Abstract
This volume introduces readers to the work of 15 ‘emerging’ German-language writers who have risen to prominence in the last decade. While authors such as Thomas Brussig, Bernhard Schlink and Marcel Beyer have long been the subject of critical debate, the strength of this volume lies in its focus on a younger generation of writers whose work has only recently begun to attract scholarly attention. These include authors such as Julia Franck, Karen Duve and Daniel Kehlmann, who have already achieved some degree of national and international success. However, the editors of the volume also seek ‘to introduce … lesser-known authors and texts to an international audience’ (p. 2). In this respect, the volume offers a useful insight into the breadth and vitality of contemporary writing in German.
The volume comprises 15 chapters, each offering a detailed introduction to the work of one particular ‘emerging’ writer. Every chapter presents a close reading of a single text, while also situating this within the context of the writer’s work as a whole and relating it to broader literary or theoretical developments. The chapters are arranged chronologically, and together they span almost a decade of literary production by German-language writers in the twenty-first century. Though the texts chosen are diverse in content and style, Lyn Marven’s excellent introduction draws attention to a number of common thematic concerns which lend the volume a sense of overall coherence.
Many of the individual chapters situate the work of emerging writers in the context of debates specific to German-language literature. Although the 1990s search to find the ultimate Wenderoman has now dwindled, some of these texts are shown to reveal a continuing preoccupation with the legacy of German division and reunification. Andrew Plowman’s chapter on Sven Regener’s Der kleine Bruder (2008) reads the novel as a memory text, highlighting the way in which it revives the alternative scene of Berlin-Kreuzberg in the 1980s in order to comment on its demise in the wake of reunification. A similar engagement with the aftermath of the Wende emerges in Frauke Matthes’s chapter on Clemens Meyer’s Als wir träumten (2006). For Matthes, the novel’s focus on delinquency and violence enables Meyer to depict ‘a world that was not openly seen in the GDR’ (p. 90), and one which has been concealed by the ‘ostalgic’ memory discourses that have emerged since reunification.
Other chapters engage with the broader ‘memory discourses and revisions’ (p. 5) that have characterized German historiographical engagement with the past since 1990. Valerie Heffernan, in her chapter on Julia Franck’s Die Mittagsfrau (2007), reads the novel as a ‘historia matria’ (p. 151), which, in contrast to the Väterliteratur of the 1970s and 1980s, explores the events of twentieth-century history from the perspective of women, revealing how ‘history is made in the home’ (p. 151). For Heffernan, Franck’s exploration of female lineage provides a means of examining the ways in which women contribute to shaping the course of history. The central character of Vladimir Vertlib’s Das besondere Gedächtnis der Rosa Masur (2003) is also engaged in constructing and shaping her history through narrative. As Stuart Taberner’s chapter demonstrates, her performance of Jewishness can be understood as an attempt to reclaim her story from an ‘unreflective German culture of Holocaust remembrance’ (p. 35), even as she enacts precisely the stereotype of the victimized Jew that this culture has engendered.
As well as engaging with local concerns, the volume also emphasizes the extent to which many of these literary works are global and transnational in their outlook. Emily Jeremiah’s chapter on Sibylle Berg’s Die Fahrt (2007) highlights the way in which the text challenges ‘facile discourses on globalization’ (p. 138) and exposes the rootlessness of the contemporary peripatetic subject. Rather than seeking refuge in idealized fantasies of Heimat, Jeremiah suggests, the novel puts forward a form of ‘nomadic ethics’ which demonstrates that ‘the global and the national are intertwined’ (p. 135). While some chapters in the volume focus on ‘minority’ voices (p. 6), that is, authors writing in German as a second language or authors from non-German backgrounds, their work is shown to challenge existing categories of migrant writing: as Anke Biendarra observes in her chapter on Terézia Mora’s Alle Tage (2004), these texts ‘create a new aesthetics of a “transnational’ literature”’, highlighting the fluidity of borders and calling into question classifications based on origin and ethnicity.
The final section of the volume contains two new translations of works discussed in earlier chapters: an excerpt from Vertlib’s Das besondere Gedächtnis der Rosa Masur, translated by Jamie Lee Searle, and a chapter of Clemens Meyer’s Als wir träumten (2006), translated by Katy Derbyshire. Searle’s thoughtful translation captures the conversational style of Vertlib’s narrative, while Derbyshire’s rendition succeeds in conveying the detached and highly stylized prose of Meyer’s novel. The translations provide a fitting conclusion to the volume by introducing the work of these contemporary writers to an English-speaking audience.
This compelling volume clearly fulfils its aim of gaining readership for ‘some of the most exciting and innovative voices in German-language literature in the twenty-first century’ (p. 15). It presents a series of innovative and well-researched essays which will provide a foundation for further scholarship in this cutting-edge field of contemporary German studies.