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Reviewed by:
  • Reinhard Jirgl. Perspektiven, Lesarten, Kontexte
  • Keith Bullivant
Reinhard Jirgl. Perspektiven, Lesarten, Kontexte. Herausgegeben von David Clarke und Arne De Winde. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. 278 Seiten. €58,00.

In an early review of this volume Katrin Polak-Springer described Reinhard Jirgl as a "shooting star of contemporary German literature" (H-Net Reviews, 9/2007). She, like the editors of this volume, overstates the case, uncritically lumping together various awards without regard to the complex landscape of public sponsorship of literature in Germany; all three, for example, write of the award of the Stipendium of the Deutscher Literaturfonds in 2002, when, in fact, many such awards are given on a regular basis. Nevertheless, there have been times in recent years when important figures such as F.C. Delius, Iris Radisch, and Helmut Böttiger have testified to their sense of the importance of a writer who, not least because of the political aspect of publishing in the DDR, can be called truly "postwendal." Of the awards cited, the most significant one—that of the Josef-Breitbach-Preis of the Mainzer Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur (1999)—is strangely underplayed.

This volume (German Monitor 65) is the first of any kind to be devoted entirely to the work of Jirgl, and therein lies its major claim to usefulness. Its most important [End Page 647] contribution consists in an extensive "Gespräch in Briefen" between Jirgl and Clemens Kammler / Arne De Winde that can be recommended to anyone less familiar with the work of Jirgl. De Winde also contributes a commendably thorough bibliography of primary and secondary literature. The body of essays on the individual works or major themes and stylistic aspects of the author, written in the main by younger scholars in Great Britain and Germany (the exception is Erk Grimm of Columbia) are all written in German, prefaced by short abstracts in English, and are of a consistently very decent quality. A number of the contributions overstate their claim as to the importance and quality of Jirgl's work, but no one knows better than this reviewer how the views of a young convert, once a voice crying in the wilderness, may in time become mainstream. And Erk Grimm is to be particularly commended for his not uncritical essay "Die Lebensläufe Reinhard Jirgls. Techniken der melotraumatischen Inszenierung," which brings out his awareness of certain problematical aspects of a writer who admits to the influence of Ernst Jünger, Oswald Spengler, and Carl Schmitt on his writing, and to whom a proximity to Céline has been attested. Specifically he addresses the volume of essays that Jirgl put together with the Polish writer Andrzej Madela, in which Grimm detects a "geistige Nähe zur Jungen Freiheit," "schillernde Begrifflichkeit und mangelnde Abgrenzung von historisch belasteten politischen Vokabeln und Grundideen, [ . . . ] mehrdeutige Bezüge auf einen neuen Konservatismus und [ . . . ] seine polemische Stoßrichtung gegen demokratisches Gleichheits-Denken" (216), in other words a proximity to the ideas of the "Konservative Revolution" that I also detected in the early 1990s (cf. my The Future of German Literature). Clemens Kammler also offers a differentiated analysis of Jirgl's novel Die Unvollendeten (2003), an important and somewhat neglected contribution to the examination of 'Germans as victims'—in this case the eviction of Germans from the Sudetenland. Inevitably a number of contributors, directly or indirectly, bring out the strong parallels in Jirgl's style with Arno Schmidt and the Prenzlauer Berg school of writing of the 1980s, observed over the years by numerous critics; for those who have their problems with Schmidt and the likes of Bert Papenfuss-Gorek: Jirgl is not for you.

A final point: one of the problems with a volume like this, which tries to introduce the range of work of a still relatively unknown author to a wider audience, is that the division of labor can lead to compartmentalization, and the subsequent lack of a critical overview. This can be seen in the way that three of Jirgl's more important works—the novels Abschied von den Feinden (1995), which marked his important move to the Hanser Verlag, and for which he received the Alfred-Döblin-Preis, Hundsnächte (1997), and...

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