The Short Story in German in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Lyn Marven, Andrew Plowman, and Kate Roy

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Short Story in German in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Lyn Marven, Andrew Plowman, and Kate Roy Lydia Heiss The Short Story in German in the Twenty-First Century. Edited by Lyn Marven, Andrew Plowman, and Kate Roy. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2020. Pp. vii + 345. Cloth $99.00. ISBN 978-1-64014-046-2. The Short Story in German in the Twenty-First Century sheds light on current thematic and form-based developments in German-language short story writing and fills the void created by a lack of recent academic publications on the genre. Fifteen years lie between its publication in 2020 and that of the most recent edition of Leonie Marx's important theoretical work Die deutsche Kurzgeschichte. But what exactly constitutes a short story? This is a central issue the volume seeks to address. One of the masters of the genre, Edgar Allan Poe, defined the short [End Page 396] story in his famous review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales (1842) as a story to be read continuously without interruption achieving a "unique or single effect" (61). The editors of the volume, Lyn Marven, Andrew Plowman, and Kate Roy, unfold their central thesis that the short story form is ever-changing and elusive in terms of a fixed definition. Instead, they advocate for a flexible framework for future research, in which any critical approach—be it thematic, form-focused, or based on a certain theoretical perspective—must be specifically tailored to the author, text, or collection at hand. Concerning the German-language short story, the matter of genre definition is further complicated historically and methodologically by terminology, i.e., the difference between Erzählung and Kurzgeschichte, and the delimitation against other German short prose genres like the Novelle. Furthermore, in the twenty-first century, the World Wide Web and digital media have especially impacted the creation and distribution of short stories. The contributions to the volume are grouped into three sections and address form, function, and theme in the works of both well-known and up-and-coming contemporary authors. The theme-centered part of the first section begins with Katharina Gerstenberger's reflections on the "odd" hybrid genre of Berlin short stories, which takes city literature's primary focus on place and blends it with the short story's focus on plot. The second contribution with thematic emphasis by Todd Herzog explores the close link between Poe's definition of the short story and S. S. van Dine's definition of the detective story and stresses the innovative aspect of short crime fiction. The first section's form-centered part presents the short story as a performative, ambiguous, and subjective genre with a tendency toward the political. Emily Spiers highlights that especially its "dialogic" quality and "fragmentary form" are what make the short story performative (51). Kate Roy's contribution focuses on the shortest form of short story writing, the short-short, stating that its extreme brevity underlines the importance of the implicated and the unsaid. Helmut Schmitz closes out the second part of the first section with his reflections on similarities and differences between the German Novelle and the American short story. The second section comprises eight author-focused essays. In the first contribution on well-known writer Clemens Meyer, Gillian Pye detects a lack of academic attention to his short fiction despite his many prizes and wide press coverage. By showing how it is precisely Judith Hermann's sometimes criticized minimalistic style that makes the reader's own reality "present" (139), Leonhard Herrmann presents more recent works of Hermann as underrated by critics. Heide Kunzelmann expands on Austrian writer Alois Hotschnig's tendency toward open-endedness, moments of crisis, and the uncanny in the Western capitalist world and highlights how he makes the disoriented reader complicit in their construction. Through the example of Swiss author Peter Stamm's publication of his collected short stories, Andrew Plowman explores different approaches to collections, their self-reflexivity and construction. Heike Bartel and [End Page 397] Elizabeth Boa investigate the work of Ulrike Almut Sandig and Sylvia Bovenschen. They find that in the digital age, a time of acceleration, these authors use...