12 - Rupture, Tradition, and Achievement in Thomas Kling's Poetics and Poetry

Summary

When did the postwar era end? Well, that depends, might be the most appropriate answer — it depends on the interests of whoever is answering the question, whether we are talking about politics, economy, culture, etc. Possible answers may range from the opinion that we are still dominated by postwar paradigms to the conviction that it is not, in fact, valid, to speak about a postwar era as such. When it comes to literature, we are accustomed to applying the term “Nachkriegsliteratur” (postwar literature) to literary texts that were written after 1945 and deal either with the atrocities of the Second World War or with living (and, particularly, writing) conditions after the war or both. As the starting point of this literary era is marked by a political caesura, it is an epoch that can be more clearly defined than others. The question of when it ends or whether it has already ended is, however, much more difficult. Is another political change needed to bring about the completion of a literary era which has been initiated by political change? And, if so, can the GDR and German reunification be regarded as the beginning of a new literary era? What makes these considerations more complicated is the fact that epochs, of course, are construed ex post. Although Blumenberg's statement that there are no witnesses to the changing of eras has since been qualified (by Hans Robert Jauß, for example), it remains undisputed that there is a certain danger of what Wilfried Barner calls “Epochenillusion”: “Die Möglichkeit von Epochenillusion ist Konsequenz aus der Perspektivität aller Epochenerfahrung” (The possibility of the delusion that a particular period seems to be an epoch is a consequence of the fact that any experience of epochs is necessarily a question of perspective).