1 - Literary Debates since Unification: “European” Modernism or “American” Pop?

Summary

soviel Sinnlichkeit wie der Stadtplan von Kiel

— Maxim Biller

WHAT IS MOST IMMEDIATELY STRIKING about the German literary market since unification, and in particular since the mid-1990s, is its sheer diversity. This variety was reflected in, though not necessarily a direct result of, a series of heated discussions that took place from the end of the 1980s amongst newspaper critics and professional readers working for publishing houses — authors, with some exceptions, continued to write novels. As a by-product of these disputes, literary scholars have been furnished with a lexicon for their readings of post-1990 German fiction, including, as we shall see, “Gesinnungsästhetik,” “Unterhaltsamkeit,” “Realismus,” and “Neue Lesbarkeit.”

The most dramatic but by no means the first of these debates concerned the person and literary achievements of East German writer Christa Wolf, following the belated publication of her Was bleibt (1990). Had this short narrative appeared, in West Germany, at the time of its composition more than ten years previously, argued Ulrich Greiner, literary critic at Die Zeit, in a commentary of 1 June 1990, its portrayal of the way the East German security apparatus had spied on the author during the protests following the expulsion of songwriter Wolf Biermann in 1976 would have been an explosive exposure of the true nature of the GDR. Instead, her failure to release the manuscript at this point testified, Greiner claimed, to the fatal alliance of intellectuals and the state; the decision to issue such a text just after the fall of the communist regime, he insisted, smacked of opportunism.