Mass And Velocity

Chicago Review # 48: 2/3 (Summer 2002)

New Writing in German

Edited by Eirik Steinhoff.

Guest Editors Anna Gisbertz & W. Martin (Fiction)

Andrew Duncan & Tony Frazer (Poetry)

Chicago Review, 5801 South Kenwood Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60637 USA or http://www.humanities.uchicago.edu/review

[354pp. $8, ISSN 0009-3696]

Some of this work fills me with dissatisfaction - the best of it, I should add. It makes me question my own literary practice. It opens up ways of writing I regret not having pursued and feel (irrationally) that I should have discovered for myself, and there is nothing negative about this either. The more often we are shaken up, the more likely we are to make progress.

The effect of encountering a body of contemporary work, by writers within one's own age group and younger (the youngest here was born in 1975), from a field as wide as that of contemporary German literature, can be cathartic. Ideally, it would be as commonplace an experience as, say, encountering an anthology edited by Daisy Goodwin. Back in the Sixties and Seventies, indeed, I recall that Penguin issued anthologies of new writing, of similar scale and scope, from a range of countries such as France, Poland and Yugoslavia. I don't know how well the series sold, but it would be invaluable again now. As it is, I have no idea what contemporary writers of French poetry are doing - and I can get there in a few hours on the ferry. Nor do I know what is happening in Spain, Italy, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia… the whole poetry world, outside the English-speaking part of it, has become an almost unrelieved Terra Incognita, to those without linguistic genius or endless persistence.

This makes this project especially welcome, even if the question of its rarity comes up in the same breath, as does the question of why there is no perceived demand for this kind of project in the UK. At least this is the third collection of new German writers I've come across recently - more than for any other contemporary literature. The copy of the Forest collection, Young Poets of a New Germany, I found in a bargain bin in WH Smith, around six years ago, was generously conferred on Tim as a birthday present - I recall enjoying it, but the relatively small number of poems from each poet made it hard to form judgements about their work. Eighteen months ago, moreover, Eratica's first issue featured a handful of younger poets and short-story writers from Bavaria, and none of them would have been out of their depth here - in fact, two very different writers, Martin Langanke (b. 1972) and Caro Rusch (b. 1958), would have particularly graced proceedings. Langanke's understated industrial tableaux recalled post-war writers such as Huchel and Brobowski, without sliding into retrospective pastiche, whilst Rusch's lyrical, opulent meditations on post-Classical, post-Renaissance Italian landscapes possessed historical depth and formal grace in equal measure.

Rusch's work, in fact, seems to connect with a cultural current that has surfaced and re-surfaced in Europe over the last two or three decades, and which I know something about through art (Kiefer, Chia, Clemente, Neue Slowenische Kunst etc) and more particularly through music (Laibach, Autopsia, Actus, Lacrimosa, Ataraxia, Stoa, Engelsstaub et al). This has been termed the retro avant-garde, to reflect its strategy of wilful anachronism, its immersion in the cultural humus of Europe (I shall return to this theme later). I don't know if the poetry editors of this anthology, Tony Frazer and Andrew Duncan, know Rusch's work and, in any case, I'm not sure if it'd be their thing. But she, and Eratica One, are worth checking out in the same context as this.

This collection is much larger, at over three hundred pages. It features twenty-three poets and thirty fiction writers, most of whom are in their thirties and forties. Given the pluralist nature of German- speaking Europe, with its multiplicity of actual and 'secret' capitals, the fact that almost half the writers are based in Berlin is notable (Vienna, Munich and Hamburg contribute only a handful between them). This either implies that Berlin-based writers are being marketed more assiduously, or that the most prominent younger writers are now moving to Berlin as the one true German metropolis. Were I German, I'd worry about the loss of diversity this implies, although the emergence of another European cultural focus has its positive factors. If the Berliners are heading in different literary directions from the non-Berliners, I didn't notice.

The translations are uniformly good, in the sense that they come across as 'literature' throughout - how faithful they are is a matter for others to judge. Parallel texts for the poetry, at least, would have been welcome but generosity has its limits! Banal virtues, such as a readable typeface and a spacious layout, contribute to what is an 'easy' read in that limited sense - Albert Oehlen's quasi-Mattaesque cover is also successful, in that the energy of the painting approximates well to the energy of so much of the content.

That having been said, the volume has a touch of Durs Grünbein's okapi to it - half one thing, half the other, if by no means "equally distant /From the childish shadows, the picturebook silhouettes of each" (To An Okapi in the Munich Zoo). The editorial taste that selected the poetry, in short, appears to be different to that which selected the fiction. Whereas the poetry editors showcase 'multifacted experimenters' at the expense of more traditional writers, the prose, with a few exceptions, aims at narrative clarity over linguistic experiment. However, that actually enhances the reading experience - the velocity of the poetry compliments and contrasts with the mass, and relative clarity, of most of the prose.

The introduction lists the four main trends that have been marketed within contemporary German fiction. It depicts them as aspects of a literary boom, in a land in which going to a literary reading can (allegedly) be like going to a sell-out rock concert, and in which writers are sustained by an incredible (to their English counterparts) array of prizes and reading opportunities. Indeed, the chronicling of prizes in the biographies verges on the parodic, although given the kind of work that gets prizes in Germany these days, it actually makes them seem less insidious than in the UK. These four trends, hyped to death no doubt by the publishing companies which appear to dominate German cultural production, are "Pop-Literatur" (needing no translation), "Das neue Erzählen" (the 'new narration'), "Das Fräuleinwunder" (the 'maiden-miracle' for want of a better translation) and "multikulturelle Literatur" (again, this needs no translation).

The contents of this anthology suggest that the second of these four trends is dominant - the bulk of the fiction deals in narrative in what is a relatively time-worn and conventional way, although it does so convincingly and at times brilliantly. On the whole, the other three trends are subsumed into it - for example, Summerhouse, Later, a Berlin-based Generation X yarn by Judith Hermann (b. 1970), has a touch of pop to it but is also strongly reliant on conventional narrative norms. The same goes for That's Really No Way to Make Money by the Austrian Kathrin Röggla (b. 1971), which parallels the loose, slangy structures of an Irvine Welsh or a Lloyd Robson in order to spice up the straightforward story of an encounter between a group of younger Austrians, up in Berlin for the annual "Love Parade" event, who decide to string along an intrusive local by pretending to be Hungarians. These texts are 'pop' in the sense that they are written by women whose culture is contemporary pop culture, but it's only the application of generational stereotyping that turns them into 'pop' writers - people tend to write about what they know about, and it's simple as that. The piece of work by arguably the most representative 'pop' author, Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre (b. 1975), is bizarrely banal, a student magazine filler about his experience of laundromats which has either lost something in translation or has nothing to lose - although, to be fair, the irony he exhibits towards consumerism may be as heartfelt as that exhibited back in the seventies in the lyrics of Kraftwerk. He attracts standing-room-only crowds on his national reading tours, allegedly, so one assumes that there's more to his repertoire than this.

As far as the 'maiden-miracle' goes, Hermann and Röggla could equally be seen as contributing to that current as to the 'pop' current, and, whilst the work of some writers, such as Antje Strubel (b. 1974) and Alissa Walser (b. 1961), indicates a desire to deal with the experience of being female, even a female who desires other females in the case of the excerpt from Strubel's work, it's hard to draw firm lines between the male and female writers. And the fragments of 'multicultural' literature included simply transcribe the same criteria into contexts where other cultures are in play.

So what comes through is a commitment to storytelling, but a storytelling that is aware of language and of contemporary conditions - a literature, in fact, that springs from contemporary and recent German history, that answers to that collective experience without being subsumed to it. With the exception of The Root of the Free Radical is Heart by Birgit Kempker (b. 1956) - a non-linear performance text with hints of some of Rosemarie Waldrop and Caroline Bergvall's work to it - there is a low level of textual resistance, and the work is easy to read in so far as the complex, winding sentences of literary German permit. The editors point out, indeed, that 'an abiding interest in the sentence as the site of formal artistry' is apparent. They go on to discuss the way in which this body of writing is informed by the tension between this, and counter-tendencies to 'plain style and plot-and-character-driven narratives' - in other words, familiar questions of form and content.

Here, three writers stand out, and they are the writers I would most like to encounter again, along with the much younger Judith Hermann. The published excerpts from Das Provisorium (The Interim) by Wolfgang Hilbig (b. 1941), Frühling (Spring) by Thomas Lehr (b. 1957) and Der Verlorene (Lost) by Hans-Ulrich Treichel (b. 1952) all deal with 'German' issues in ways which appear appropriate, and the power of their writing comes through in translation. Hilbig writes of a writer (himself?), sustained by the rubber-chicken circuit of readings and publishing events, comparing his passage through the stations and city nights of contemporary Germany and Austria with his earlier life in the former East. Lehr's novella tells of the last moments in the life of a pharmacologist, the son of an concentration camp doctor, who fulfils a suicide pact with his Polish prostitute lover. Treichel writes in the first person, giving voice to a young boy growing up in the aftermath of the Second World War and in the shadow of an absent brother, Arnold, who turns out to have been given away by his mother in the flight from East Prussia. Hilbig offers complex, swirling, lyrical sentences of interrogation: Lehr the fractured, quasi-Beckettesque desperation of a man's last breath: Treichel the ingenuous ironies of a boy who is more complex than the language he has at his disposal. In their own ways, they all attest to the calibre of fiction writing that is currently being encouraged by German publishers and audiences.

The élan of much of the poetry chosen and, for a large part, translated by Tony Frazer and Andrew Duncan is remarkable. Constant leaps of imagination, metaphoric invention and reference are made and justified by the logic of texts as a whole. It is a familiar argument that the pace of things, in modern times, demands an equally-paced response, an art of montage, cutting and pasting, sampling and editing and splicing - however, it takes accomplished writers to shuffle at that pace without dropping their cards all over the floor, or producing something that requires an altogether pre-modern quality of attention to assimilate.

The writers that impress here are those who move rapidly and surely, trusting readers to follow the lines of connection without setting traps or revelling in resistance. Ulrike Draesner, for example, writes a poetry which investigates her bodily identity and the disruptions of physical existence to the 'life of the mind' - most notably, the experience of miscarriage in the sequence Bluish Sphinx - in a way that admits the reader, challenges the way in which this experience has been inscribed in the past, but also finds a synthetic, yet convincing verbal analogue for that experience. The first few lines of Op begin thus:

"morphine bees /their yellow-black stripes /a slimy blob /injected into the artery"

Draesner takes a visual metaphor - that of the bees - magnifies it by referring to their colours, then turns it into a tactile one, of a slimy blob injected into the artery. The delayed-action synaesthesia of this allows the image to embed itself, as if physically, in the attention zone of the reader - the main point of the image, the way in which the furriness of the bodies of bees corresponds to the furriness of an injected anaesthetic, is implied but not imposed.

Draesner is also willing to assert her connection to the non-human world, the way in which the pressures of bodily existence squeeze us out of our own identities: in Am My Own Zoo, she sees herself as

"sow bug, little hammer /flying hamster in wheel /koala package and absurd limp, /mosquito with the consumption /of a vampire…"

Her work, with its raw nerves, its transitions, its richness of metaphor, its portrayal of the female body as a site where the whole universe enters and dances, can be compared to that of Penelope Shuttle or Sylvia Plath, although the pace at which it moves is her own.

Durs Grünbein's work is more relaxed, and his consciousness more traditionally male - that of onlooker, observer, walker of song-lines and pisser on territory. He is apparently the most celebrated of younger German poets - like Draesner, born in 1962 - and, bearing in mind that the comparable British figures would be people like Armitage and Paterson, the difference between the scenes becomes evident. Here, Grünbein's laconic, offbeat, morning-after observations would probably vanish into some corner of the small press, its lack of ostentation and tricksiness seen as a lack of talent - in other words, it just wouldn't fit the marketing ploys. This excerpt, from What all comes clear, is typical:

"In this //grey zone morning landscape /everything's at first a /dead tangle of stale images, e.g. /a bit of shaving cream in /the gutter, a collar /or, moving on, a DO NOT sign. You //don't blow up."

I have this picture in my head of Grünbein, nursing a permanent mild hangover as he wearies his late-morning way through the streets of Dresden or Berlin to his chosen cafe or bar. Addressing himself habitually in the second person, because the two halves of his brain are wedged apart with aspirin or Paracetamol, he tries to make sense of a landscape that both invades and escapes him. What he does seems slight on one level, but I guess - on the basis of the handful of his pieces that I've read - that his work appeals to the sense we have that everything is a) basically OK, for now but b) not ours. What I do know is that I would be happy to read more.

With Thomas Kling (b. 1957), another highly-regarded figure who would have probably been cast out even further into the void over here, we encounter a faster tempo, and a jump-cut technique that does, indeed, defamiliarise its subject matter. However, there is an appealing energy and good humour about his work, and once the context is grasped it comes (relatively) clear. History Painting, for example, is very simply a place poem about Bohemia, but one that disguises itself at the outset so that the context only gradually becomes apparent, with the mention of Heydrich, the 'reich protector' (no capitals), dying of his wounds. Chaldaean Catalog does 'the same' for the skies overhead, and Taunus Sample. Course in Hessian homes in on what appears to be a country and western night in a club or pub somewhere to the west of Frankfurt, in the lee of the Taunus mountains:

"the boozer's own team, cupcup, wears /501s wears suede boots, third-rate /western they're putting on here, HEILHEILHEIL!!!! /fluff-blond back of thigh, the row from /opposite; the blonde hank…"

The rapid changes of register, the acerbic humour, the anecdotal excess, suggest some of the more recent poetry of Iain Sinclair, or the output of Ken Edwards - and a parallel universe in which these writers turn up in the Forward Anthology and make a living from prizes and reading-tours. But that point's been made. On his own terms, Kling can be admired for his flexibility towards language, and his desire to draw out its wider resources even when the results risk impenetrability, but also for his parallel concern to engage and communicate with the reader.

Kling's pace is also characteristic of Lutz Seiler (b. 1963), a writer brought up in the GDR who draws upon that experience and plays it off against the realities of the post-Unification present. He samples, cuts and edits what the editors call the 'blasted landscapes of his native Thuringia' in a way that puts across the strange realities of a grubby, grey-tinged, failing utopia. Slagheap Glow writes of

"accidents, looks dead, suddenly /purple temples shafts; slagheap glow /was brandy, bootleg /for cave-dwellers, then /"all out for the First of May"

In another poem, My Cohort, Sixty-Three, That, he writes of his generation, schooled in the Seventies to inherit and conserve a society whose days were already numbered. That generation is consoled - even then - that "at least we were holding out a bright path /for the dark side of the planet /first all together & then /each quietly to himself". Seiler's work can verge on the opaque, but his attempt to give voice to that essential part of the German collective experience, and to the twenty per cent of Germans whose history has been made partially invisible by the Wende and its aftermath, is an exemplary one.

Interestingly, the longest poem featured, and perhaps the most demanding and rewarding of all, is by the second oldest contributor Jürgen Becker (b. 1932). Journal of Repetitions is hard to summarise but, in large part, it relates to the East German experience, one that the writer did not take part in but is now approaching, from the outside, after the forty years of German disunity that corresponded with the bulk of his adult life. So, he writes of

"Rusting tank barriers; the security zone reaching /between Wehrmacht and Volksarmee; seagulls, /one at a time, crying, circle over the dune terrain, the building sites /of the Arbeitsfront."

He goes on, in even more explicitly elegiac mode:

"rain/and wind take their time /crumbling the four kilometers of façade, backdrops /to the dream that shifts masses /of humans and materials /and left this behind, the paradise of ruins."

The impossible German century is being summed up, by a man who has lived through most of its events, who has taken one of the paths and is now confronting the other, tamed and broken, at an advanced stage of his life.

These are by no means the only writers whose work stands out… space prevents discussion of other poets of quality such as Friederike Mayröcker, Brigitte Oleschinski, Sabine Scho, Raoul Schrott and Peter Waterhouse. Certainly, Scho (b. 1971) contributes one of the most striking poems in the volume, Horst and His New Opel, which lays into German technophilia and speed-addiction with a vengeance:

"the/force behind the rush-hour, the wrecking force /composed of mass and velocity /

buckling the chrome finish"

and it's interesting how this 'wrecking-force' is evident, in a more positive and constructive form, in so much of the poetry included.

So is this an accurate map of what is going on in contemporary German poetry - assuming such a thing were possible? This is not claimed by the editors, who admit that they have homed in on the linguistically-innovative at the expense of other kinds of poetry. They acknowledge a counter-tradition of explicit political poetry, furthering the example of the '"Generation of '68": in addition, guest editor Gerald Fiebig talks, in Eratica, of the 'Social Beat' phenomenon. This appears to express social and political concerns within the Bukowski tradition, and my limited forays into German bookshops have indicated Bukowski, indeed, as the most-translated English-speaking poet, with only Larkin, Hughes and Heaney putting in an appearance from the contemporary British and Irish scenes. This strand, presumably, did not appeal to the editors.

The existence of a hermetic, transcendental poetry in the lineage of Hölderlin, Novalis, Trakl, Rilke and Celan is another matter. As this is the line of German poetry I've always prized the most, both in translation and in my mole-blind forays into parallel text, I find myself wondering whether it has come to a close under the pressures of post-modernism, condemned to extinction by its very unworldliness or to surface in less sophisticated, quasi-New Age formulations. I'm not sure if it's right to say, as do the editors, that the stylistic influence of Celan has not carried through obviously to the writers here, because there are suggestions, in the packing and piling of words, in the syntactical strategies that appear to have been employed, that the more 'constructed' mid-period Celan of Sprachgitter and Die Niemandsrose has been influential. For example, the nervous syntax and wrist-flicking metaphoric invention of the second stanza of his Matière de Bretagne (trans. Michael Hamburger)

"Dry, the bed behind you/fills with silt, its hour/clogs with rushes, above,/by the star, the milky/tideways jabber through mud, date shell,/below, bunched, yawns into blueness, a shrub/of transience, beautiful,/meets your memory, greets it."

resonates, in some of these texts, in a manner which goes deeper, surely, than the deployment of a common language.

Perhaps the problem here is that the pre-Atemwende Celan is being (relatively) overlooked, in favour of the desperate limit-statements of his final work - and late Celan is so much itself, so much of a private language-world, that the influence is hard to work with even when the work itself is treasured. However, a contemporary current that is post-Celan and possibly post-Heidegger in content, as well as informed by earlier parallels, is certainly not apparent, any more (and the two things are connected) than a current of 'retro avant-garde' work which reaches back to earlier centuries (Caro Rusch, if included, would come closest). Claudio Magris has posed the problem (re. Celan) of whether an Orphic poetry of this kind could be written at all now without the risk of creating mere 'precious objects of scandal'; if so, then Celan's example may well turn out to be an end rather than a beginning, if not linguistically then conceptually. As for Heidegger, the unpleasant political aspects of his life and work may have made it easier, ironically, for non-Germans to be influenced by his poetics.

All this may well say something about editorial taste, or it might just say that ways of writing which are less explicitly grounded in present-day conditions have been exiled to the margins, as here. Of course, this raises all sorts of contentious issues as to whether any practice of writing can aim at 'permanence', i.e. at long-term relevance, without engaging in a massive amount of self-delusion. It also raises the issue of whether self-delusion might not, in fact, be the most effective source of creative enterprise and progress, as against the kind of wide-awake immersion in critical theory that might only serve to make it impossible to write or, if one does write, to take what one is doing (as opposed to oneself or one's career development prospects) seriously. It may well be that we are exiled into our own time, rather than liberated into it - and, whilst the engagements with recent German history here are fruitful, perhaps a longer time-span has its advantages too, as with a visual artist like Kiefer.

Perhaps there are writers around on the contemporary German-speaking scene who are doing just that without the obligatory patina of irony - I've heard rumours of the 'new Gothic' recently in the visual arts, and the way in which younger musicians in these parts have taken the Goth genre, purged it of its beery Brit braindeadness and shifted it somewhere else altogether has been of interest to me for some time. But perhaps I'm chasing imaginary dragons, and I'm profoundly thankful for what is present rather than nostalgic for what might not, in any case, exist. Taken on its own terms, this collection offers us work that is not only of a uniformly high standard, but sufficiently apart from contemporary British and American writing to enrich our sense of what the possibilities might be - an assemblage of material that disrupts and disquiets in the best possible sense, and sets new trails for the adventurous here to follow.