The feminist movement in Germany led to the emergence of a prolific and innovative group of women writers. Women were encouraged to feel and write through their bodies rather than through conventional rationality, and the distinctiveness of feminine sensibility became a hotly debated issue. Karin Struck’s novel Klassenliebe (1973; “Class Love”), an exploration of female sexuality, and Verena Stefan’s Häutungen (1975; Shedding), a collection of notes and jottings that trace a young woman’s search for identity, became classic works of German feminism.
This period was also marked by a preoccupation with generational differences, brilliantly developed by Peter Schneider in Vati (1987; “Daddy”), in which a young German lawyer travels to South America to meet his father, who has fled there to escape trial for Nazi crimes (the figure of the father is modeled on the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele). Auslöschung: ein Zerfall (1986; Extinction), by Thomas Bernhard, takes the form of a violently insistent and seemingly interminable diatribe by a first-person narrator who returns from Rome to Austria for a family funeral. Bernhard’s novel expresses intense feelings of disgust and anger about Austria’s collaboration in Nazism. Elfriede Jelinek’s novel Die Klavierspielerin (1983; The Piano Teacher), the story of a musician dominated by her possessive mother, is a terrifying story of family violence told from a feminist perspective. Postmodernism
In the last decades of the 20th century, German literature was influenced by international postmodernism, a movement that combined heterogeneous elements in order to appeal simultaneously to a popular and a more sophisticated readership. Parody, pastiche, and multiple allusions to other types of cultural production are characteristic of postmodernist literature. Günter Grass’s Der Butt (1977; The Flounder) and Die Rättin (1986; The Rat), with their convoluted inset narratives, lyric interludes, recipes for favourite German dishes, revisions of fairy tales, and ironic representations of contemporary feminism, were at first misunderstood because they were judged by the standards of the canonical modern novel. Once viewed in the light of postmodernism, however, these novels underwent a critical reevaluation. Patrick Süskind’s Das Parfum: die Geschichte eines Mörders (1985; Perfume: The Story of a Murderer), with its brilliant imitations of literary styles from various periods, was another work of German postmodernism that became an international best-seller. After reunification
Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, writers began to explore the tensions between the economic, social, and cultural values of West and East Germany. There was intense debate about the East German experience under communism, in particular about whether the psychological need to come to terms with this experience was comparable to the soul-searching that had been undertaken after the end of World War II. Monika Maron addressed this issue in her novel Stille Zeile Sechs (1991; Silent Close No. Six), set in the 1980s and ostensibly a story about the discovery of guilt incurred by an important East German party functionary during the Third Reich. By exploring the rift between actions and desires, the novel becomes an inquiry into the responsibility of historians and writers in general. The link between the communist and the Nazi eras is established in a key scene that metaphorically brings together violence past and present. One year earlier, Christa Wolf’s narrative Was bleibt (1990; What Remains) had unleashed a violent controversy about the form and function of reflections on the East German past. The subject of the story was Wolf’s reactions to surveillance by the East German state security police. Some readers saw the tale as a self-serving portrayal of the author as a victim of communism; these readers failed to notice, however, the thread of self-critique woven into the narrative. In 1993 it was revealed, in a further twist of irony, that Wolf herself had given information to the security police for a brief period. The Christa Wolf case became paradigmatic for the difficulties of coming to terms with East Germany’s communist past. It was succeeded by another debate that broke out after the secret police files of several other well-known writers became available. One outraged victim of surveillance, Reiner Kunze, published a selection from his own files under the title Deckname “Lyrik” (1990; “Code Name ‘Lyric’”). At the same time, some members of an apparently oppositional group of East German writers, known as the Prenzlauer Berg poets after the district in Berlin where they lived, were shown to have acted as informants for the secret police. The resulting discussions stimulated a probing reexamination of the problem of autonomous art and the relation of aesthetics to ideology. The turn of the 21st century
In the mid-1990s a new generation of writers emerged who finally provided the “reunification” novels that critics had expected immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Thomas Brussig’s grotesquely comic novel Helden wie wir (1995; Heroes Like Us) was a satiric reworking of the debate about the East German secret police. Thomas Hettche’s Nox (1995; “Night”) has a strangely omniscient narrator in the form of a young man whose throat has been slit in a sadomasochistic sexual act during the night the Wall came down. Nox draws a rather too obvious equivalence between its narrator’s wound, from which he is dying, and the “wound” of the divided Germany, which, on the face of things, is about to be healed. Nonetheless, Hettche succeeds in transforming this central metaphor into a multilayered analysis of postunification psychology. The cityscape of Berlin comes to stand for national and individual memory, conserved, as it were, beneath the surface of streets and canals and the no-man’s-land of the former border.
In these and other novels of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the Nazi past continues to haunt German writing. Marcel Beyer’s novel Flughunde (1995; “Flying Foxes,” Eng. trans. Flughunde) recounts the deaths of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’s children through the eyes of two narrators: the eldest daughter, Helga, and a sound technician who had worked for Goebbels. Long after the children’s deaths, the technician begins to recognize his own role in their murders at the hands of their mother. Thomas Lehr’s experimental novella Frühling (2001; “Spring”) employs drastically ruptured syntax to reproduce, in the form of a hesitating interior monologue, the final 39 seconds of its protagonist’s life. Only toward the end of the story does the narrator, who has just completed a suicide pact with his female lover, come to understand his father’s guilt as a former concentration-camp doctor. This guilt, which has already caused the narrator’s young brother to commit suicide, is revealed as the solution to a childhood scene that the narrator has never fully understood. In contrast to German novels of the 1960s, which attempted to “master” the Nazi past through narration, these more recent novels belong to what has come to be called “memory culture.”
Linked with debates about the problem of memorializing the victims of Nazism in the form of public monuments, German-language novels of the 1990s explicitly probe questions about how memories of the Nazi period can best be represented. The Austrian writer Christoph Ransmayr’s powerful Morbus Kitahara (1995; The Dog King) is set in a dystopian landscape that resembles Mauthausen concentration camp and in an imagined alternative history in which Germany has not been permitted to redevelop its industrial capabilities following World War II. W.G. Sebald’s haunting novel Austerlitz (2001; Eng. trans. Austerlitz)—the story of a man who had been saved from Nazi Germany and adopted by an English couple but who has been traveling in search of the places he believes to have been way stations in his early life—has had international success as a moving, though puzzling, exploration of memory, real and imagined. Judith Ryan