|
Literary critic Helmut Böttiger
looks back at the books of 2005
– and lets us in on his favourites.
For quite some time German-language literature has been trying to shake off its reputation of being too heavy-going, too ponderous. It wants to move on from the soul-searching of Hermann Hesse and the agonizing of Musil or Kafka and simply tell a good story. Several writing schools have been set up recently and sundry creative writing courses modelled on their US counterparts have been established; what is striking is that, for all this determined striving to adapt to international norms, sometimes traces remain, albeit of a completely new sort, of that old earnestness, even of a provincial narrowness. After a media-fuelled euphoric period welcoming a new young generation of German writers labelled the “Fräuleinwunder” and “Pop-Bürschlein” (Girl-Wonders and Pop Generation), a certain sobriety has returned. And this is good for literature. Suddenly books are appearing that are not only readable, but really worth talking about. Last year – the year prior to the World Cup in Germany – even produced a bestseller of the calibre long hoped for: Daniel Kehlmann, a thirty-year-old genius, with seven novels already under his belt, brought us Die Vermessung der Welt (‘Measuring the World’), a lively, fast-paced, thoroughly entertaining novel from the world of thought, sharply drawn and refined in its tools. The subject, all the same, is a very German one. It chronicles a late encounter between two outstanding scientists at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the explorer and researcher Alexander von Humboldt and the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauß. The way in which the young author brings together these two very different outlooks on the world, vastly varying life experience and types of disillusionment, and unites them in scenes by turn grotesque, witty and intelligent is the stuff of masterly storytelling. Die Vermessung der Welt may well have what it takes to become an international bestseller. All the stranger, then, that it failed to win the prize awarded for the first time at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2005 and compared to the Booker and the Pulitzer Prize: the German Book Prize for the best German-language novel of the year. Was it perhaps because Kehlmann’s book was already doing so well that the jury’s choice of it would have seemed too obvious? Be that as it may, the novel chosen was Es geht uns gut (‘We’re Doing Fine’) by Arno Geiger (reviewed in this issue of new books in german. It fastidiously sketches three generations of a lacklustre family with the help of what might be taught in upper sixth history lessons. The largest and most important German-language daily paper, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, described the book as ‘inoffensive tripe’. Harsh words, but this prize may indeed have fallen into a trap of its own making: the quest was for something totally comprehensive, of high narrative quality, and accessible to the highest number of readers – and the judges may have plumped for something average, conventional and even rather uninspired. The most important book of the year, in my opinion, and one that combines great literary quality and accessibility, wasn’t in the running for the prize for technical reasons: Ingo Schulze’s novel Neue Leben (‘New Lives’) was published in October and thus too late to be considered. There’s a claim so frequently made in recent years that it can hardly be taken seriously but is, ironically, the perfect match for Schulze’s novel: this really is the major novel about German Reunification, the most important work on 1989 and its consequences. Whether it could become a classic, a lasting canvas of historical panorama like Grass’s The Tin Drum, remains to be seen. But Schulze, in this epistolary novel, has brilliantly captured the atmosphere of those days in the autumn of 1989, the Monday Demonstrations in the towns of the GDR and the diffuse, naïve and conflicting feelings in the citizens’ movement. The book is a masterpiece of discerning psychological realism, and incidentally takes place at the very last moment in which this particular literary genre would be credible: for letterwriting was still an obvious means of communication in the GDR – a way of baring one’s soul in a world where everyday life had not yet speeded up. Schulze has created in his ambivalent protagonist, Enrico Türmer, a highly literary personification of the feeling of the time. Another high-point in last year’s literary calendar was without doubt Wilhelm Genazino’s new novel: Die Liebesblödigkeit (‘The Feebleness of Love’) (see new books in german, Autumn 2005). Genazino, born in 1943, only recently began to receive his due recognition. In his tableaux of the everyday he combines the ease and the difficulty of life in a most unusual way. Humour and melancholy merge and seamlessly change places. Die Liebesblödigkeit – ah, note the wonderfully old-fashioned title! – is ostensibly the story of a man, no longer young, who is seeing two women at once, each one unaware of the other’s existence. This requires careful logistical planning by the hero, but the anonymity of the city and the women’s desire for independence enable him to carry it off. The protagonist is neither a playboy nor a womaniser; rather his distinctive quality is his indecisiveness. He drifts along, powerless in a hopelessly incalculable world. Genazino is a master of the sublimely grotesque and the depiction of contemporary alienation. Yet in the midst of all this insecurity there are pockets of happiness. The way Genazino combines his subversive and enigmatic social critique with an existential hope is indeed unique. This is the literature of hope. Another of the giants of contemporary German-language literature also had a new novel out in 2005: Reinhard Jirgl. Probably a very tricky one to translate, though. With luminous, expressive images and a use of grammar and spelling peculiar to himself, he sketches a picture of a new Germany at pains to reconcile the archaism of the East with the decadence of the West. Abtrünnig. Roman aus der nervösen Zeit (‘Renegade: A Novel Penned in Nervous Times’) takes us into the lives of two middle-aged men, one from each side of the Wall, post-2000: they don’t know one another and meet by chance in a taxi. Their shared rootlessness conveys a hyperrealistic image of contemporary Berlin with its darkness, its fading traces of history and its belief in living in the moment. Signs of destruction are never far from the surface and take on aesthetic significance in Jirgl’s writing. Emotive, dramatic talk, analytical and epistemological passages, sensitive and poetic sketches, trivial corny jokes and seemingly banal play on words jostle cheek by jowl to rich effect. One of the pleasantest surprises of the year was Peter Stephan Jungk’s novel Die Reise über den Hudson (‘A Drive Across the Hudson’) (see new books in german, Autumn 2005). At first sight it is one of those typically droll Jewish family stories, interweaving the tragic and the comic in enigmatic fashion: yet it delves far deeper than some of its coquettish and superficial opposite numbers. Jungk conjures up an inscrutable symbol that reflects the entangled persona of his protagonist, a Viennese fur merchant approaching the age of fifty. During a tedious, time-wasting traffic jam on the great Tappan-Zee Bridge spanning the Hudson outside New York he espies below him an image of his father, 22 months deceased, stretching along the riverbed – a mix of the Jewish Golem and a modern Kafka figure. The whole thing, with its esprit and psychological refinement, has elements of a good Woody Allen film, but its core could never be filmed. Noteworthy is the volume of essays, both poetic and concerned with poetry, by Lutz Seiler, born in the GDR in 1962 and, in my opinion, the most significant of contemporary German-language poets. Sonntags dachte ich an Gott (‘On Sundays I thought of God’) looks at fundamental questions of lyrical language today: it does so in several wonderful pieces of prose, balancing reflection, and dipping into poetry, going beyond fashionable trends and passing moods. Among Seiler’s early formative experiences are those of uranium mining in the GDR and the destruction of his childhood village – nature and society are thus inextricably linked in his mind and lead him to ever new crossroads where the individual and the wider world meet, in a language full of intensity, as it slowly circles its subject.
And to conclude this round-up, a most
promising discovery. Published in November
in the paperback list, edition suhrkamp, and a
novel which could all too easily be overlooked,
Nähe Jedenew (‘Near Yedenev’) by Kevin
Vennemann, born in 1977, immediately draws
the reader into a mysterious web of language
and shifting times, entangled tangents and
subordinate clauses. The central focus of the
text is a vaguely pinpointed geographical
place – the moors of southern Lithuania.
The story appears to be set around the end
of the 1930s, since there are allusions to the
beginning of the Second World War. But all is
shaded. It is not even directly stated that its
principal characters are Jews. Scenes from
the past and present flow into one another,
summer and winter scenes merge, happy
childhood images and aggressive persecution
blur into one. Key scenes alternate, are
returned to and fleshed out. The language
is of an absolutely contemporary musicality,
a rhythm which captivates through repetition
and a reshuffling of basic patterns. Every
moment is at once palpable yet also possesses
an abrupt and fragmentary quality. The
experience of simultaneousness, as presented
here, springs from a consciousness dealing
above all with the years after 2000. These
aren’t scenes from a point in time when
National Socialism is over and done with.
The unsettling, the archaic, the destructive
irrational violence can reappear at any
moment and Venneman’s language shifts
it into the present. An extraordinary debut at
the end of a fruitful year, and a hopeful augury
for the one ahead.
Helmut Böttiger was literary editor of the
Frankfurter Rundschau for years and is now
a freelance literary critic and author based
in Berlin. He has published books on themes
ranging from Paul Celan to football.
Die Vermessung der Welt, |
