Brainfucked about Britain: Sibylle Berg’s Transnational Novel GRM

Abstract

In 2019, Sibylle Berg’s novel GRM Brainfuck was published to considerable acclaim. Berg, a German writer based in Switzerland, uses a contemporary British setting for a satirical speculation on the future of Western societies. The novel represents the UK as a social constellation that combines a tradition of class privilege with the worst excesses of global capitalism, technological surveillance, and mass manipulation. One force of resistance is the grime movement, which provides the emotional home for a group of young outsiders who rebel against the system. British grime is not only a major topic of the novel but permeates its entire language and style, from the use of slang through to the novel’s English-German code-mixing, and the collage-like aspects of its narrative structure. The article argues that the novel’s distinct transnational, translinguistic and transcultural dimensions challenge national and monolingual literary canons and raise issues with regard to the place of international and foreign-language fiction, both within academia and, notably, within British Studies.