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A Great Autumn
for German Crime Tobias Gohlis reveals all
A chatty book-show presenter on the radio station Westdeutscher Rundfunk recently confessed that she ‘usually gives German crime novels a wide berth.’ She didn’t enlarge, but her partner on air agreed with her: ‘German crime novels are too heavy for my taste. I like more action.’ Certainly, ‘action’ is not necessarily the word that springs to mind with German crime novels – in as far as it is permissable to talk so generally about ‘German Crime’. That spare narrative style punctuated by action associated with American thriller writers and what the French call the ‘neo-polar’ (French writer Jean-Patrick Manchette who died in 1995 referred to it as the ‘behavioural method’) is not the stuff of German crime. Of course, as is always the case with sweeping generalisations, there are exceptions. Frank Schätzing’s internationally successful ocean thriller Der Schwarm (The Swarm) is a showcase for an effective mix of global action, political and ecological information, and speculation. D.B. Blettenberg’s novels, which draw on his many years of personal experience as a development worker in far-flung corners of the world, bristle with action. His latest novel Land der guten Hoffnung (‘Land of Good Hope’, 2006) is a thriller as exciting as it is informative about the involvement of German firms in the apartheid politics of South Africa. So, let us concede it, these authors – particularly in their combination of international settings and action – can be classed as exceptions. The chatty book reviewer’s admission was, however, leading somewhere quite different. She brought up her prejudice only in order to revise it. She had devoured Astrid Parotta’s brand-new novel Feuertod (‘Death by Fire’). And her conclusion? German crime is more fascinating than its reputation suggests. In fact, a great deal of change has been afoot recently in German crime literature. This can perhaps be best summed up by the observation that after the barren years of the immediate post-war period, the genre actually exists. Indeed, from its new beginnings at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s, much influenced by the socially-critical crime writing of the Swedish duo Sjöwall and Wahlöö, it has developed over four decades with suprising strength. While German crime writers in the 1970s would have been justified in complaining that they were not taken seriously, today the book pages of newspapers feature the winners of the Deutscher Krimi- Preis (German Crime Prize) and the ‘Glauser’ (named after the Swiss writer Friedrich Glauser, awarded by the German Society of Crime Writers, otherwise known as ‘Das Syndikat’, and comparable to the CWA daggers) with the same regularity and attention as they give to the winners of the Klagenfurt Bachmann Competition. No one should judge the quality of the productions by the mere fact that crime literature has now been formally put on the map. But the figures do indicate that this specifically modern, critical narrative form has now established itself, however, even in ‘the belated nation’ as philsopher Helmuth Plessner called Germany. The ‘Syndicate’ founded in 1986 represents around 350 crime novelists. Every year, in a changing location, the syndicate hosts the ‘Criminale’, a large festival of readings and a display of all the trappings of the German crime novel. The Deutscher Krimipreis is awarded annually (for the three best foreign and the three best German titles of the year) as is the ‘Glauser’ (for the best crime novel, the best debut, the best short story and the best young adults’ book of the year). To act as guide, a jury of expert critics compile a monthly ‘Krimi-Welt-Bestenliste’ (‘Best from the Crime World’) and a network of specialised crime bookshops sell approximately 400 new titles a year. Most fiction publishers in the meantime have a crime list. Crime pays! The crime novel (German as well as international) is booming, and for years it has accounted for a more or less constant fifth of the total turnover. So far, so good and so stable. The second and far more interesting criterion for a developed literature of crime is a noteworthy number of excellent writers. And these we have. Their literary output holds its own with Britain, America or France – and not on the general bestseller mainstream level, but with their own distinctive voices. A look at the output of these outstanding writers means that the second half of 2007 can already be proclaimed a ‘great autumn for German crime’. It’s no surprise that the radio presenter referred to at the start of this article warmed to the German crime scene specifically after reading Astrid Paprotta’s Feuertod. The Frankfurt author was already regarded as an insider tip before she scooped the German Crime Prize in 2005 and the Glauser Prize in 2006. Her particular strength is her immersion in, and laying out of, extreme pyschological states. Her four previous novels featuring Inspector Ina Henkel dealt with the homeless, the lonely, the outcast, and abducted children – those on the edges of society. Henkel, a rather poor and muddled investigator, disappears in the fourth book to an A Great Autumn for German Crime Tobias Gohlis reveals all administrative post. In Feuertod, too, Paprotta’s fifth crime novel, the professional investigators are out of sync with the action. Right up to the end they are at a loss as to what’s really going on. They are labouring under the misapprehension, a perfectly natural one in its own limited way, that a victim cannot be a perpetrator. The fashion in which this unfurls is masterly. The investigations are triggered by the murder of a lawyer who, through her role as spokeswoman for a citizen’s action group for the self-protection of rich ‘key players’, and also as a commercial lawyer, has attracted much social envy and class hate. It seems fitting that it is two underdogs who pick up the trail of the cryptic happenings. However, this sense that there is some justice in the world is short-lived. As the police arrest the wrong man, it dawns on one of the minor investigators that the other is exploiting him. There are no moral judgements. Paprotta’s language is slick, sometimes satirical, always sharp, her characters are highly realistic and – most importantly – credibly and vividly depicted in all their complexity. There’s no softening of the edges of this war in miniature in the big city: love turns out to be nothing but selfdeception, living together is accompanied by blackmail, and fear reigns supreme. From a plot perspective, Feuertod is noir: whoever’s got their money on justice is backing the wrong horse. But despair doesn’t enter the characters’ make-up. Be they sad, sick or poor, – they are magnificently alive. The power and the powerlessness of the twin pinnacles of justice and religion, and of the police themselves, are put to the test in the novels of Friedrich Ani with his chief inspector Polonius Fischer. Fischer is an extraordinary figure, on the German or any other scene. He was a Benedictine monk for thirteen years; and before that, and now again, a policeman. His faith is ‘in tatters’ we’re told in the second novel in the series, just out, entitled Hinter blinden Fenstern (‘Behind Blind Windows’). In contrast to classical clerical investigators such as Rabbi Small or Father Brown who render their ideological knowledge and their profession as pastors useful tools for their detection work, Fischer is a policeman, no more, no less, who doubtfully and despairingly believes in God. A crucifix in his interrogation room, a psalm that he recites to comfort the relatives of the murdered – these are the outward, almost ritualised expressions of his religious stance. For him crimes are not only a human phenomenon, they are always also an impenetrable mystery. In Hinter Blinden Fenstern Ani, through flash-backs and glimpses of the future, narrates with great art the tale of several cases connected solely by a place, a housing estate on the outskirts of Munich. Here, as in its predecessor, Idylle der Hyänen (‘The Hyenas’ Idyll’, 2004), people consciously place themselves beyond secular as well as religious rules, and challenge them. In this sense Ani’s Polonius Fischer novels are philosophical crime novels which explore the conditions of ethics and morality – not least determined by language. Ani is not only a philosopher in the guise of a storyteller, he is also a musician in his use of words and their rhythmic structure. Often the accused deliver lengthy tirades of self-justification of the highest rhetorical elegance. Ani, like hardly any other writer, avails himself of all the possibilities of the German language, coupled with an ability to bring together almost any noun with any other. New creations such as ‘Einzelerwachsene’, ‘Lügentiere’ or ‘Menschenlosigkeit’ (literally translated as ‘lone adults’, ‘lying beasts’ or ‘peoplelessness’) can often be understood only in context, but imbue the text with an almost ecstatic intensity. He, like Paprotta, deals with lonely, despairing and bewildered souls, people who have become the social and metaphysical victims of consumerism and materialism. Another member of the group of authors whose criminal cases develop from emotional loneliness and breakdown is Jan Costin Wagner His novel Das Schweigen (‘Silence’ – to be published in the UK by Harvill Secker) has just appeared in Germany and has polarised the critics. While some reproach him with a lack of realism, others admire him, this reviewer among them, for the intensity of his depiction of emotional states – which incidentally do not, as in his earlier novels, come at the expense of criminal plausibility. Three completely different and contrasting crime figures must also be mentioned in conclusion. Heinrich Steinfest, an Austrian living in Stuttgart, has just published his ninth novel, Die feine Nase der Lilli Steinbeck (‘The Fine Nose of Lilli Steinbeck’) in which he once again uses the narrative structure of the crime novel, or here rather the abduction thriller, to juggle wittily with philosophical questions. Steinfest follows the tradition of the new Austrian crime avantgarde which plays with language, alongside Wolf Haas, Günter Brödl, Manfred Wieninger and Stefan Slupetzky. Ulrich Ritzel (winner of the 2001 German Crime Prize) is a subtle analyst of small-town Germany. In Forellenquintett (‘The Trout Quintet’) he tackles a story of a case that for the first time draws on the new Europe, Poland, and the German idyll that is Lake Constance. This writer, a late-comer to crime – after a successful career in journalism he started to write thrillers at the age of 57 – knows his grotesque little country inside out. Whoever is interested in knowing what the Germany of today is like will receive crisp enlightenment through reading him. Andrea Maria Schenkel was the literary sensation of the year with her detective-less crime novel Tannöd (to be published in the UK by Quercus). This newcomer – she’d never had a line published before – was not only showered with all the important crime prizes but also spent months in the number one spot of the bestseller lists for her psychologically compelling, linguistically sharp and chilling reconstruction of the murder of a farming family. It is rare for quality and success to come so neatly hand-in-hand. Kalteis, her new novel (and already on the bestseller list), tells its tale with the same intensity and skill – in this case that of a murderer whose victims are women and who operates in the Munich of 1931 – 1939. Highly recommended!
Astrid Paprotta’s novels and those of
Heinrich Steinfest are published by Piper
Verlag; Friedrich Ani’s novels are with
Zsolnay Verlag; Jan Costin Wagner is
published by Eichborn Verlag; Ulrich Ritzel
is with btb, Random House; Andrea Maria
Schenkel is published by Edition Nautilus.
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