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Abstract
Germany is more prolific than any other country in the world in promoting its authors through book tours. Given the demands placed upon Germany’s authors through the institutionally organized reading circuit, contemporary authors sometimes turn their experiences of these tours into themes in their own works. This essay primarily examines two novels in which the institution of the ‘Lesereise’ is a significant focus: Rafik Schami’s ‘Sieben Doppelgänger’ (1999) and Daniel Kehlmann’s ‘Ruhm’ (2009). Both texts treat the difficulties and irritations to which authors are subject when they engage in such tours. While Schami’s novel uses the motif of the Double to explore Germans’ (mis)perception of cultural alterity and to underscore why the author took a hiatus from the reading circuit late in the 1990s, Kehlmann’s ‘Ruhm’, in which the institutionalized reading tour constitutes only one, albeit significant, thread, broadly examines issues of celebrity and identity in our highly technological age.
Notes
1 Joachim Umlauf spoke at a colloquium on ‘Förderung deutscher Literatur im Ausland und in Mittlerorganisationen’ held for the participants in the 2005 Fulbright German Studies Seminar in Berlin on 15 June 2005. A collection of 39 anecdotes from German-language authors on the often humorous difficulties they have encountered during reading tours also provides a sense of the prolific quantity of these tours and the varying degrees of industriousness with which the readings are organized: Klaus Bittermann (ed.), Auf Lesereise: Was unterwegs alles schiefgehen kann. Wahre Geschichten (Berlin: Tiamat, 2004).
2 Wladimir Kaminer, Mein deutsches Dschungelbuch, 8th edn (Munich: Manhattan, 2003), p. 8.
3 John Pizer, ‘The Transnationalization of the Double Motif: Rafik Schami’s Sieben Doppelgänger’, Gegenwartsliteratur, 3 (2004), 278−300.
4 Jakob Augstein, ‘Der Handlungsreisende: Porträt,’ Die Zeit, 24 October 2005, <http://www.zeit.de/2005/48/L-Kehlmann> [accessed 2 July 2010].
5 Daniel Kehlmann, Ruhm: Ein Roman in neun Geschichten, special edn (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2011), p. 34. Subsequent references follow quotations in parentheses in the text.
6 See Stephen Brockmann, German Literary Culture at the Zero Hour (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004), pp. 106−07.
7 Rafik Schami, Damals dort und heute hier: Über Fremdsein, ed. by Erich Jooß (Freiburg: Herder, 1998), p. 117.
8 Schami’s perspective on the hakawatis has not been uniformly positive. As a child, he found them loud and primitive, and in some works he treats them as too loyal to the government. See Bettina Wild, Rafik Schami (Munich: dtv, 2006), p. 99.
9 Schami, Erzähler der Nacht, 10th edn (Munich: dtv, 2001), p. 274.
10 Schami, Damals dort, pp. 117−18.
11 Schami, Sieben Doppelgänger (Munich: Hanser, 1999), p. 5. Subsequent references follow quotations in parentheses in the text.
12 Wild, Rafik Schami, pp. 101−03.
13 Peter Arnds, ‘Orientalizing Germany in Rafik Schami’s Die Sehnsucht der Schwalbe and Sieben Doppelgänger’, Seminar, 41 (2005), 275−88 (p. 285).
14 Wild, Rafik Schami, p. 104.
15 Arnds, ‘Orientalizing Germany’, p. 285.
16 See Schami, Gesammelte Olivenkerne aus dem Tagebuch der Fremde, 2nd edn (Munich: dtv, 2000), pp. 91−92 and 122−24.
17 See Rebecca Braun, ‘Daniel Kehlmann, Die Vermessung der Welt: Measuring Celebrity through the Ages’, in Emerging German-Language Novelists of the Twenty-First Century, ed. by Lyn Marven and Stuart Taberner (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011), pp. 75−88.
18 Kehlmann, ‘Diese sehr ernsten Scherze: Zwei Poetikvorlesungen’, in Kehlmann, Lob: Über Literatur (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2010), pp. 125−68 (pp. 125−26). Subsequent references follow quotations in parentheses in the text.
19 Kehlmann, ‘Die Katastrophe des Glücks: Dankesrede zur Verleihung des WELT-Literaturpreises,’ in Kehlmann, Lob: Über Literatur, pp. 169−78.
20 Kehlmann, Leo Richters Porträt sowie ein Porträt des Autors von Adam Soboczynski (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2009), pp. 34−39. Subsequent references follow quotations in parentheses in the text.
21 See Klaus Zeyringer, ‘Gewinnen wird die Erzählkunst: Ansätze und Anfänge von Daniel Kehlmanns “Gebrochenem Realismus”’, in Daniel Kehlmann, ed. by Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Munich: text + kritik 177, 2008), 36−44.
22 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. by Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 76; italics in the original.
23 Braun, ‘Daniel Kehlmann,’ p. 86.
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Notes on contributors
John D. Pizer
John D. Pizer is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Louisiana State University and Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures. He is interested in author-as-character fiction and the theory of world literature. His most recent book is Imagining the Age of Goethe in German Literature, 1970–2010 (Camden House, 2011).