2 - “Im Land der Väter und Verräter”: Intertextuality, Influence, and the Problem of Symbiosis in Maxim Biller’s Writing

Summary

In troduction: Patriarchal Poetics

MAXIM BILLER UNDENIABLY made a comeback in 2013, when his novella Im Kopf von Bruno Schulz earned him the praise of influential critics such as Michael Krüger and Ijoma Mangold. In the wake of his success, Biller kicked off a debate about the state of German Gegenwartsliteratur in early 2014, and the ensuing discussions consolidated his position as a controversial literary commentator. These developments certainly influenced the decision to appoint him as Marcel Reich-Ranicki's successor for the 2015 revival of the legendary Literarisches Quartett. Given the long and well-documented struggle that tied Biller to Reich-Ranicki, his appointment equaled an “Oedipal coup,” which finally allowed the son to mount the father's throne. The takeover ended abruptly, though, when Biller announced his decision to leave the Literarisches Quartett in early 2017, shortly after the publication of a monumental nine hundred-page novel entitled Biografie, which has received mixed reviews.

Characterized by a profound concern for questions of tradition, legacy, genealogy, and post-Holocaust Jewish identity, Biller's latest work foregrounds the perspective of the writer—“Judesein (ist) Schriftstellersein” (DgJ, 70; italics in the original)—putting intertextuality at the center. His 2013 novella Im Kopf von Bruno Schulz continues on a path that started with his earlier “Selbstporträt,” Der gebrauchte Jude: both texts engage extensively with seminal writers and cultural figures—such as Thomas Mann, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, and Bruno Schulz—who are cast as literary (anti-)fathers. The following chapter will thus analyze how Biller's recent publications relate to these three authors via the oedipal dispositive, by investigating strategies of connection and distinction, of belonging and dissociation, which Biller employs to stage intertextual feuds with his precursors. Focusing on Biller's textual relationship with the works of Bruno Schulz, I will show that Im Kopf von Bruno Schulz has to be read in connection with the figures of Thomas Mann and Marcel Reich-Ranicki, who feature prominently in Biller's writing. Intertextual references to these three writers connect to the central topics of Holocaust (post)memory, German-Jewish identity, and the German-Jewish (negative) symbiosis and engage with two key questions: Which traditions are still available for the (male) Jewish writer in post-Holocaust Germany?