Any selection is necessarily eclectic and offers a personal view of the stories which have been chosen. The present selection is therefore by definition not an objective survey of this particular genre in German during the past twenty-five years. My aim in assembling this volume of German Parallel Texts has been to include a variety of themes and a range of different approaches to storytelling. I shy away from using the term ‘short story’, as it does not always do justice to ‘Erzählung’ in German, where the raw material of the narrative can be more extensive than in the traditional British or American short story, and where bigger issues may be confronted.
In Birgit Vanderbeke’s ‘Das Muschelessen’, the only case where I have included an excerpt, the narrative evolves from one event – an evening meal – at which a mother and her two children are present, but not the father, the actual focus of the story. The plot is minimal, as the only event is a conversation over a dinner where the main dish – the mussels – is not consumed. The time-span of the narrative is one evening, with some brief flashbacks to previous events in the course of the conversation. What emerges is the progressive questioning of the authoritarian father figure, who has been striving to mould his entire family in his own image, that of a matter-of-fact, analytical scientist. His destructive influence, particularly on his wife, whose artistic gifts he has systematically suppressed, are gradually exposed. The brief excerpt in this volume contains all these elements.
Dieter Wellershoff also centres his narrative around a meal in ‘In Erwartung der Gäste’, this time an imminent dinner party, which has a comparable function as a catalyst. In this instance it triggers off a process of reflection by the central character about her affair with the husband of one of her guests and the role of the wife in their relationship. While Birgit Vanderbeke strips away taboos, Dieter Wellershoff penetrates levels of deception and self-delusion.
Gabriele Wohmann pursues similar goals in her satirical story ‘Bessere Zeiten’, where she deftly exposes the delusions an elderly couple harbours about the use of cars. They are the perpetrators of all the foibles they find fault with in other drivers they are observing. The way in which she constructs this story underlines the importance of delusion in this context: as a reader you only realize at the end of the story that the couple is actually sitting in a car.
In ‘Lascia’ by Judith Hermann love has given way to wordless loathing, but in the course of the story a journey with a stranger resolves the atmosphere of enmity between the former lovers, who achieve a new modus vivendi, where possibilities are reopened, even that of a future together. The journey reveals the hostility between the two lovers as a form of delusion, as a state of emotional turmoil which has destroyed all sense of perspective.
A sense of perspective is crucial to Georg Klein’s ‘Chicago/Baracken’. In this instance it is the perspective of the past, the past of Hitler’s Germany. The reader encounters it on foreign soil in the shape of the character of Mr Arno, who is a German émigré living in Chicago. He has made it his life’s work to produce a definitive translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf as a warning against fascism. The story calls into question whether such a warning can be created effectively in several ways. The narrator, the husband of an avant-garde percussionist, is completely detached from the past which his father had to struggle to come to terms with, because he has no direct link with it. His wife views the past with detachment; it is no problem to her that someone might be dealing in Hitler memorabilia. And Arno himself is caught in a contradiction. It is perfectly acceptable for him to earn money by selling Nazi memorabilia – and fake memorabilia at that, as the pistols he sells are actually ‘souvenirs’ from the former DDR – whilst endeavouring to produce a warning against fascism in his free time. Furthermore, his perception of the skills required of a philologist to produce an effective translation is such that he loses himself in minutiae that turn his plans to produce a comprehensive new translation of Hitler’s book into a quixotic adventure. Two different aspects of Germany’s past are brought together here, but the more immediate one of the DDR is not dealt with. It is overshadowed by what preceded it – the war – and what followed it – German unification, which has produced a new future for the country, as the conclusion of the story suggests.
In Christoph Hein’s ‘Grossvater und die Bestimmer’ the character of the grandfather is overshadowed by the past in a different way. He has spent his life as a man of principle, as a Christian committed to honesty and dedication to duty. As an experienced farm manager he constantly brings these qualities to bear. But he is not prepared to compromise his personal beliefs when it is expected of him by the newly established Communist regime in the DDR, where the allegiance of a party secretary in a machine factory is deemed a more crucial qualification for the position of manager of a big farming estate than the many years of experience and excellent results the grandfather has to offer.
While Christoph Hein illustrates how life in the early days of the DDR was characterized by a destruction of true values, Jurek Becker reveals the oppressive nature of the STASI, the secret service in the DDR, in his story ‘Der Verdächtige’. In this satirical story the narrator takes his own personality to the point of self-obliteration to exorcize all suspicion of having been unfaithful to the ruling ideology, only to realize that all his endeavours have been in vain. Ironically, it is the total futility of his own efforts which sets him free from the consequences of any suspicions at the end.
Siegfried Lenz’s story revolves round a conflict of a different kind: that between critic and writer, how the qualities the author perceives in his writing may not be shared by a critic. Here it leads a writer to pay a visit to a critic’s weekend retreat to demand satisfaction for the terrible injustice he feels the critic did him by dismissing one of his stories because he had been singularly bored. He is hoping that the critic might be suitably chastened when he has heard his latest story. When in the absence of his foe he reads it to the critic’s wife, his failure to engage the reader is exposed by the ease with which his listener can complete the narrative.
Different narrative techniques are used in these stories, ranging from third-person narrative in ‘Die Zuhörerin oder Eine absichtsvolle Wegbeschreibung’, ‘Bessere Zeiten’ and in ‘In Erwartung der Gäste’, where it is interspersed with a first-person viewpoint, creating a stream-of-consciousness effect, to first-person narrative. ‘Lascia’ is told from the perspective of the girlfriend, ‘Grossvater und die Bestimmer’ from the point of view of one of the grandfather’s grandsons. This results in a distance from the events of the narrative, as the child does not fully comprehend the significance of the events which unfold before him. This is also true to a degree for another first-person narrative, namely ‘Das Muschelessen’, where the son of the family is the narrator. ‘Chicago/Baracken’ is told by the husband of the percussionist, whose role in the narrative is purely passive. ‘Der Verdächtige’ is also a first-person narrative, one that takes the form of a personal confession.
None of the stories chosen have complex plots; their concision helps to intensify the message they set out to convey. All details are relevant to the narrative. The narrative time ranges from a short break in ‘Bessere Zeiten’ to a few days in ‘Grossvater und die Bestimmer’. The venues are also restricted almost entirely to one place. While I do not claim that these are the most successful stories published in the last thirty years, all these factors help to turn these stories into highly effective narratives. The difficulty of finding an objective yardstick against which to measure the quality of fiction is illustrated very well in Siegfried Lenz’s story, where the story within the story illustrates the difficulties of creating a successful plot line. One particularly interesting aspect of the stories is the use of irony, of which there is quite a variety of examples in this collection, be it dramatic irony in ‘Das Muschelessen’, where the mother finds her out-of-tune violin broken in the wardrobe one day, or verbal irony at the end of Siegfried Lenz’s story, where the critic’s wife presents her visitor with some poppy-seed cake, adding that it is her husband’s favourite cake (he is not her visitor’s favourite person) and that poppy-seed aids and strengthens both patience and memory, two areas in which the visitor has shown deficiencies.
The earliest of the stories in this collection is Jurek Becker’s ‘Der Verdächtige?’, which was published in 1980 and is reproduced here in the original spelling. (The new spelling is used in this volume only when it is used in the German source from which the story has been taken.) The most recent story is ‘Lascia’ by Judith Hermann, which was published in 2002. None of the stories chosen has been published in English before. In my translations I tried to remain close to the original, attempting where possible to recreate some of the flavour of the German.
I would like to thank my friend Margaret Jacob, Emeritus Fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford, for her excellent advice on my translations; my friend Andrew Thomson for his meticulous proof-reading; and my editor, David Watson, for his thoughtful improvements.