Introduction

PETER HUTCHINSON AND MICHAEL MINDEN

‘Kaum wird man in hundert Jahren […] den Nobelpreisträger Heinrich Böll unter die Jahrhundertschriftsteller zählen.’ Rudolf Augstein’s assessment, immediately following Böll’s death in 1985, may have seemed cruel at the time, but it might equally well be applied to a number of current literary giants. Böll, one of the major political consciences of his day, the man who summed up so many aspects of the post-war period and its aftermath, already has relatively little appeal to many contemporary readers. The same holds for a number of late twentieth-century novelists whose work was originally hailed with enth­usi­asm or was even declared ‘unique’, and one could easily embar­rass various prominent literary critics by pointing to their ecstatic assessment of novels which have long since lost their status. We should not, however, assume from this that the original judgment was badly wrong or that popularity was driven by media hype or by other non-literary factors: Böll, Walser, Johnson, Arno Schmidt, and various others produced signifi- cant works which had an immediate impact on their society and on their fellow writers. Yet the often novel approach, the initial flood of excited reviews, the extensive sales (regularly inter­national), the sometimes explo- sive subject-matter, all these proved to be ephemeral. The first volume ofLandmarks in the German Novel included works writ- ten up to 1959, but the selection of texts became increasingly difficult as we approached that clear watershed at the end of the post-war era. It has proved even more problematic to decide which novels should follow. Obviously, the closer we are to a period, the more difficult it is to assess, and the more controversial is any selection of its most distinctive products. Earlier epochs pose fewer problems since successive generat­ions of discriminating readers have done their work for us, but with near-contemporary writing we face two particular hazards: on the one hand, daring to ignore the popularity of a novel that has commanded high sales and been translated into numerous languages; and on the other, having the courage to claim distinctiveness 2 PETER HUTCHINSON AND MICHAEL MINDEN for a work that has attracted far more modest attention and which is rela- tively unknown outside the German-speaking countries. The consolation is, of course, that only posterity can justify or invalidate any claim we may make. Had this volume been produced in the 1960s or 1970s, then Böll, Frisch, Walser, Arno Schmidt, Peter Weiss and Uwe Johnson would have been prominent. The case for including them now is less obvious: partly because they have been prised out of their cult positions by others, partly because their weaknesses have become more apparent, partly because their innovations have not continued to please, but above all, because they do not represent a major turning point or crystallise key issues. In the compilation of the present volume some difficult exclusions have therefore had to be made: a place has (reluctantly) not been found for such significant achieve- ments as Grass’s Der Butt, for Johnson’s Jahrestage, for Frisch’s Mein Name sei Gantenbein, Walser’s Einhorn or Arno Schmidt’s Zettel’s Traum. Nor for politically significant works like Böll’sDie verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum, Grass’s Im Krebsgang, or Schlink’s Der Vorleser. Or cuttingly avant- garde works like the novels of Elfriede Jelinek, or such postmodern block- busters as Süskind’s Das Parfum or Ransmayr’s Die letzte Welt, or some of the large number of works awarded the many literary prizes which Germany is able to boast. (As Thomas Kraft has sarcastically put it, however, ‘Wer heute in Deutschland einen halbwegs vernünftigen Text abliefert, kann kaum einem der zahlreichen Literaturpreise entgehen’.) Tempting though it would have been, it has also not been our aim to feature works that could be seen as representative of a series of brief trends, movements and various concepts of writing which have arisen since 1959. West Germany, East Germany, Austria and Switzerland have enjoyed a diver- sity of novels, which range from those that face the Nazi past in fresh ways (most prominently Lenz, Deutschstunde), to those of the New Subjectivity, that early 1970s movement to reclaim literature for the personal and which is reflected best in Karin Struck’s Klassenliebe and Peter Schneider’s Lenz. Closely related are those novels generally regarded as ‘Vaterliteratur’ – writ- ing in the 1970s and 1980s by a younger generation who were troubled by the apparent silence of their fathers during critical years of German history – to which one could add ‘Mutterliteratur’, a far less common, but equally important, concept. Around this time there is also the rise of gay writing, following the 1969 repeal of the infamous law prohibiting homosexuality, Introduction 3

‘Paragraph 175’, but that was often obscured by other strands, not least the important flow of women’s writing which emerged in the 1970s, with such figures as Irmtraud Morgner, Verena Stefan, and Elfriede Jelinek. By the end of the 1980s we are moving towards Stasi novels, dealing first of all with the impact of surveillance on dissidents in East German society, then We nde novels, which treat the fall of the Wall and its consequences, followed by novels concerned with Ostalgie, the partial idealisation of life under social- ism, and then, of course, novels which deal with the issues of Germans as victims, not just of a Stalinist form of socialism, but, turning to the slightly more distant past, as victims of National Socialism and the Second World War. We can here see how historical change, and especially the issues raised by unification, gave a slightly stagnating literature fresh perspectives on well- known issues. If literature had started to feel stranded in the ‘anachronistic’ medium of print, it was nevertheless now well equipped to filter questions on how personal and public identity interrelate and how controversial questions which arose in the 1980s could be explored in fictional form. Internationally recorded events like ‘Bitburg’, for example (the site of a war cemetery which included Waffen-SS graves, and to which Chancellor Kohl had invited President Reagan for an official visit), and the ‘Historikerstreit’ (the debate between historians from Left and Right about how the Holocaust should be interpreted) offered an ideal intellectual and political focus to a nation for whom the lengthening shadow of the Holocaust remained inescapable. There then followed much engagement with the issue of ‘memory poli- tics’ and renewed exploration of cultural identity. As might be expected, much of this fiction reflects the breakdown of the traditional third-person narrator, achieved so decisively for modern German fiction with Grass’s Die Blechtrommel (1959), and all the novels featured in this volume reveal unreliable, or at least problematic, narrators, sometimes author-narrators, self-conscious, self-reflexive, confessionary. We have, of course, been able to feature some novels which fall into certain of the categories noted above or which deal with some of those issues relating to them – but only when there was no doubt about the stat- ure and impact of the work in question. Thus it was easy to identify Wolf ’s Kindheitsmuster as a novel which, quite apart from its status as ‘Mutterroman’, boldly explored the relationship between past and present from a social and psychological point of view. And Bachman’s Malina, although not fully 4 PETER HUTCHINSON AND MICHAEL MINDEN appreciated for many years after its appearance in 1971, and far from being a clearly ‘feminist’ novel, subtly engages with sexual difference as well as the problems of language and the limits of what can be said. Fichte’s Detlevs Imitationen „Grünspan“ (1971) is one of the most striking products of the new gay literature, anticipating many aspects of Queer, as well as being a bold experiment with perspective, consciousness, and language. Brussig’s Helden wie wir (1995), which deals in scatalogical manner with the relationship between private and public life in the GDR, was the first to be claimed as ‘the’ novel of the We nde, while Schulze’s Neue Leben (2005), perhaps best seen as a ‘late’ We nde novel, shows in complex, satirical form the tensions in GDR society towards its end, and the problems which it faced as it emerged into a ‘free’, capitalist world. Many of the works mentioned above are politically-inspired (in the broadest sense of the term). Above all, the Nazi past remained a challenge to Germany’s writers far longer than could ever have been expected, and it features, although often indirectly, in several of the novels dealt with in this volume. The break with that past, and the move towards the ‘normalisation’ of Germany, has proved extended and often deceptive, with the embrac- ing of European Community values constantly interrupted by unwelcome reminders of a painful, not-so-recent history; prominent literary debates, or amazing revelations about writers’ National Socialist activities, keep this past very much alive, as do parallels raised between the practices of the Third Reich and those of the German Democratic Republic. The issue of coming to terms with the past, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, has thus remained a central concern of German fiction, from shortly after the war up until the present day. And ‘the past’ now embraces far more than simply the Holocaust: the heritage of East German crimes is providing a continuing source of painful material. It is the former GDR, of course, which has changed most of all the German-speaking countries in the course of the last fifty years. Prior to 1959, and largely for political reasons, East German literature was almost com- pletely ignored in the West. It was not until Uwe Johnson’s Mutmaßungen über Jakob (1959) that those in the Federal Republic were prepared to accept that writers who were not purely ‘Dichter im Dienst’ existed in the ‘other’ part of Germany. But Johnson could only be published in the West, and the building of the Wall in 1961 created further western hostility to eastern Introduction 5 writing; so it was not until Christa Wolf ’s Nachdenken über Christa T. (1968) and Jurek Becker’s Jakob der Lügner (1969) that attention shifted drama­ tically and western publishing houses saw opportunities. The decisive text was Plenzdorf ’s Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. (1972), which also probably represents the most important turning point in GDR literature: it reflects a new attitude to life under socialism, puts criticism which had simmered for years in blunt form, and with its slang, euphemisms, and shameless, private (rather than communal) attitudes, it disregards all eastern conventions; most importantly, it marks the beginning of widespread­ literary dissent in the GDR which could never be fully suppressed. A stream of fascinating fiction was to flow. Much of it was related – often allegorically – to the problems of socialism. Austria too has proved a strong contributor to fiction since 1959, just as it has since the end of the nineteenth century. Unusual, controversial,­ sometimes iconoclastic figures like Bachmann, Bernhard, Handke, Jelinek and Roth have continued the modernist fight against dead language and the culture industry, displaying a particularly creative non-conformism and anti-authoritarianism. And some of them are clearly ‘Austrian’ in their choice of material – not something which is quite so evident in other genres. This is most striking in the case of Bernhard, and his choice of the Austrian backwoods in Frost (1963), a savage anti-Heimatroman which inverts the standard myth of rural idyll. Switzerland’s great contributor to the novel, Max Frisch, will possibly survive more for his diaries, especially those written shortly after the war. Perhaps only a Swiss could have taken up the position of sympathetic, but horrified, distance which is evident in these, but the concerns of his fiction are different, and less compelling. Although his well-conceived novels about the construction of the subject, of which the most successful is Mein Name sei Gantenbein (1964), proved highly popular for a short period, they lost their attraction with the rise of feminism and have never wholly regained it. Of all the German-speaking countries, it was above all the Federal Republic which reflected a cultural diversity that is now evident in numer- ous other European countries. This became particularly noticeable in the literature of the 1980s, and the period since then has produced several major figures. German ethnic minority writing has a long tradition, of course, and one of the twentieth century’s most famous writers had belonged to a 6 PETER HUTCHINSON AND MICHAEL MINDEN minority group in Prague; but there is now a steady and important flow from writers, especially with Turkish and East European backgrounds, who have made a decisive mark on fiction. Özdamar’sDas Leben ist eine Karawanserei (1992) shows not least that the problems of identity are not those of Germans alone, as it explores political and cultural problems seemingly far from the Federal Republic. Yet one of the most unusual backgrounds is to be found not in someone for whom Germany was not a natural home, but rather in someone who left the country in order to teach German literature abroad: born in Bavaria, yet resident in England from his early twenties, W. G. Sebald developed a new hybrid of testimony, photography and poetry which re-established the possibilities of literary writing beyond the West German feuilleton. His multi-layered, multifaceted Austerlitz (2001) shows that innovation is still possible in the modern age, and that the challenge of developing the novel form still remains open.

As with the preceding volumes in this series devoted to significant works in German literature, all but one of the following essays were delivered as lectures in the University of Cambridge. We are grateful to our colleagues and visiting lecturers for the enthusiasm with which they approached the project, the liveliness of their lectures, and their careful adaptation of the spoken word for the printed page. Since this is the last course of lectures currently proposed, may we express our long-standing indebtedness to Gar Yates, the exemplary General Editor of the Series, for his generosity and shrewd judgment over a number of years. We are also grateful to the Tiarks German Fund for its support.