The New German Lesbarkeit in Action: Narrative and Context in Martina Hefter's Zurück auf Los

Abstract

Concerns about creativity and marketability have plagued the German literary scene since the 1990s, resulting in the literary trend of “neue Lesbarkeit”—a call for good stories in palatable packaging to appeal to the reading masses. This examination of Martina Hefter's second novel, Zurück auf Los, calls into question the assumption that young German authors striving for readability compromise literary sophistication in the process. Further, it demonstrates that recognizable literary conventions can be used to present sophisticated explorations of the semantic crisis facing German authors deluged by imports from the United States and Great Britain.

Acknowledgments

Rachel J. Halverson is an associate professor of German at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, where she has taught German culture, film, language, and literature since 1990. She specializes in postwar and post-Wende German culture, film, and literature and has published on the Historikerstreit and works by Jurek Becker, Thomas Brussig, Günter de Bruyn, Martina Hefter, Wolfgang Hilbig, Tobias Hülswitt, Hanna Johansen, Judith Kuckart, and Siegfried Lenz.

I would like to thank Dr. Carol Anne Costabile-Heming for her thoughtful reading of this manuscript and insightful suggestions for its improvement as it matured from conference paper to article.

Notes

¹Frank Finlay provides an excellent retrospective distillation of these debates and trends in his “Literary Debates and the Literary Market since Unification.” For primary contributions and analysis of the debate surrounding East German authors and their relationship to the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED), see Anz. See literary critic, author, and editor Uwe Wittstock's Leselust: Wie unterhaltsam ist die neue deutsche Literatur for his seminal call to German authors for readability (Lesebarkeit). Volker Hage, author and literary editor of Der Spiegel, provides an excellent delineation of the Walser debates and discussion of literary representations of German victims of World War II air raids.

²Matthias's focus is for the most part on the literary portrayals of hotel guests. Yet her description of a typical hotel's reception desk captures the role the narrator in Zurück auf Los plays in the hotel's operation:

The woman behind the counter gives you a welcoming smile, and you notice her impeccable hairdo, her beautiful hands, and her attire that seems a mix between a power-suit and a policeman's uniform. You tell her that you have a room reserved, and within seconds, she confirms your existence. You are a guest now, with a number associated with your name, maybe only a number, but one that means you are one of the initiated group. Asked to fill out the registration form, you realize that you are writing the beginning to your own story in this space. (57)

³“[…] Diskretion und Geld waren voneinander abhängig, wie Abszisse und Ordinate; wer hier ein Zimmer bekam, kaufte diskrete Gewissen; Augen, die sahen und doch nicht sahen, Ohren, die hörten und doch nicht hörten […]” (18).

⁴See Halverson for an analysis of the transmission of family stories and generational difference in these two novels.

⁵In their introduction to German Memory Contests: The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film, and Discourse since 1990, Anne Fuchs and Mary Cosgrove list Monika Maron's Pawels Briefe (1999), Hans-Ulrich Treichel's Der Verlorene (1998), Günter Grass's Im Krebsgang (2002), Uwe Timm's Am Beispiel meines Bruders (2003), Reinhard Jirgl's Die Unvollendeten (2003), Stephan Wackwitz's Ein unsichtbares Land: Ein Familienroman (2003), Thomas Medicus's In den Augen meines Großvaters (2004), and Dagmar Leupold's Nach den Kriegen (2004) as representative of this trend (9).