenberger’s analysis of Monika Maron’s Endmoränen highlights the distinctive ways in which this novel traces the end of the GDR and the ensuing changes for individual identities. I could not agree more...