The Austrians have come – and they’re here to stay. Stefan Gmünder on the flourishing scene in Vienna and beyond Five or six months ago the Berlin newspaper taz proclaimed that the most important cultural trend of 2006 was the ‘Kehlmannising’ of the German literary supplements. This was a reference to the enormous success of the Viennese author Daniel Kehlmann, whose novel Die Vermessung der Welt (Measuring the World) has headed the German bestseller list for many months. Its sales have topped the million mark. Its publishers abroad have included Quercus in the UK and Alfred A. Knopf in the USA. The Washington Post reviewer remarked that in the US book market it would take a boy wizard or a Jesuit conspiracy to achieve the phenomenon of a young writer (Kehlmann is thirty-one) topping the charts for such a prolonged period. Of course, Austrian writers have long enjoyed a special cachet and exercised an influence well beyond the confines of the small Alpine republic in which they now live, even when, ninety years ago, it was still an empire. From Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal who ushered in the twentieth century, through their successors Joseph Roth and Robert Musil, then on to Peter Handke and that most distinguished of women writers, the Nobel prizewinner Elfriede Jelinek, who kept the torch burning in the 1960s and 1970s, the list of eminent Austrian writers is as long as it is illustrious. Their sales were formidable. But the ‘Kehlmann effect’ is something else again. And now it appears, again from the bestseller lists, that Kehlmann is not the only Austrian author of the present generation intent on scaling the literary heights. In fact, a few weeks ago, those Austrian lists resembled nothing so much as those of the winners of women’s downhill ski events, in which the ‘foreign’ competitors always seem to lose out. Here was Wolf Haas narrowly pipping Christoph Ransmayr and Daniel Kehlman (at last!) to the post; Thomas Glavinic and Paulus Hochgatterer in places four and five; one Brazilian, Paulö Coelho, that well-oiled prober into states of his characters’ souls, at number six; then meine Herren Daniel Glattauer and Alfred Komarek. That’s seven Austrian writers in the top ten. What’s going on? Has an insidious commercial bug subtly infiltrated Austrian literature? Or were no good books written in the country until now? Or is it that Austrian writers have suddenly become better at reflecting the reality of society and engaging the reader’s interest? Or – quite the opposite – has literature become more shallow, more arbitrary? Was it not the great Umberto Eco who once said that all a bestseller requires is ‘a bit of sex, some money and crime, a slice of high society life, or, equally, a convincingly described erection in each chapter’? However, the Bolognese professor did go on to point out that the bestseller is a ‘commercial category’ and says nothing about the literary merit of the work in question. While writing these comments he apparently suddenly remembered that his own novel, The Name of the Rose, had rung the cash tills thirty million times worldwide. One’s own writing, commercial rubbish? Perish the thought! But that is another subject – albeit one connected to the current success of the new Austrian literature. For a long time now the hot debate in German-language countries has begun and ended with the question of just how entertaining is literature allowed to be, or indeed ought to be. A noisy, on-going lament, stretching over two decades, gloomily high-lighted the apparently miserable state of German-language literature – too much mournful self-examination and heaving melancholy, resulting in stale novels warmed up microwave fashion. And nor was it thought that German books could be funny, oh no. Entertainment became the new watchword and American writers its prime producers. America, that was the place to look at, America where the novelist’s art could be learned through ‘creative writing courses’. There may be some truth in the contention that while there has always been a highlydeveloped awareness of the aesthetic element in German writing, there has been a dearth in the aesthetics of production, although that is beginning to change with the likes of the Leipzig Institute of Literature, the Klagenfurt workshops and the Vienna Poetry Academy. ‘Back to the tools of the trade!’ was the rallying cry some years ago of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s literary supplement – a cry that revealed a belief in the teachability and learnability of literature and its rules. Until then writing had not been regarded as something that could be taught but rather as a matter of inheritance (talent) or divine intervention (genius). In Austria it was a group of young writers, in particular Kehlmann himself (born 1975) and Thomas Glavinic (born 1972) who led this debate. They were in favour of accessible, well-crafted novels. They also recognised a lack of narrative in the Austrian literature of a few decades before and a clinging to handed-down traditions, particularly of the avant-garde sort. ‘Narrative is encouraged in the whole of the rest of the world – this is the only place in which it has been banned for the past forty years’, Glavinic commented. Kehlmann once said that he wanted to write the sort of books he himself enjoys reading. Who wouldn’t? Yet ten years ago it would have been impossible to make such a statement. The writer would have been accused of being devoid of artistic sensibility, audiencedriven, and a money-grubbing philistine. The other strikers on the bestseller list also cock a snook at the former embargoes, play skilfully with the reader’s expectations and defy those too. Wolf Haas (born 1960), who became a star with his unconventional Detective Brenner crime novels, entered uncharted territory with his latest bestseller Das Wetter vor 15 Jahren (‘The Weather Fifteen Years Ago’). It is told in interview form, consisting of a discussion between the literary editor of a newspaper and an author. The books of the serious – but not humourless – Paulus Hochgatterer (born 1961), a doctor and child psychologist by profession, are also now receiving rave reviews, though he had to wait patiently for his breakthrough. Die Süße des Lebens (‘The Sweetness of Life’) is his first straight crime novel. In his email novel Gut gegen Nordwind Daniel Glattauer (born 1960) develops a love story in a brand new genre. Christoph Ransmayr (born 1954), well known for his novels Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis (The Terrors of Ice and Darkness, Paladin 1984) and Die letze Welt (The Last World, Grove 1988), has remained true to himself in his novel Der fliegende Berg, (‘The Flying Mountain’) a highly literary tale bearing on three unsuppressible attractions – the mountains, love, and the bond between two brothers. In his novel Die Arbeit der Nacht (‘Night Work’), Thomas Glavinic places his hero in the situation of being the last, or first, person in the world. Kehlmann himself, setting Die Vermessung der Welt in the nineteenth century, brings together the figures of Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Friedrich Gauss, and thus two different world views, while the detective novelist Alfred Komarek (born 1945, and so a comparative veteran) sets his popular protagonist Daniel Käfer off on new adventures in the Salzkammergut. On the face of it, these books differ vastly from one another and the age range of the writers is considerable. And yet they all have something in common. All are finely crafted, well-written, exciting, sometimes amusing and, in the new German critical jargon, have ‘English-style plots’. We can rejoice then, in a new generation of Austrian writers whose books combine a welcome tinge of daring with imagination and lightness of touch – and are being read by an increasingly large audience. They also have younger imitators. For example, Anna Mitgutsch’s Zwei Leben und ein Tag (‘Two Lives and a Day’), in which three lives overlap with that of Herman Melville, or Eva Gruber’s Uber Nacht (‘Over Night’), dealing with the body and its decay and long-listed for this year’s German Book Prize, have both been well received. Three bright new talents who should also be mentioned in this context are Martin Prinz, Linda Stift and Xavier Bayer. Born 1973, 1969 and 1977 respectively, they are also benefiting from the sense of breaking free into a new and widening world. Universality is in then, but dancing to the tune of the golden calf that is the bestseller list is a dangerous game. For literature and writing is about something else altogether, and something far more important: passion, enthusiasm and endurance. In Daniel Kehlmann’s previous novel, Ich und Kaminski, the now aged and once very famous painter Kaminski bumps into a younger fellow artist. Conversing with Kaminski the younger man says: ‘Duchamp is important. He is someone you can’t ignore’. ‘Importance isn’t important’, Kaminski replies. ‘Painting is important’. Stefan Gmünder is literary critic at the Austrian daily newspaper Der Standard. Daniel Glattauer, Gut gegen Nordwind (Deuticke, 2006); Thomas Glavinic, Die Arbeit der Nacht (Hanser, 2006); Sabine Gruber, Über Nacht (C. H. Beck, 2007); Wolf Haas, Das Wetter vor 15 Jahren (Hoffmann und Campe, 2006); Paulus Hochgatterer, Die Süße des Lebens (Deuticke, 2006); Daniel Kehlmann, Die Vermessung der Welt (Rowohlt, 2005); Alfred Komarek, Narrenwinter (Haymon, 2006); Anna Mitgutsch, Zwei Leben und ein Tag (Luchterhand, 2007); Martin Prinz, Ein Paar (Jung und Jung, 2007); Christoph Ransmayr, Der fliegende Berg (Fischer, 2006); Linda Stift, Stierhunger (Deuticke 2007)