“Kennt Kultur keine Kurzarbeit?”: Representing Work and Worklessness in Contemporary German Literature

“Woran arbeiten Sie gerade?” The German weekly Die Zeit asked fifty cultural producers to answer that question in a special “labour-day” 2009 edition of its feuilleton. The introduction framed the discussion as follows: “Kultur kennt keine Kurzarbeit. Auch in Zeiten der Krise herrscht unter Deutschlands Schriftstellern, Musikern, Intellektuellen, Schauspielern und Filmemachern Vollbeschäftigung – allerdings meist nur für Gotteslohn” (“Woran”). “Vollbeschäftigung,” of course, is as unattainable for the cultural as for any other sector in contemporary Germany, and broadening the sample beyond the cream of the crop would have made that clear. Beyond that, philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s answer to Die Zeit calls into question the traditional notion of work by stating that “Sankt Labour ist keine Figur in meinem persönlichen Heiligenkalender. Das Beste, was man mit dem ‘Tag der Arbeit’ anfangen kann, ist doch, ihn so bald wie möglich zu einem ‘Tag der Übung’ umzuwidmen” (“Woran” 49). Sloterdijk’s comment is not simply esoteric. Rather, it points us in the direction of the often stated crisis of the society of work (Arbeitsgesellschaft), challenging us to recognize, and act upon, a profound transformation that the practice and meaning of work have undergone over the past several decades – a transformation that is still poorly understood.

Although most of the fifty respondents to Die Zeit did not reflect on the notion of work itself in the way Sloterdijk did, the correlations between cultural and general social production need to be vigorously investigated. Changing work patterns also impact cultural and artistic production, on a thematic and structural level. In the arena of literature, representations of work – or the absence thereof – have recently surged, which is not surprising given the overall preoccupation with work and unemployment in German society as a whole. This article will map several literary attempts to come to terms with this “brave new world of work” (to use the English title of sociologist Ulrich Beck’s influential Schöne neue Arbeitswelt) in the contexts of a) earlier moments in the tradition of Arbeitsliteratur and b) current practices of, and debates about, work. More specifically, it is interested in what kinds of aesthetic imperatives inform today’s articulations of work. In other words: What happens to representations of work with the shift from industrial to (allegedly) postindustrial society? Does the classic Materialästhetik continue to have relevance beyond the days and hey-days of Brecht and Wallraff? Or does it serve only as the “other” of a blissfully virtual postmodernism, as Slavoj Žižek polemically argues in the following passage about the cinema:

When, in a James Bond film, the master-criminal, after capturing Bond, usually takes him on a tour of his illegal factory, is this not the closest Hollywood comes to the proud socialist-realist presentation of production in a factory? And the function of Bond’s interventions, of course, is to explode this site of production in a ball of fire, allowing us to return to the daily semblance of our existence in a world with the “disappearing working class.”

(134–35)

In forging connections between “work” and the literary “Work” throughout this essay – using Scott Shershow’s distinction between these two terms – this article will argue that genres that were employed to shed light on the Arbeitswelt during earlier periods may well have reached retirement age. This analysis will show that there is much complexity in, and confusion about, new configurations of working and writing and the relationship between the two. At the same time, it will demonstrate that a more radical critique of waged work is gaining ground that new forms of writing may be better equipped to articulate than literature.

Disappearing working class, brave new world of work – let us first gain some insight into how the German Arbeitswelt has been transformed in order to better understand the challenges authors face when writing about it. The first thing one usually talks about in Germany today when it comes to work is unemployment figures, and these have been extremely high in Germany for some time now. The official number as of January 2009 was...