3 - Literature in the West

Summary

Eine unerwartet liebenswerte Republik

— Sten Nadolny, ER oder ICH

THE PUBLICATION IN 1995 OF Günter Grass's Ein weites Feld was, Daniela Dahn claims, a “nationales Ereignis” without parallel “in der Kulturgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschlands.” Indeed, a quarter of a million copies of this nearly eight hundred page novel had been ordered prior to its release. Three chapters, moreover, had appeared in Neue deutsche Literatur, a journal based in the ex-GDR, and some five thousand advance copies had been sent out to reviewers by Grass's publishing house, Steidl. A literary sensation appeared to be in the offing. Nineteenth-century novelist Theodor Fontane was to be resurrected as Fonty, a seventy-year-old citizen of the former East Germany whose biography would include almost incidental collaboration with the French resistance during the war and, later, with the Stasi as well as sporadic refusals to conform before and after 1990. Also featured would be Fonty's “shadow” Hoftaller, a.k.a. Tallhover, the man who had spied on Fontane and who was made famous by Hans Joachim Schädlich's 1986 novel Tallhover. This rather ambivalent figure was to be Fonty's partner in extensive dialogues on the unifications of 1870–71 and 1990 and in discussions of Fontane's eager embrace of the liberal cause in 1848, his activities as a Prussian agent reporting on German émigrés in London, and Fonty's own inconsistencies. In addition, Fonty, possibly like Fontane, would turn out to have at least one illegitimate daughter. The stage was set for the novel of the decade.