As part of the Guardian's New Europe series, literary editors reflect on the literary scene in their countries, beginning with Germany's Sebastian Hammelehle of Der Spiegel.
A young woman reads Herta Mueller's novel 'Atemschaukel'.
©guardian.co.uk
One of the biggest recent news stories in Germany involved a plagiarism scandal that brought down the defence minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg. Perhaps this is a fitting moment, therefore, to recall another case of plagiarism that rocked the literary world at the beginning of 2010.
The debut novel by the Berlin author Helene Hegemann, who was 18 at the time, had the unusual title of Axolotl Roadkill and made headlines with its depiction of a teenage girl's drug-addled adventures in Berlin's club scene. But the author found herself attracting headlines of an entirely unwelcome kind when it was revealed that she had borrowed liberally from other writers, including a blogger who goes by the name Airen. The initial enthusiasm for the book quickly melted away, and some critics may have wondered how they had allowed themselves to get caught up in the hysteria over what turned out to be a minor literary event.
Perhaps that's why a large swath of German readers are pleased that there is at least one person who never loses his cool, namely the former chancellor Helmut Schmidt. Four of his non-fiction works are among the 10 most successful books of the past 10 years, including Unser Jahrhundert ("Our Century"), a conversation with the historian Fritz Stern, which was published in 2010. In Germany it's no longer the pope or Jürgen Habermas who satisfies the country's yearning for moral guidance, but Schmidt. The former chancellor is depicted on the jacket of Unser Jahrhundert holding his ever-present cigarette, something that is also part of his aura: he not only defies the zeitgeist in his opinions, he even flouts the advice of the medical establishment.
The grand old man of German politics would probably frown on another class of author that has proved popular in Germany in recent years: the self-deprecating egocentric. They write entirely about their own experiences from an ironic perspective, and churn out tongue-in-cheek books about such diverse topics as getting old, snoring and having children. One of the most successful works of the genre is the recent Achtung Baby! ("Look Out Baby!") by the comedian Michael Mittermeier. For his generation, it seems, becoming a father is not so much a normal biological process as a lifestyle choice.
Thomas Hettche also focused on the theme of family in his novel Die Liebe der Väter ("The Love of the Fathers"), which deals with the relationship between a father and his estranged daughter. Literary critics welcomed the book, partly because its publication coincided with a landmark decision on custody law by Germany's highest court. But Hettche's novel suffered the same fate as Hegemann's book – only a few weeks after its publication, the critics began to find fault with it.
The daughter in Hettche's novel is portrayed as a modern child who spends much of her time texting and listening to her iPod. What could be more shocking than to go without the tools of modern communication? In Ohne Netz ("Without the Internet"), Alex Rühle writes about his "half year offline". As it happens, this type of "self-experiment" has become increasingly popular among German non-fiction authors, who try to live strictly in accordance with the Bible, say, or forgo sex completely.
One of the standout works in the genre is Karen Duve's Anständig essen ("Eating Properly: How I Tried to Become a Better Person"), in which the author tries out a variety of green-tinged diets such as vegetarianism and veganism. The result is not so much a polemic as a personal investigation into the food industry and factory farming. In Germany, where there are now plans to build the largest poultry slaughterhouse in Europe, with the capacity for slaughtering 130m chickens a year, it makes sense to be more aware of the side effects of industrial-scale breeding, fattening and killing. The book seemed to be Germany's contribution to a discussion on the ethics of eating sparked by the publication of Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals.
Much more controversial – and successful – was Thilo Sarrazin's Deutschland schafft sich ab ("Germany Does Away With Itself"). This treatise by a former Bundesbank board member is – to put it mildly – highly critical of immigration and Muslims, who he claims are threatening the very fabric of German society. The tremendous success of Sarrazin's theories says a lot about the way society is going in Germany, where even the liberal chattering classes unashamedly complain there are "too many foreigners" in their kids' schools.
Sarrazin's book sold more than 1m copies, contributing significantly to a year-on-year rise in the sales of non-fiction books of 20%. The fiction market, on the other hand, was extremely weak. The bestseller lists are dominated by globally successful fantasy authors such as Stephenie Meyer, or by crime fiction writers such as Britain's Simon Beckett and the American author Elizabeth George.
More challenging fare was provided by Melinda Nadj Abonji. Her novel Tauben fliegen auf ("Falcons without Falconers"), a family drama about Yugoslavian immigrants in Switzerland, won the 2010 German Book Prize, Germany's answer to the Booker. But unlike previous winners by authors such as Katharina Hacker, Julia Franck and Uwe Tellkamp – all reliable suppliers of highly marketable light novels for a moderately demanding reading public – Abonji's novel was a commercial disaster, just reaching number 50 on the bestseller list shortly before Christmas.
New books by Günter Grass and Christa Wolf reminded us that there were once such things as great German writers. Gruppe 47 (Group 47), a literary association that influenced an entire era and encompassed the country's best authors, disbanded long ago. Which author under 60 could play that role today? Thomas Lehr, perhaps, whose September. Fata Morgana is a linguistic tour de force set in the aftermath of 9/11 and is both celebrated and controversial. Pedantic critics derided it for not having a single punctuation mark (despite the full stop in the title), as if punctuation has anything to do with literature.
Next to Lehr's book, the most striking work in stylistic terms was Peter Wawerzinek's Rabenliebe ("Motherless Child"). The autobiographical novel seems almost anachronistic, like something from the days when lederhosen-wearing poets declaimed at open windows. The fact that this powerful writer grew up in the communist German Democratic Republic will perhaps encourage some East German intellectuals to claim that the workers' state was a republic of scholars. But anyone who has read Rabenliebe knows that it was a cold, brutal childhood that prompted Wawerzinek to escape into literature.
Today the former East Germany is on the road to becoming the Wild East for writers from the west. In Deutschboden ("On German Soil"), described as an exercise in "participatory observation", Moritz von Uslar spends time with the natives of a Brandenburg village, while Wolfgang Herrndorf's Tschick dispatches two adolescents through the same state in a stolen Lada. The latter was a surprise success.
Readers may be wondering at this point whether Basil Fawlty's famous dictum "Don't mention the war" also applies to contemporary German literature. But one current literary sensation is a previously almost forgotten novel that deals with the Nazi era. Jeder stirbt für sich allein ("Every Man Dies Alone") by Hans Fallada (1893-1947) is the story of a Berlin couple executed by the Nazis; it was recently republished in Germany in its original version. Like the liberation from Hitler in 1945, Germans can also thank the Allies for giving them Fallada's novel back: its republication was inspired by the book's tremendous success in Britain and the United States (as Alone in Berlin).
Germany's bestsellers
1 Hummeldumm by Tommy Jaud (comic novel about German holidaymakers in Namibia)
2 Erbarmen (Mercy) by Jussi Adler-Olsen (Danish crime)
3 Fall of Giants by Ken Follett (five families in the first world war)
4 The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner by Stephenie Meyer
5 Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany Does Away with Itself) by Thilo Sarrazin
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