German Short Stories
Barbara Schwepcke reviews a new anthology
The publication of an annual collection of short stories, the best of new writing by both established and lesser-known writers, has long been a tradition in America. Not so in Germany. The Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, publishers of this collection, confidently state that it is the first of a series to be published each autumn. If that is so, it is an enterprise to be warmly welcomed.
The editor, Verena Auffermann, herself a leading literary critic, is well placed to make the selections. She has rounded up the usual suspects - but the fact that one can even think of using this colloquial term is noteworthy in itself. As recently as five years ago good literary fiction on the German market was primarily of works in translation. German literature itself appeared to have gone underground, retreated into ivory towers, or become so bound up in itself and the German past that it had lost its audience. Heinrich Böll, Uwe Johnson, Martin Walser and Günter Grass had blazed a magnificently adventurous trail. Then the avantgarde reaction set in. Whole literary genres were declared out-dated, the novel dead, while the rhetorical brilliance of Hans Magnus Enzensberger was accused of inhibiting many a budding talent. The reading public, left behind by the intellectualisation of writing, and losers in the rejection of 'bourgeois literature', turned in consequence to foreign authors to quench their thirst for stories.
But now the story is back and German reviewers everywhere are hailing a new generation of writers - not all of them German by nationality but all sharing the German language. They are called by nicknames - 'Miss Miracle', or 'Grass's Grandchildren'. Six of them were featured on the cover of Spiegel with a tin drum prominently grasped. It was the German literary equivalent of being dubbed Time magazine's 'Man of the Year'. Mathias Schreiber, Spiegel's literary editor, opined that what they had in common was the ability to tell a good story in the way the young Grass had done.
These new young storytellers have their critics, of course. Some say their phenomenal success is due to no more than clever marketing of their personalities, as opposed to their work. Others point out that theirs is hardly experimental prose, expanding or pushing at the boundaries of literature. Literary prizes, however, have confirmed their success, and reflect the current trend of a return to narrative prose.
One striking difference between them and their immediate predecessors lies in their much more uninhibited approach to the past. Their tongues are no longer paralysed by the Nazis' appalling crimes. Bertolt Brecht, confronted with the horrors of the concentration camps, wrote that 'literature was not prepared for, and had no means of dealing with, something like this'. Michael Naumann, former publisher and now Minister for Culture, said it was 'a miracle' that German literary voices did not fall completely silent after the war. There were plenty of people who thought they should: Theodor W. Adorno said poetry after Auschwitz was 'barbarian' and stated categorically in 1954, 'there is no story left to be told'. The achievement of Günter Grass and his contemporaries was to perform the 'miracle'. To continue it his literary grandchildren have had to bridge a yawning gap of almost four decades.
The two opening stories in this collection help to illustrate this point. They also demonstrate the strength of Verena Auffermann's anthology, which is not just a collection of the young and trendy, but a show-case for established writers as well. The first is a piece by the young Swiss author Peter Stamm (born 1963) entitled Aufenthalt (Delay). It concerns three people on a station platform watching the passengers in a train bound for Lourdes which has had to make an unscheduled stop to unload the corpse of a passenger who has died. This is immediately followed by Film und Verhängnis (Film and Catastrophe) by Ilse Aichinger, a writer born in 1921. Both allude to the same chapter in German history and pose the question of how people could plead ignorance while the trains were rolling by. But whereas Aichinger's references to the Holocaust are explicit, Stamm achieves his effect by means of cool, simple phrases in which the emotion is understated.
There is a wealth of talent to be savoured in this book, and a number of notable prizewinners are represented among the contributors. Herta Müller won the Impac Prize in Dublin in 1999 and her novel, The Land of Green Plums, has already been published in Britain. Terézia Mora, represented here by a story about an animal handler awaiting the report on an accident involving a cheetah, was awarded the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for unpublished writing, also last year. This year's winner is another of this book's contributors, Georg Klein, whose style has been compared to Kafka. Felicitas Hoppe in 1996 won the Aspekt Prize for debut work, Christoph Peters followed her this year, his tone praised by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as 'fresh, yet almost classical', his language as 'clear and unsentimental'. Arnold Stadler has received the Georg Büchner Prize for a lifetime's achievement, while Ingo Schulze, whose Simple Stories has already been published in English translation, to glowing reviews, earned a place in the Observer's list of the twenty-one top writers for the twenty-first century.
The settings of the stories range from Austria to Romania to Ghana, the subjects from political loyalties and betrayals to severed fingertips found in a car, two old sisters faking antique furniture, and a woman whose working life has been spent restoring sarcophagi now observing the death of a fellow patient in her hospital ward. Many stories take place in Germany, but Germany is no longer the central focal point, particularly for the younger writers.
Any anthology will inevitably be accused of omissions. Notable for their absence from this one, for instance, are Thomas Brussig, known in England for Heroes Like Us (Harvill), and Judith Hermann, whose debut collection, Sommerhaus Später (Summer House, Later) is due from Flamingo next year. But this is a fine collection, and a fine opportunity to become acquainted with the style, language and approach of the new German storytellers.
Barbara Schwepcke is a freelance editor living in London.
Verena Auffermann (Ed.): Beste Deutsche Erzähler 2000
Translation rights available from:
Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, August 2000. 280pp. ISBN 3-421-05386-3
Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt GmbH
Geibelstrasse 6
D-81679 Munich
Tel: +49 89 455 54 310
Fax: +49 89 455 54 113
e-mail: susanne.seggewiss@dva.de
