5 - Some Preliminary Thoughts on German Science Fiction

Summary

THERE IS NO such thing as a canon of German SF. As discussed in my introduction, it simply does not feature in the standard German literary histories. Nor does it register in histories of German film, with the exception of Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou's Metropolis (1927), which has acquired cult status. And even in the German SF community—that is, among the members of the Deutscher Science Fiction Club e.V and the organizers of the German SF prizes—there is no agreement over what the key moments of German SF are. Many would name Kurd Laßwitz as the “father” of German SF, but few have read more than his novel Auf zwei Planeten (1897). Hans Dominik is undoubtedly the most successful German SF writer in the first half of the twentieth century, but his reputation as a peddler of jingoistic and nationalistic sentiments makes him a less than ideal figurehead. As Hans Esselborn's recent study has shown, what one selects as a representative sample of German SF invariably determines one's conclusions. In his case, a decision to dismiss the “Americanized” variety (as well as SF films and SF written by women) produces a corpus that earnestly engages with future technologies but tells us little about the imaginative and playful core of German SF, its dystopian outlook, or what makes it distinctive.

My selection is admittedly equally subjective, and I have to acknowledge that casting the net wider makes it significantly more challenging to come to firm conclusions about the nature of German SF. But perhaps that is one of its best qualities, with writers and film directors balancing commercial considerations, aesthetic ambitions, political agendas, and innovative ideas. The writers and directors’ starting point of asking “what if” can lead them in any direction, which explains why my decision to subsume texts and films under thematic headings regularly puts me in a quandary, since most of these would fit under several categories. At the same time, my selection of seventy novels and twenty-five films provides a large enough base to allow distinctive patterns to emerge.

I argue that the works listed in the appendices should be regarded as science fictional, whether they have the “SF” label on the cover or not, since they all engage with the central questions of SF: What if the world were different?