Questioning the Canon: Counter-Discourse and the Minority Perspective in Contemporary German Literature by Christine Meyer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Questioning the Canon: Counter-Discourse and the Minority Perspective in Contemporary German Literature by Christine Meyer Bethany A. Morgan Questioning the Canon: Counter-Discourse and the Minority Perspective in Contemporary German Literature. By Christine Meyer. Translated by Dustin Lovett and Tegan Raleigh. Boston: De Gruyter, 2021. Pp. 343. Cloth $99.00. ISBN 978-3110674361. Christine Meyer’s Questioning the Canon masterfully treats the representative works of Rafik Schami, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and Feridun Zaimoglu through a postcolonial methodology to reveal their overlooked counter-discursive aspects. In response to a field of scholarship that lags behind its Francophone and Anglophone counterparts, Meyer calls for the necessity of utilizing a postcolonial approach to Germanophone literature and its authors originating from stigmatized countries. This work questions the power relations between the center, the canon, and the margins. Utilizing Genette’s theories of “hypertext” and “hypotext,” Meyer shows which authors have written into the canon and essentially asserted themselves as “successors” to canonical authors. Meyer exposes the problems with a literary canon as a collection of texts approved for universality by cultural and academic institutions. From a position inferior to the main subject of discourse in canonical texts, the un-, under-, or misrepresented, such as women and ethnic and sexual minorities, question the ability of canonical authors to universally represent the human experience. For her methodology, Meyer convincingly demonstrates both the validity and importance of approaching German-language “migration literature” from a postcolonial perspective, which originated with “orientalism” and has developed through “mimicry” and “third space,” “subalternity,” and “writing back.” The main difference between the German-speaking canon and the Anglophone or Francophone canon lies in the aims and discourse itself. Rather than uncovering a colonialist or racist ideology in the canon, German-language authors of “migration literature” endeavor to “de-ethnicize” and “denaturalize” the canon by uncovering cosmopolitan and hybrid elements already within. The German canon does not contain the same cultural imperialism or notions of expansionism, but rather focuses on its own “cultural nation.” Moreover, Meyer points out that Germany’s immigration population does not come from colonized subjects but rather from Turkey or from nations conquered by other colonizers. Despite these differences in colonial and immigration histories, Meyer does not excuse the German canon from its share of literary protests but rather [End Page 342] shows how a postcolonial approach unveils a power struggle between the margins and center analogous to that between writers in post-colonial regions and the colonizer. In considering the conditions under which Germany’s contemporary literary canon has developed, the fraught twentieth century required the redefinition of a common patrimony and cultural foundation upon which to build its Kulturnation. Schami, Özdamar, Zaimoglu, and others have entered intertextual dialogue not only with canonical German authors but also with Shakespeare and authors of the larger Western canon. By rereading authors such as Adelbert von Chamisso, Heinrich Heine, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in a “minor” mode, contemporary authors of “migration literature” recontextualize these authors into a decentered space. Beginning with chapter two, Meyer introduces the counter-discursive strategies of her representative authors, including metatextuality and rewriting. Continuing through chapter six, Meyer involves us in her fruitful close readings of numerous texts to show how they write back from the East, test national traditions by diversity, write oppositionally, and utilize a bottom-up approach. Rafik Schami even writes directly to some of these authors. He adopts the position of a grandchild to Chamisso in the epistolary preface to Chamisso’s 1990 biography. To address “Harry Heine,” Schami chooses an interview in which he and Heine realize they have political persecution, exile, and marked status as a historical minority in common. Meyer reads Schami’s epistolary and interview writings as postcolonial in that he assumes a position of successor and kin rather than outsider. In Schami’s corrective (re)reading of European classics such as the fairy tales and Dracula, he rewrites the Wolf as the misunderstood outsider and the Count as misrepresented. Meyer argues that these texts and yet another text in which a fictional sultan evaluates Goethe’s corpus all point to Schami’s postcolonial tendencies to scrutinize the canon and to...