Tatort Germany: The Curious Case of German-Language Crime Fiction ed. by Lynn M. Kutch and Todd Herzog

Abstract

Reviewed by: Tatort Germany: The Curious Case of German-Language Crime Fiction ed. by Lynn M. Kutch and Todd Herzog Thomas W. Kniesche Lynn M. Kutch and Todd Herzog, eds., Tatort Germany: The Curious Case of German-Language Crime Fiction. Rochester, ny: Camden House, 2014. 263 pp. That crime fiction written in German exemplifies a “curious case” has been established before, but a more wide-reaching case can indeed be made for contemporary German-language crime fiction, and the editors and contributors of this volume succeed in doing so quite admirably. A volume that endeavors to outline a framework for current trends in German crime fiction should provide answers to a number of questions, such as: Does it succeed in offering a representative overview of contemporary German-language crime fiction? Does it include discussions of relevant and interesting authors [End Page 173] and texts? Does it compare contemporary German crime fiction to such writing in other languages? The answer to all of these questions is an unqualified “yes.” In their introduction, the editors maintain that repeated readings of and scholarly reflection on German-language crime fiction is not only possible but necessary. In such readings, the specifics of crime fiction written in German should be given special attention. To achieve this goal, the volume is divided into three parts that focus on the three areas of geographical setting, history, and identity, respectively. Thus, the individual chapters are mostly concerned with three popular subgenres of German crime fiction: the regional crime novel (Regiokrimi), the historical crime novel, and the crime novel that highlights questions of gender and sexual identities. Part One, on “Place,” includes contributions by Kyle Frackman on Regionalkrimis, Sascha Gerhards on contemporary trends in German crime tv and fiction, Jon Sherman on the Simon Brenner novels by Wolf Haas, and Anita McChesney on Austrian regional crime fiction. Frackman claims “that German regional crime fiction is both a modern development and simultaneously a recollection of crime fiction’s journalistic and literary beginnings” (23) and discusses examples of journalism featuring crime in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century periodicals to make his point. Gerhards identifies two new subgenres of the German Krimi he calls “Weltkrimi” (concerned with global crime) and “Verarbeitungskrimi” (concerned with dealing with the Nazi past). The former he finds in certain episodes of the popular and long-running series Tatort, the latter in crime fiction written by authors such as Volker Kutscher and others. Sherman shows that the focus of Wolf Haas’s Simon Brenner novels is not on solving crimes but on painting a picture of contemporary Austrian society with all of its complex issues, such as shifting ethnic, sexual, and class identities, and, in a similar vein, McChesney establishes “the sociocritical function of regional Austrian crime novels” written by Alfred Komarek, Wolf Haas, and Gerhard Roth and shows “how the novels draw on familiar images to unsettle notions of the provincial Austrian homeland” (82). In part two, “History,” Magdalena Waligórska examines novels by Volker Kutscher, Erich Schütz, Henrike Heiland, and Monika Buttler and asks “whether contemporary German crime fiction provides an exculpatory vision of Germany’s dark past or offers a critical investigation of the National Socialist period” (103). Susanne C. Knittel reads Rainer Gross’s Grafeneck (2007) and Kettenacker (2011) as examples of the “retrospective historical detective [End Page 174] novel” (Achim Saupe), Carol Anne Costabile-Heming looks at the publication history of Erich Loest’s crime novels he wrote under the pseudonym Hans Walldorf between 1967 and 1975 after his release from prison, and Traci S. O’Brien discovers in Eva Rossmann’s novel Freudsche Verbrechen (2001) a balanced approach to the problem of (historical) knowledge between the illusion of knowing how it really was and the poststructuralist distrust of knowledge. Part three on “Identities” features contributions by Angelika Baier on gender deviance in contemporary German crime fiction, Faye Stewart on how contemporary writers Thea Dorn and Christine Lehmann subvert the crime genre to expose gender discrimination and violence against women, and Heike Henderson on the culinary crime fiction of Eva Rossmann. In the three novels Baier analyzes, intersexed characters are the killers, but they are also shown as victims of repressive medical and...