Protest und Verweigerung/Protest and Refusal: Neue Tendenzen in der deutschen Literatur seit 1989/New Trends in German Literature since 1989 ed. by Hans Adler and Sonja E. Klocke

Abstract

Reviewed by: Protest und Verweigerung/Protest and Refusal: Neue Tendenzen in der deutschen Literatur seit 1989/New Trends in German Literature since 1989 ed. by Hans Adler and Sonja E. Klocke Doris McGonagill Hans Adler and Sonja E. Klocke, editors. Protest und Verweigerung/Protest and Refusal: Neue Tendenzen in der deutschen Literatur seit 1989/New Trends in German Literature since 1989. Wilhelm Fink, 2018. 293 pp. Paper, $90.00. This collection of essays examines politically engaged German literature of the post-Wall period. Such an endeavor, as ambitious as it is topical, must necessarily remain limited to a few selective trends, topics, genres, authors, and approaches. Hans Adler and Sonja Klocke’s anthology offers the broad overview it promises: the volume includes many strong contributions that purposefully respond to current debates and discuss—with great sensitivity, theoretical acumen, and ethical verve—a comprehensive selection of contemporary texts and contexts and the relationship between the two. The diverse perspectives on littérature engagée range from a discussion of Mediterranean “boat refugee narratives” (a term coined by April Shemak) in Faye Stewart’s discussion of texts by Merle Kröger and Reinhard Kleist to environmentally engaged thrillers, Öko-Krimis, in Sabine Gross’s analysis of this popular German-language genre. Gender studies and feminist theory are not a particular focal point of the collection. One essay chooses gender and another the body as a lens: Melissa Sheedy analyzes Kerstin Hensel’s transformation of the fairy-tale genre into a critique of patriarchal structures and sexualized violence, and Simone Pfleger employs body theory in the context of a larger critique of hierarchical societal structures in her approach to Antje Rávic Strubel’s [End Page 111] novel Kältere Schichten der Luft (2007; Colder layers of air). More engagement with gender in this volume would be desirable. What else does the anthology offer? Concise, circumspect, historically conscious, and theoretically informed discussions of works by Navid Kermani, Ulrich Peltzer, Ilija Trojanow, and Juli Zeh—and, by way of a conservative outlier, Uwe Tellkamp. The emphasis, as the introduction informs us, is on texts that engage critically, not affirmatively, with dominant social paradigms and power relations. The quality of the contributions is uniformly impressive, but several stand out for their scope, theoretical rigor, and well-developed methodologies, including Claudia Breger’s proposal of “engaged realism” as a way of transcending traditional discursive fault lines (such as realism versus formalism). Breger uses Kermani’s Einbruch der Wirklichkeit (2016; Incursion of reality) to demonstrate an engagement with social reality that is grounded “in an aesthetics of careful, multi-perspectival mediation” (24). Katharina Gerstenberger masterfully argues that Trojanow’s blending of fictional and nonfictional registers facilitates new perspectives for literary engagement. And Klocke’s contribution traces the subtle perpetuation of Soviet-style power structures and totalitarian nomenclature through the prism of texts by Trojanow and Strubel. Providing a solid but conventional analytical framework, the twenty-page introduction is subdivided into three short sections dedicated to generic and historical categories. The editors dutifully touch on Horace, Hegel, and numerous loci classici. Although it stumbles a bit at first (with many negatives, double negatives, and learned mannerisms), the prolegomenon includes a helpful overview of engaged German-language literature since the Enlightenment, an overview of the “ethical turn” in contemporary literature, and the assertion that the unifying aspect of all contributions lies in their shared belief in fictional literature’s particular aptitude for deliberating political content. The editors’ programmatic premises ultimately adhere to a traditional genre typology that many of the individual essays transcend. The collection’s bilingual title suggests broad accessibility to the essays collected in this volume, but the anthology addresses itself to academic audiences conversant in both German and English. The ten contributions are equally divided between essays in English and German, but the editors’ introduction is exclusively in German, as is the overall layout of the book, its content headings, and the format of its footnotes and indexes. [End Page 112] As if to counteract the linguistic lopsidedness, the short contributor profiles are solely in English. This collection builds on earlier scholarship, notably models of political authorship developed by Sabrina Wagner in Aufklärer der Gegenwart...