Contemporary German Fiction: Writing in the Berlin Republic. (Cambridge Studies in German) by Stuart Taberner

Abstract

MLR, 104.2, 2009 609 notwithstanding, it remains an extremely welcome addition to the field of GDR studies, providing an engrossing re-evaluation of GDR literaturenearly sixty years after the creation of theEast German state and nearly twentyyears after itsdemise. Swansea University Katharina Hall Contemporary German Fiction: Writing in the Berlin Republic. Ed. by Stuart Taberner. (Cambridge Studies inGerman) Cambridge: Cambridge Univer sityPress. 2007. ix+268pp. ?50. ISBN 978-0-521-86078-9. The international success of works such as Bernhard Schlink's Der Vorleser and Wolfgang Becker's Goodbye Lenin! appears to have alerted theworld in general to the culture of theNew Germany. So there is clearly a need for a book like this one, which takes a close look at the fiction of the so-called Berlin Republic. The thirteen individual essays thatmake up the volume introduce us to just over a hundred authors and theirworks of narrative prose. All the grand old persons of the past are covered, sometimes from differentperspectives, as aremore recent publishing phe nomena and textsby lesser-known contemporaries. The editor has assembled some of themost distinguished Germanists on these islands, complemented by equally well-known transatlantic backup, and the results are in part impressive. Moray McGowan's contribution on 'Turkish-German Fiction since theMid-1990V is a masterpiece, distilling an encyclopedic knowledge into a perfectly judged essay that punctiliously fulfils itsbrief and effortlesslygoes beyond it.Frank Finlay's opening essay on 'LiteraryDebates and theLiteraryMarket sinceUnification' does invaluable work in contextualizing the often acrimonious debates thathave raged inGerman newspapers. Bill Niven's essay on 'Representations of theNazi Past I: "Perpetrators"' combines an unusually broad range of referencewith a spiritedly specific defence of Schlink's book. Margaret Littler suffusesher contribution with an elegant admixture of critical theory.And Brigid Haines's account of 'German-Language Writing from Eastern and Central Europe' is characteristically wide-ranging and circumspect. The book as a whole, though, is rather less than the sum of itsparts. That the editor also writes on '"WestGerman writing" in theBerlin Republic' is symptomatic of a certain bias. Moreover, the contributions would appear tobe in thewrong order. Surely Littler's essay on 'CulturalMemory and Identity Formation in theBerlin Re public' ought tobe inseparable from?and properly precede?essays concerned with 'Representations of theNazi Past'? Yet because Littler insistently focuses on Turkish and East European writing, her essay has been grouped alongside McGowan and Haines, leavingHelmut Schmitz painfully alone with his taxonomy ofmemory. This literal riftis symptomatic of an apparent disunity between individual contributions and the larger conception. Thus Niven, called upon to look forNazi perpetrators, roundly declares that he cannot find any. And Haines, by focusing exclusively on writing by women, effectively attacks the policy of offeringwomen a chapter of their own. In that chapter, though, Lyn Marven is able to pick up on one of the lines of continuity inEast German writing that escape Paul Cooke inhis account of '"GDR Literature" in the Berlin Republic'. This is partly because her insistence on 6io Reviews form constitutes a relatively rare exception in a book organized according to theme and authorship. Indeed, demolishing the assumption of a congruence between the twowastes a disproportionate amount of space, and isnot always successful. Para doxically, it also leads to the inclusion, especially but by no means exclusively, in Erin McGlothlin's final essay on 'Writing by Germany's Jewish Minority of a good number of texts that are not fiction and/or not written (or even interested) in the Berlin Republic. And that then raises serious issues of focus and purpose. Equally, the ubiquity of translations suggests that the book is aimed at people not familiarwith the terrain.Yet almost no attempt is made to cater to this constituency. The translations of titlesand concepts are oftenmechanical, inconsistent, ideological, or just plain wrong. (Particularly crass is the translation 'Middle' for '(Berlin) Mitte'; but we also have 'False Hare' for themeatloaf that is 'Falscher Hase', 'Fall of the Berlin Wall' and 'political turn' for 'Wende\ and 'Legacy for 'Mitgift'.) Buzzwords such as 'Frauleinwunder, 'Generation Golf, '78er\ even '68er\ are explained inade quately and inpassing. (Conversely, afterFinlay's magisterial treatment of the topic, further explanations of the 'Literaturstreit' are redundant.) The two...