Books from Germany
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Before the Festival BOOKS Literature in German: Highlights from 2014 FROM Vor dem Fest Höhepunkte deutschsprachiger GERMANY Literatur 2014 * Curated by Denis Scheck www.book-fair.com #fbm15 b blog.buchmesse.de In 2015, Germany celebrates the first Thanks to the generous funding by the Federal 25 years since Reunification. Foreign Office this book collection will be on Our cover shows young people in show on German collective stands at many book March 1990, climbing on the remains fairs worldwide in 2015. of the Berlin Wall. Wir danken dem Auswärtigen Amt für die 2015 feiert Deutschland 25 Jahre großzügige Unterstützung, dank derer diese Buch Wiedervereinigung. kollektion 2015 an deutschen Gemeinschafts Unser Covermotiv zeigt Jugendliche ständen auf vielen Buchmessen weltweit zu sehen auf den Resten der Berliner Mauer sein wird. am Brandenburger Tor, aufgenommen im März 1990. Our special thanks go to Denis Scheck who, as curator of this year’s collection, chose the titles and wrote the reviews. Besonderer Dank gilt Denis Scheck, der als Kurator in diesem Jahr die Titelauswahl und das Verfassen der Rezensionen übernommen hat. Contents Inhalt Foreword Vorwort 5 On Books and Drivel 8 Über Bücher und Blödsinn Denis Scheck Book Collection Buchkollektion 11 Selected Books from A to Z Ausgewählte Bücher von A bis Z 22 Longlist dbp 2014 (German Book Prize) Appendix Anhang 45 Index of Publishers Verlagsverzeichnis 47 Picture Credits Bildnachweise 48 Imprint Impresssum On Books and Drivel During the Frankfurt Book Fair recently, I was sitting in a car with a highly successful German writer. She said to me that writers have bigger souls than other people, which is why writers experience things more profoundly, and why they suffer more – more than normal readers, and especially more than literary critics. My wife was with us in the same car, and when, some days later, the two of us were trying to prune down our library, baseness took hold of our small souls. With a giggle, we carried the books by the large-souled author to the even larger pile of books we no longer wanted to read. In the case of the author with the large soul, I crept back to the pile in the middle of the night and put her books back on the shelf, because they are good books and it’s not their fault if their author sometimes talks drivel. A lot of drivel gets spoken about books. But books themselves also contain a lot of drivel. There is a corner of my library which I like to call my “dummies’ shelf”, where I keep books that, in one way or another, are great examples of failure, ready for occasions such as this when I can expose them to public scorn and derision. The elites of the modern age strip themselves more completely bare in the things they write – or get written for them – than if they’re sitting naked in a sauna. If you understand how to read properly, you escape the worm’s eye view of dependency and subservience. In my old school in Stuttgart I read – albeit beneath my desk – the sentence attributed to Denis Diderot: “Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” This has stood me in good stead as a political compass ever since. But who are the kings and priests of our time? Currently my favourite book on my dummies’ shelf goes under the title, “Age- ing Gracefully”. It is by Ruth Maria Kubitschek, an actress whom I certainly respect for her role in the TV series “Kir Royal”, but who outdoes even Shirley MacLaine as an author of mixed up esoteric books. “Ageing Gracefully” is less a book than a dumdum bullet; a text that adds a new dimension to the com- plaint of “literary navel-gazing”. “With the power of my imagination I see once again the cosmic floodlight that envelops me completely in light”, writes Kubitschek, incidentally demonstrating how detrimental television cameras can be to the human brain. Books like these are not an exception on the German bestseller lists, such books are the rule. The general readers’ silly fixation on bestsellers is probably the 5 result of a semantic misunderstanding: a confusion between the best books and those that sell the most copies. Let’s do a little mental experiment and imagine that we’re obliged to eat a dinner consisting of the ten most frequently bought meals in Germany. Nobody would ever expect anything other than the sort of fodder served up in motorway service stations – let alone hope for culinary delicacies. And that’s just how it is with the bestsellers. They are the lowest common denominator of the popular taste. Anyone picking up Germany’s Next Top Novel should bear this in mind. In the mid-1970s, when I was ten years old, I firmly believed that drivel would disappear. I did not know when it would happen, but was sure it would be within my lifetime. Before the year 2000 for sure. And of its own accord. By then – so I thought – drivel would have brought its own downfall, biologically. It would simply have become extinct, just like the dodo and the dinosaurs. Back then, I had a much keener sense of what drivel really was. It certainly included folk music programmes, news about European aristocratic families, and comparisons about the sizes of human souls. Now I am nearing 50 and the drivel still hasn’t disappeared. What has disap- peared is my childish belief that anything would be able to bring about its own downfall. Without some forceful intellectual demolition work, everything sim- ply carries on existing, and in the end, unexpectedly and powerfully, it comes back again. Things like Catholicism, Communism or Bayern Munich football club. Ernest Hemingway held that “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector”. In my eyes, such a shit detector is also the most essential gift for any reader. And by the way, the drivel also includes the whining that takes place whenever the topic of reading and literature crops up. “What a wonderful country Germany must be.” This statement, with the ring of a pop-song refrain, was the opening to a book review by Tom LeClair a few years ago in the “New York Times”. He was talking about Daniel Kehlmann and his novel “Measuring the World”, which had just been published in English. LeClair expressed his sur- prise that such an intelligent and complex book by a 31-year-old author – as he was at the time – could supplant Dan Brown from the top of the German best- seller lists. He was right to be surprised. 6 Today, Germany is literature’s promised land. We are experiencing a golden age. Contemporary German literature is richer and more varied than ever before – across four generations. Nowhere is the readership more awake or the book trade more flourishing; nowhere enjoys a more diverse literary life or more effective literary criticism than modern Germany. Nowhere are so many books translated; nowhere are so many readings organised; nowhere do people make such a song and dance about literature: thank God! But picture this: you’re living in paradise and nobody will admit it. The great majority of people involved in literature in Germany know only one song: the We-Poor-Things Lament in the key of sigh; the Great German Fugue in Ach- minor. That is drivel. The same cannot be said of the 50 books – recent products of German-speaking authors – recommended for translation on the following pages. Twenty of them are taken from the long-list for the German Book Prize; the rest are from my attempt to correct the drivel of the jury. Denis Scheck Literary editor of Deutschlandfunk and presenter of the ARD TV programme “Druckfrisch” 7 Über Bücher und Blödsinn Neulich auf der Frankfurter Buchmesse saß ich mit einer überaus erfolgreichen deutschen Schriftstellerin im Auto. Die deutsche Schriftstellerin sagte, Schrift- steller besäßen eine größere Seele als andere Menschen, weshalb Schriftsteller tiefer empfänden und auch mehr litten – tiefer und mehr als gewöhnliche Leser und insbesondere tiefer und mehr als Literaturkritiker. Meine Frau saß im sel- ben Auto, und als wir einige Tage später unsere Bibliothek ausflöhten, machte sich Niedertracht in unseren kleinen Seelen breit und wir trugen die Bücher der Autorin mit der großen Seele kichernd auf den noch größeren Stapel mit den Büchern, die wir nicht mehr lesen wollen. Im Fall der Autorin mit der großen Seele schlich ich nachts übrigens zurück zu dem Stapel und stellte die Bücher wieder ins Regal, weil es gute Bücher sind, die nichts dafür können, wenn ihre Autorin mal Blödsinn redet. Es wird viel Blödsinn geredet über Bücher. Aber es steht ja auch viel Blödsinn in Büchern. Es gibt eine Ecke in meiner Bibliothek, die ich zärtlich MEIN „Doofelregal“ nenne, in dem ich auf irgendeine Weise exemplarisch misslungene Bücher auf- bewahre, um sie bei Gelegenheiten wie dieser öffentlich Hohn und Spott preis- zugeben. Nackter als in der Sauna zeigt sich die herrschende Klasse unserer Zeit in dem, was sie schreibt – oder schreiben lässt. Wer zu lesen versteht, wird erlöst aus der Froschperspektive und Unmündigkeit des Untertans. In meiner alten Schule in Stuttgart habe ich, allerdings unter der Schulbank, den Denis Diderot zugeschriebenen Satz gelesen: „Der Mensch wird erst frei sein, wenn der letzte König an den Gedärmen des letzten Priesters aufgeknöpft wird.“ Dieser Satz hat mir als politischer Kompass seither keine schlechten Dienste geleistet. Wie heißen die Könige und Priester unserer Zeit? Mein aktuelles Lieblingsbuch in meinem Doofelregal trägt den Titel „Anmutig älter werden“ und stammt von Ruth Maria Kubitschek, einer Schauspielerin, die ich, etwa in der Fernsehserie „Kir Royal“, durchaus schätze, die als verschwur- belte Esoterikautorin aber selbst Shirley MacLaine unterbietet.