Afghanistan, Soldiers' Experiences and Literary Invention in Dirk Kurbjuweit's Kriegsbraut (2011) and Norbert Scheuer's Die Sprache Der Vögel (2015)

Abstract

This article examines how recent literary texts have sought to represent the experience of German soldiers in Afghanistan in the deployment of the Bundeswehr to NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) after 2001. This deployment proved increasingly controversial in the FRG and from the late 2000s reverberated through cultural production. Literary representations were published into a discursive field already shaped by a proliferation of soldiers’ accounts of ISAF, which as military memoirs laid claim to a particular authority. In readings of Dirk Kurbjuweit’s Kriegsbraut (2011) and Norbert Scheuer’s more self-consciously literary Die Sprache der Vögel (2015), the article offers a case study of the way two recent novels have drawn on and positioned themselves in relation to soldiers’ accounts of their experience. Both novels offer an affirmation of the power of literary invention to cast this experience in a fresh light and the article explores the very different strategies by which they do so.