French and Russian fiction dominated nineteenth-century Continental European literature, and German fiction came into its own at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Franz Kafka (1883–1924) and
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) remain among the most influential writers in Germany and beyond, their distinctive styles still attracting many imitators.
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) no longer enjoys quite the popularity he did a few decades ago, though his work has qualities beyond the introspective spiritual aspects that accounted for much of their original appeal. The works by authors who captured the era that ended with the collapse of Central Europe held together by the Hapsburg Empire, including
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) and
Joseph Roth (1894–1939), have recently been revived in English translation. The most representative novels,
Robert Musil’s (1880–1942) unfinished epic,
The Man Without Qualities (1930–1943, English 1953–1960, 1995), and
Hermann Broch’s (1886–1951)
The Sleepwalkers (1930–1932, English 1932), are among the peaks of twentieth-century fiction. Other remarkable authors, as different as
Robert Walser (1878–1956) and
Alfred Döblin (1878–1957), also continue to be widely hailed.
Few of the best German writers stayed or survived in Germany after the rise of Nazism and through World War II. With the country then split into West and East Germany, its citizens having to come to terms with its recent terrible history and vast numbers of writers dead or dispersed abroad, German literature was slow in reestablishing itself after the war. The situation in Austria was similar, and even the neutral isolation that had spared Switzerland from the damage incurred elsewhere did not prove to be a great advantage in reviving a literary culture that continued to rely on the large readership found only in Germany.
THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY
The pillars of German fiction after World War II, at least as seen abroad, are two of its Nobel laureates, Heinrich Böll (1917–1985) and Günter Grass (1927–2015). Böll’s moral vision appealed to both East and West, and he was among the few writers who, during the Cold War, enjoyed great success in Eastern as well as Western Europe, his Catholic humanism independent and critical enough that it seems to have played better in the Soviet Union than in the United States. Despite the dozens of volumes of his work that were translated into English, his vision seems to have been quickly eclipsed and set aside with his death, his popularity soon dropping off. Heinrich Böll’s novels do provide strong, morally compelling examples of twentieth-century German lives, especially in the family saga Billiards at Half-Past Nine (1959, English 1961) and Group Portrait with Lady (1971, English 1973). Some of his late work is even overtly political, especially The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1974, English 1975), which was inspired by the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group and presents a thinly veiled criticism of Bild, the influential German tabloid giant. The novel’s alternative subtitle, How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead, suggests that he saw little room for subtlety in these times.
Günter Grass’s
The Tin Drum (1959, English 1962, 2009) is a history of the first half of the twentieth century as recounted by the diminutive and obsessive madman Oskar Matzerath, who willed himself to stop growing when he was three. It is a vivid and coarse chronicle of the rise and fall of the Nazis and then the defeated nation. A landmark German novel, it is among the best of the postwar period and certainly the most important and, especially among foreign readers, overshadows much of Grass’s other works.
The Tin Drum is the first volume in Grass’s Danzig trilogy, which continues with the short Cat and Mouse (1961, English 1963) and then Dog Years (1963, English 1965), whose three narrators relate the experience of growing up in Danzig in the Nazi period and after. Neither has the striking immediacy of The Tin Drum, but they also are worth reading.
Although Grass’s fiction deals extensively with political matters and large sweeps of history, it is his vividly drawn characters that make them particularly effective. Local Anaesthetic (1969, English 1970) is a curious take on the tumultuous years of student uprisings and protests in which a teacher and a student face the question of how to act in these times while undergoing a series of dental procedures to deal with the rottenness of their teeth and mouths, a convenient metaphor that Grass plays to the hilt.
The epic The Flounder (1977, English 1978) is dominated by women, its sections corresponding to the nine months of a pregnancy, each covering a different mythic or historic period and each having its own female cook. Here it is a talking fish that makes its way through history, while in The Rat (1986, English 1987) it is a representative rodent that figures prominently in an equally sweeping novel that also sees the return of Oskar Matzerath.
Most of the leading German-language authors of the postwar period participated in at least some of the meetings of the Gruppe 47 (Group 47), a loose but influential literary association formed in 1947 whose heyday lasted into the mid-1960s. Grass’s tribute to this group,
The Meeting at Telgte (1979, English 1981), may be less accessible to English-speaking readers than most of his other novels but is a fascinating “doubled” history. Set in 1647, its characters are the leading German authors of that time, fictionally brought together near the close of the Thirty Years’ War, with Grass drawing clever parallels to the Group 47.
The extraordinary Arno Schmidt (1914–1979) was obsessed by literature. He was both a great writer and a great reader, and spent much time promoting lost masters. As well as translating works by James Fenimore Cooper, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Wilkie Collins (along with the occasional thriller and Stanislaus Joyce’s two volumes of reminiscences of his brother James), Schmidt wrote exemplary and wonderfully imagined didactic dialogues for radio, introducing forgotten authors and works, selections of which have been collected in Radio Dialogs I (English 1999) and Radio Dialogs II (English 2003). Schmidt’s own fiction is almost hyperliterary in its constant use of references, echoes, and allusions, yet he created a greater variety of truly original work than did any other German writer of his times. From relatively straightforward and realistic fiction set in the early postwar years to a number of futuristic and dystopian works, much of Schmidt’s fiction is pointedly intellectual but also darkly humorous.
Schmidt also wrote several ambitious and experimental typescript novels, closer to hypertexts than conventional prose with their marginal and explanatory asides and typographical games. Evening Edged in Gold (1975, English 1980) is of particular interest, with its many autobiographical elements, while The School for Atheists (1972, English 2001), presented as a dense six-act drama, has been published in a wieldy format and is the best introduction to Schmidt’s word (and typographical) play. Finally, the devoted John E. Woods, responsible for most of the translations of Schmidt’s works into English, has now completed (but not yet published) his translation of Schmidt’s magnum opus, the monumental Zettel’s Traum (1970), a thirteen-hundred-page volume that weighs more than twenty pounds, in which a close analysis of the work of Edgar Allan Poe plays a major role.
Other authors are more approachable, and numerous individual German novels are easily preferred to any of Schmidt’s, but the totality of his work, challenging though many parts of it are, is the most rewarding of that of any modern German author.
• Wolfgang Koeppen’s (1906–1996) trio of novels from the 1950s remain among the most significant in dealing with the early postwar years. Pigeons on the Grass (1951, English 1988), for instance, describes a single day in a large German city in those years.
• Peter Weiss (1916–1982) is best known for his drama, Marat/Sade (1964, English 1965), but his fiction is memorable as well, ranging from the experimental to the autobiographical to his greatest achievement, the trilogy The Aesthetics of Resistance, a work of political fiction of resistance in the Nazi era, of which only the first volume (1975, English 2005), has been translated into English.
• Gert Hofmann’s (1931–1993) fine, restrained novels include The Film Explainer (1991, English 1996) and Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl (1994, English 2004).
THE GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC
Uwe Johnson (1934–1984) was the leading writer who moved, in 1959, from East to West Germany. Several of his books were translated into English, and his epic work of the late 1960s, describing a year in the lives of a German woman and her daughter living in New York, the four-volume Anniversaries (1970–1983, English 1975–1987), has long been available only in a radically abridged translation. Fortunately, Damion Searls’s complete translation is expected in 2017. Anniversaries is one of the great New York novels of recent decades, with its detailed portrait of the city in that era, but it also covers German history from its protagonist’s birth in 1933 onward in retrospective scenes, culminating on a date on which readers know what awaits mother and daughter as they set out for Prague on the eve of the Soviet invasion that spelled the end of the Prague Spring.
Irmtraud Morgner’s (1933–1990)
The Life and Adventures of Trobadora Beatrice as Chronicled by Her Minstrel Laura (1974, English 2000) is one of the major works to come out of East Germany and certainly one of the most entertaining. The novel can best be described as work of feminist magical socialist realism. Its central character is a female troubadour who is awakened in the spring of 1968 from a slumber of more that eight hundred years in France. She then seeks to devote herself to her craft again, journeying to what she is told is “the promised land,” the German Democratic Republic (GDR), to do so. The GDR turns out to be a disappointment regarding her hopes for female equality, but that does not keep her from pursuing her ambition. Its portrayal of contemporary East German life as well as its broader consideration of history and art from a female perspective is an enthralling achievement.
Christa Wolf (1929–2011) is one of the few East German authors whose work was also being published—and also enjoyed considerable success—in West Germany and who continued to be a significant figure in the unified Germany after 1990. Wolf’s works range from her early novels of East German life, The Divided Heaven (1963, English 1965, and as They Divided the Sky, 2013) and The Quest for Christa T. (1968, English 1971), cleverly presented as quizzical rather than overtly critical; the autobiographical A Model Childhood (now published as Patterns of Childhood; 1976, English 1980) and City of Angels (2010, English 2013); her use of myth in Cassandra (1983, English 1984), consisting of “a novel and four essays”; and Medea (1996, English 1998). Typically, she poses questions rather than supplying answers, and while the vantage point is usually that of a woman, sister, or mother, she addresses everyday universals as well. Whether in first-person accounts such as Accident (1987, English 1989), set on a single day on which its narrator’s thoughts center on her brother’s brain surgery before she then learns of the Chernobyl disaster, or in reworking historical material, as in No Place on Earth (1979, English 1982), which imagines a meeting between the nineteenth-century writers (and later suicides) Heinrich von Kleist and Karoline von Günderrode, Wolf’s works are both lyrical and provocative.
With a clear, unadorned style,
Christoph Hein (b. 1944) unfolds his stories of (East) German lives to often powerful effect, most obviously so in his finest work,
The Distant Lover (1982, English 1989), a chilling novel of self-imposed isolation and alienation in which a doctor tries to deal without emotion with the death of her lover, its narrator a product of a system in which emotional distance is a common mechanism for survival. In
Settlement (2004, English 2008), five narrators recount the different segments of the central character’s life, a harsh East German success story that continues past reunification.
Willenbrock (2000, English 2003) shows the eponymous protagonist making the transition from East to the new Germany, facing a different set of challenges and opportunities that also bring frustration in a story of escalating small-scale violence.
KEEP IN MIND
• Ulrich Plenzdorf’s (1934–2007) The New Sufferings of Young W. (1973, English 1979, and as The New Sorrows of Young W., 2015), one of the most widely read and discussed books to come out of the GDR, is an insightful portrait of youth and East German conditions, shaped by two books with which its protagonist identifies: The Catcher in the Rye and Goethe’s classic, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774).
• Thomas Brussig’s (b. 1965) Heroes Like Us (1995, English 1997) is a moderately enjoyable comic novel in which the central figure plays an instrumental part in the fall of the Berlin Wall. The accounts of his life and escapades, as told to a reporter for the New York Times, is an amusing story of growing up in East Germany.
• Uwe Tellkamp’s (b. 1968) German Book Prize–winning The Tower (2008, English 2014) is an impressive broad epic portrait of East German life in the 1980s.
Ingo Schulze (b. 1962) is one of the strongest talents to emerge from East Germany. His ambitious novel New Lives (2005, English 2008), which focuses on Germany’s reunification, staggers under its own weight. Instead, the many individuals’ overlapping stories in Simple Stories (1998, English 1999) is a more successful novel of East Germans facing the new Germany. Schulz’s first work, 33 Moments of Happiness (1995, English 1997), is a collection of sketches set in St. Petersburg when the Soviet Union collapsed. Presented in a variety of styles, the author occasionally seems to be experimenting with voices and approaches, although Schulze already has displayed considerable command of his material.
AFTER REUNIFICATION
All the changes that accompanied the reunification of the two Germanys in 1990 only slowly filtered into German fiction, especially outside the former GDR. The foremost figure of that decade,
W. G. Sebald (1944–2001), was among the many whose work remained almost entirely untouched by reunification. His case is easy to understand as Sebald had long distanced himself from Germany, living and teaching in England, even though he still wrote in German. Several of Sebald’s often elegiac texts address the German past, with the four-part
The Emigrants (1992, English 1996) and
Austerlitz (2001, English 2001) describing how the Nazi era shaped individual lives and fates.
Vertigo (1990, English 1999) also delves deeper into history, presenting four episodes around well-known figures such as Stendhal and Kafka but, like all of Sebald’s work, is also about the processing of memory. Sebald’s own presence is a prominent one in most of these texts as he interacts with and responds to both the characters and the events. In many ways, these works do not seem to be fiction at all, least of all
The Rings of Saturn (1995, English 1998), in which Sebald recounts a walking tour of Suffolk, offering digressions on whatever inspires him along the way. The flat style and the presentation are similar throughout these discursive works, which are further grounded in fact and reality by the photographs, newspaper clippings, and other images he invariably intersperses throughout his texts. These black-and-white images give the books a certain feeling of nostalgia, and much of Sebald’s musing is melancholy, heightened by stories of exile and loss.
If Sebald’s work can occasionally seem maddeningly rambling, most obviously in The Rings of Saturn, it is also rewarding. Austerlitz is closest to a conventional novel. With its focus on a single fate and the protagonist’s search for identity and attempt to come to terms with an unknown past, it may be the most approachable of Sebald’s works. While it bears all the hallmarks of a Sebald text, most notably in the form of a narrator recognizable as the author, these are more artfully employed here than elsewhere. Each of his other works, however, deserves attention as well.
Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009,
Herta Müller (b. 1953) began writing while she still was living in Romania, where she was born as part of the local German-speaking minority. Her short novel
The Passport (1986, English 1989) describes everyday village life under the Ceauşescu regime, and the consequences of one of the characters, Windisch, applying for a passport in order to emigrate to West Germany. Although Müller did emigrate in 1987, she continued writing about the Romania she had grown up in.
The Land of Green Plums (1994, English 1996) follows several university-aged Romanian youths with a background similar to Müller’s who hope to find more freedom outside the provinces and in a more urban and intellectual environment, only to find that the dictatorial rule is just as oppressive there. The novel, in which several of the main characters die, is a dark indictment of the Ceauşescu regime, as is
The Appointment (1997, English 2001), which focuses on a single character facing the authorities. Her Soviet concentration camp novel,
The Hunger Angel (2009, English 2012), is closely based on the experiences of her friend, the writer and Oulipian Oskar Pastior (1927–2006). Müller’s poetic use of language in often simple, short sentences, and her characters, numbed by their difficult situations from which there seems no escape, make for powerful if bleak works.
Gerhard Köpf (b. 1948) is an entirely different sort of writer from Sebald, as his ebullient novels of artistic creation and failure are both fun and often very clever. In Papa’s Suitcase (1993, English 1995), a German bookseller goes on a wild chase for Ernest Hemingway’s famous lost suitcase and the manuscripts it contained, a novel that is an homage to Hemingway even as it jokes at his expense. There Is No Borges (1991, English 1993) is an even more daring game with literary reputations and authorial identity, as an unsuccessful academic who has speculated that maybe Shakespeare was behind Don Quixote is receptive to the idea that perhaps even Jorge Luis Borges was merely an invention by Adolfo Bioy Casares. Köpf is also a professor, and this book has more theoretical digressions than any sort of story, but he is able to pull it off. Köpf’s fictional biography of the great eighteenth-century artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Piranesi’s Dream (1992, English 2000), is the tale of the ultimate frustrated artist, able to set his creations on paper but not to actually build them. Köpf’s fantastical reimagining of Piranesi’s life and ambitions makes this his most powerful work.
A judge and law professor,
Bernhard Schlink (b. 1944) has always dealt with the complexities of guilt and morality in his fiction, beginning with a series of crime novels, but he achieved international recognition with
The Reader (1995, English 1997). What begins as the narrator’s account of his affair when he was in his teens with a woman two decades his senior becomes a novel of dealing with Nazi guilt when he meets her again years later and she is on trial for her role during the war. Even though she is not innocent, Schlink’s twist on her culpability suggests a case where absolute judgments are too simplistic. The way that Schlink forces that conclusion with his far-fetched premise can, however, be off-putting.
Homecoming (2006, English 2008) is another novel of dealing with the Nazi past, but this time the young protagonist is looking for his father and finds, of course, more than he bargained for. Schlink’s style is straightforward, but his books are weighed down by their earnestness, too often seeming didactic and even contrived. With the lower expectations and greater freedoms of the genre, his mystery novels about the private detective Gerhard Self are, in some ways, more satisfying.
Much of Jenny Erpenbeck’s (b. 1967) fiction engages with twentieth-century German history, with a focus on the small and individual scale rather than the large. Visitation (2008, English 2010) centers on a house in Brandenburg and tells the stories of a dozen characters who, over the decades, try to make their home there. The original German title—Heimsuchung, literally a “searching for home”—conveys the novel’s theme even more clearly. The End of Days (2012, English 2014) is a novel of what if ? and lost potential, imagining five different lives (and deaths) for its protagonist. Erpenbeck came of age in the GDR, but her novel of growing up in a totalitarian system, The Book of Words (2005, English, 2007), is set in an unnamed country more closely resembling a South American dictatorship. The young narrator is unable get a grip on the shifting, unstable reality around her, and even language cannot provide the hold she seeks.
Daniel Kehlmann (b. 1975) appeared on the international scene with
Measuring the World (2005, English 2006), in which he contrasts and brings together two nineteenth-century German geniuses, explorer Alexander von Humboldt and mathematician Carl Gauss, each in his own way measuring the world. With these light and lively adventures of the mind and the real world, Kehlmann offers two fine character portraits, allowing readers to complete the picture from his sketches, unlike much of the heavy German fiction that sometimes seems to consider each detail from every angle and does not tolerate any indeterminacy.
Me and Kaminski (2003, English 2008) is a slighter novel, about a young art critic hoping to make his name with a biography of a famous painter but ill equipped to tackle the life of another when his own is such a mess.
KEEP IN MIND
• Several of publisher Michael Krüger’s (b. 1943) novels deal with writing and authenticity, including Himmelfarb (1993, English 1994), in which an academic’s reputation rests on a single book that he did not write. The End of the Novel (1990, English 1992) is about an author essentially unwriting his novel, and The Executor (2005, English 2008) is about a literary executor’s attempt to uphold an author’s legacy, which proves considerably more complicated than anticipated.
• Patrick Süskind’s (b. 1949) one great success, Perfume (1985, English 1986), is the story of an eighteenth-century Frenchman with a perfect sense of smell (and no scent of his own).
• Born in Los Angeles, Peter Stephan Jungk (b. 1952) often uses American locales and lives in his novel, including The Perfect American (2001, English 2004), his fictional biography of Walt Disney (and the basis for an opera by Philip Glass), as well as Crossing the Hudson (2005, English 2009).
• The Karnau Tapes (1995, English 1997) by Marcel Beyer (b. 1965) is a documentary version of the final days in Hitler’s bunker, told in part in the voice of Joseph Goebbels’s eight-year-old daughter.
• Several novels by Austrian author Thomas Glavinic (b. 1972) have been translated into English, including his chess novel, Carl Haffner’s Love of the Draw (1998, English 1999), and his version of the last-manon-earth concept, Night Work (2006, English 2008).
AUSTRIA
Germans may generally be considered to be more severe, but the works of the best-known Austrian authors available in English make the Austrians seem even less jolly.
Thomas Bernhard (1931–1989) at least does display a wicked sense of humor in much of his fiction, but he,
Peter Handke (b. 1942), and Nobel laureate
Elfriede Jelinek (b. 1946) show a lot of angry intensity, tempered only by some melancholy, especially in Handke’s later works.
Thomas Bernhard (1931–1989) is the master of the extended rant, his novels great riffs of misanthropy as he presents portraits of and encounters with various solitary lives. The central figures in his texts are often talented artists or otherwise intellectually gifted, living in some form of isolation, often deep in the Austrian countryside where conditions, and the locals, are in many respects still primitive. From his first novel, Frost (1963, English 2006), in which a medical intern is sent to observe a painter, to his last, Extinction (1986, English 1995), which recounts most of his fixations, Bernhard presents obsessive characters verging on madness. Death, illness—mental and physical—and suicide are common occurrences, along with an abundance of detail about each. Individuals are occasionally tolerable, society barely ever—and Austria itself is constantly berated and condemned. (Bernhard’s animosity toward his homeland culminated in his testamentary decree proscribing any performance or publication of any of his work in Austria for the duration of the copyright; his heirs lifted the ban in 1998.)
Bernhard’s works are often driven monologues, but they do not merely drone on. Instead, his almost musical use of rhythm and repetition makes them lively, even mesmerizing. He could be succinct, as in the 104 stories of The Voice Imitator (1979, English 1997), which makes a fine introduction. Bernhard’s novella Wittgenstein’s Nephew (1982, English 1986) is his most approachable work, based on his actual friendship with Paul Wittgenstein, the famous philosopher’s nephew. Bernhard’s tone in this work is just slightly softer here than usual as he deals with physical and mental decline, and death. Among his longer works, Correction (1975, English 1979), in which a Ludwig Wittgenstein–like figure has committed suicide, is one of the more compelling and impressive, but his entire œuvre can pull in readers with its almost maniacal intensity.
Peter Handke’s (b. 1942) work shows greater variety, having gone through several stages. With its protagonist chasing all across the United States,
Short Letter, Long Farewell (1972, English 1974) has many elements typical of his fiction, but its parodies of genres, from thriller to travelogue, are an appealingly off-beat variation on his themes. The superb and affecting
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (1972, English 1975), in which Handke tries to work through his mother’s death, also explores the limits of writing. Indeed, the act of writing is one of his major preoccupations.
Handke’s massive, digressive works such as the year-in-the-life novel My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay (1994, English 1998) and Crossing the Sierra de Gredos (2002, English 2007), with their almost meditative calm, require more patience. Handke is unhurried, and his slow reflective loops over events and lives in these novels seem even more painstakingly precise than elsewhere, even as he eschews any strict realism. Even though Handke’s descriptions are detailed and extensive, they remain something of a blur, as he is a master of impressions, not meticulous documentation.
Among his later works, a shorter novel like On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House (1996, English 2000) is a good starting point. A circular tale of storytelling, it is also a road trip novel through contemporary Europe. Plot is rarely central to Handke’s novels—even though his works are full of incidents, piling up and occasionally building on one another—and his characters, who often remain unnamed, can seem frustratingly shadowy existences, regardless of how much one learns about and from them. Still, as On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House demonstrates, at his best this vagueness and seeming indecisiveness, combined with the constant probing and questioning by the characters (or author), can create a strong impression. At greater length, however, as in Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, this vagueness can become a very taxing read.
Elfriede Jelinek’s (b. 1946) often lush (and harsh) and expansive and allusive prose does not translate as readily or well as either Bernhard’s or Handke’s, and whereas Bernhard’s over-the-top misanthropy has a comic appeal, Jelinek’s excoriations often do not rise beyond the ugly. Although her work contains some humor, for the most part it is severe and judgmental. A deep-rooted hatred of many Austrian character failings as well as the country’s sorry Nazi past marks Jelinek’s work as much as it did Bernhard’s, but her social and feminist criticism and class (self-) consciousness is steeped in a now outmoded Continental Marxism, and while British readers will at least be uneasily familiar with similar class distinctions, American readers will not be able to relate to much of this.
The tense family dynamics in
The Piano Teacher (1983, English 1988), concerning a protagonist who has not lived up to her overbearing mother’s expectations but still is closely bound to her, are typical of Jelinek’s fiction of frustration. Here and elsewhere, Jelinek rarely presents anything resembling healthy sexual relations—yet another manifestation of the failures of this society. She deals with this most clearly in the particularly unpleasant
Lust (1989, English 1992), with its portrait of dysfunctional—yet, for Jelinek, representative—family life. Her novels of postwar alienation, including
Wonderful, Wonderful Times (1980, English 1990) and
Brassiere Factory (1975, English 1988, and as
Women as Lovers, 1994), also are bleak and disturbing but offer more engaging personal stories.
Die Kinder der Toten (
Children of the Dead; 1995, English forthcoming), which she considers her magnum opus, is another novel of brutal frankness, populated by the living dead, a graphic confrontation with history and mortality—or, rather, the refusal to accept and process either. More a tableau than a story that advances in anything resembling a linear form, it is a huge dose of everything Jelinek does and shows exactly what kind of a writer she is.
AUSTRIAN PLAYWRIGHTS
In Austria, Bernhard, Handke, and Jelinek all are known as much for their works for theater as they are for their prose, and for several decades they were, in turn, among the most often performed contemporary dramatists on the world’s major stages. It is striking, however, how little in their fiction, including conversations, resembles the quick give-and-take of dialogue common to drama. All three tend to embellish their prose. Handke took the focus away from the actual spoken word to extremes even on the stage, as in his play The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other (1992, English 1996), in which, despite the more than four hundred individual parts, not a single word is uttered.
KEEP IN MIND
• Erich Hackl’s (b. 1954) slim, spare novellas concern small but terrible personal tragedies based on historic events. Examples are Aurora’s Motive (1987, English 1989), Farewell Sidonia (1989, English 1991), and The Wedding of Auschwitz (2002, English 2009).
• Christoph Ransmayr’s (b. 1954) lyrical allegory of Ovid’s exile is entitled The Last World (1988, English 1991).
SWITZERLAND
Many of Max Frisch’s (1911–1991) fictions feel as though they were pieced together, as his interest seems to be more in the individual pieces than the bigger puzzle. Most of his novels do form a cohesive whole but also offer a sense of much that is absent, not so much that significant details have been left out but simply that totality is unfathomable and inconceivable.
The reflective nature of Montauk (1975, English 1976) rather than the American locale makes this slim volume a good introduction to Frisch. A personally revealing account of an aging man looking back on his life, it addresses many of the themes that run through Frisch’s books, especially regarding relationships with women. His plainspoken approach makes this a particularly appealing book. I’m Not Stiller (1954, English 1958), from early in his career, is another story about being torn between women. Its protagonist, who fled Switzerland and is arrested upon his return, tries to convince everyone that he is truly someone else. Although his attempt at reinvention fails, it allows Frisch an amusing take on Swiss life in the 1950s in a novel that is surprisingly light for German fiction of that time, without ever appearing frivolous.
In Frisch’s
Homo Faber (1957, English 1959), the narrator is an engineer who would like to think the world is reducible to the purely technical—hence the title
Man the Maker, the next step after
homo sapiens. But when confronted with his inappropriate feelings for the woman he discovers is his daughter and facing mortality, he finds it is not as simple as that. In
Man in the Holocene (1979, English 1980), in which the protagonist briefly finds himself essentially cut off from the rest of the world and becomes obsessed with the age of the dinosaurs, Frisch takes up similar themes, but in entirely new ways. Whereas the form of his early fiction is relatively conventional,
Man in the Holocene is fragmentary, almost a scrapbook of the protagonist’s short period of isolation. The text mirrors its character’s uncertainty, with detailed descriptions alternating with discontinuities.
Peter Stamm’s (b. 1963)
Agnes (1998, English 2000) is a love story, but the narrator warns at the outset that it is a story that killed the woman for whom it is named. Despite their cool and detached and very direct style, Stamm’s novels are not without passion, but in
Agnes as well as in
Unformed Landscape (2001, English 2005),
On a Day Like This (2006, English 2008), and
Seven Years (2009, English 2011), the central figures have great difficulty overcoming their isolation, even when they turn to others. The protagonist (and mother) in
Unformed Landscape has already been married twice, neither time particularly happily, and lives in a town in northernmost Norway set apart from the world. Daytime follows night only every six months there, but she has never known anything different, never having ventured south of the Arctic Circle. In
On a Day like This, the protagonist is moved by fears of his own mortality to radically change his life, trying again, as it were, even as he refuses to hear the medical diagnosis that essentially decides his fate. Stamm never completely breaks through this iciness in any of his works, with
Agnes still the best variation on these similar themes.
KEEP IN MIND
• Though a leading Swiss writer, Adolf Muschg’s (b. 1934) work is difficult to find in translation. The most impressive of his works is The Light and the Key (1984, English 1989), which, despite its vampire protagonist, offers few bloodcurdling thrills. Instead, it is a discursive narrative focusing on aesthetics.
• Pascal Mercier’s (b. 1944) Night Train to Lisbon (2004, English 2008) is an elaborate novel of self-discovery and history in which a Swiss teacher of classics suddenly walks out on his job and routines in search of an elusive text and author. In Perlmann’s Silence (1995, English 2011), the title character’s act of plagiarism is the basis for a psychological and philosophical thriller that is also concerned with language itself.
• Arno Camenisch’s (b. 1978) novel The Alp (2009, English 2014), written in both German and Switzerland’s fourth national language, Romansch, is the first in a rural Alpine trilogy.
Genre Fiction
Although the German-speaking countries are not known for their crime fiction, two leading mystery authors are Swiss. Friedrich Glauser’s (1896–1938) half dozen Sergeant Studer novels, most of which have only recently been translated into English, are definitely of a different place and time but for the most part are as enduring as Simenon’s work. Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990) is better known for his plays, but his two Inspector Barlach novels, The Judge and His Hangman (1952, English 1954, 1955, 2006) and The Quarry (1953, English 1961, and as Suspicion, 2006), as well as his “Requiem for the Detective Novel,” The Pledge (1958, English 1959, 2000), are creative examples of the genre, evil faced down, even though the resolutions are not tidy in the way expected for traditional mysteries. More recently, Jakob Arjouni’s (1964–2013) novels featuring a German private detective of Turkish descent named Kayankaya are caustic but amusing views of the treatment of Germany’s large immigrant community.
Both a lawyer and an author, Ferdinand von Schirach’s (b. 1964) story collections, Crime (2009, English 2011) and Guilt (2010, English 2012), and his novel, The Collini Case (2011, English 2013), are based on professional and personal experiences.
Phenomenally successful thriller writers such as the eminently readable Johannes Mario Simmel (1924–2009) and Andreas Eschbach (b. 1959), who also dabbles in science fiction, have barely registered in English, though older works by the very entertaining Simmel are worth seeking out.
Frank Schätzing’s (b. 1957) ecological ocean thriller, The Swarm (2004, English 2006), and his novel about space exploration, Limit (2009, English 2013), are, if anything, too thorough and detailed.
DIRT PORN
With its young female narrator’s graphic and intimate descriptions of how she revels in the unhygienic, Charlotte Roche’s (b. 1978) Wetlands (2008, English 2009) was a sensational best seller in Germany and attracted worldwide attention. The jaw-droppingly repellent dirt porn, with its infantile gross-out descriptions beyond the wildest imaginations of even booger-eating tweens, makes for an unappetizing read. Nonetheless, Wetlands is also a surprisingly tender work by a child of divorce that, oddly, has had a long shelf life.
Walter Moers (b. 1957) is known for his comics but has also written several works of fiction (that include many of his own illustrations). While the humor and wordplay in his elaborate adventure tales are rather basic and clearly aimed at younger audiences, adults can enjoy his novels set in the fictional Zamonia, such as The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear (1999, English 2000) and the wonderfully bookish The City of Dreaming Books (2004, English 2006).
Cornelia Funke’s (b. 1958) works of fantasy, beginning with Dragon Rider (1997, English 2004), are more narrowly aimed at a young adult readership but are among the best in the genre, with the first two volumes of her Inkworld trilogy (2003–2007, English 2003–2008) particularly compelling explorations of the world of literary creation, even though the last installment, Inkdeath (2007, English 2008) is somewhat of a letdown.