November sees the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Berlin
will be celebrating with a huge range of events and a multimedia recreation of the wall coming down at the Brandenburg Gate. There will be wide British coverage too this autumn including a BBC 2 series on the history of Berlin and a week of themed programmes on Radio 2, plus major literature events at London’s Barbican, South Bank and Goethe Institute while UK publishers are unsurprisingly bringing out a whole raft of titles to tie-in with the celebrations.Does this signify a turning point for books about Germany and especially those in translation? Novels such as Bernard Schlink’s The Reader and Patrick Suskind’s Perfume became international bestsellers, including in the UK. Popular films like The Reader, The Lives of Others and Goodbye Lenin have already revealed substantial audience interest in the German post-war experience. But will Europe
’s biggest nation and most significant historical player now get the attention from readers and publishers it arguably deserves?Certainly there will be no shortage of titles with a Berlin Wall theme. Frederick Taylor’s The Berlin Wall (Bloomsbury), Jeffery Engel’s The Fall of the Berlin Wall (OUP), Patrick Major’s In the Shadow of the Wall (The National Archives), Michael Meyer’s The Year That Changed the World (Simon and Schuster) and Timothy Garton Ash’s The File: A Personal History (Atlantic Books) all appear this autumn. A dramatised version of Anna Funder’s award-winning Stasi expose Stasiland is being performed by the National Theatre next year. A keenly-awaited new translation of The Tin Drum, by Germany
’s most famous living author Gunter Grass, is out next month with his 1990 Diaries published in 2010.But behind these books lies a floodgate of new German writers appearing in English translations. Julia Franck’s The Blind Side of the Heart (Harvill Secker), Juli Zeh’s Dark Matter (Harvill Secker), Alex Capus’s A Question of Time (Haus Publishing), Siegfried Lenz’s A Minute’s Silence (Haus Publishing), Berlin Tales (OUP) and city-lit Berlin
(Oxygen Books) an anthology of writing on the city, are just some of these tie-in titles. Well-known authors such as Ingo Schulze, Judith Hermann, Sven Regner and Ilija Trojanow all see new books next year, together with Bernard Schlink’s non-fiction collection Guilt About the Past.And it is in the area of new German writing that its supporters – of whom there is no shortage – claim to see a real momentum. Last year saw a record number of German writers appearing at the Edinburgh and Hay Book Festivals. Peter Florence, Hay Festival Director, a big fan of writing from Germany, programmed Daniel Kehlman (Measuring the World), Sasa Stanisic (How the Solider Repairs the Gramophone) and Ilija Trojanon (The Collector of Worlds). Between them their novels’ themes range from the meeting of two luminaries of the German Enlightenment and the story of a Bosnian refugee to the life of explorer Sir Richard Burton, while Measuring the World sold more copies in Germany than Harry Potter.
‘It feels like a whole new generation out there, including writers not born in the country. It feels like we’re on the verge of a breakthrough and the books are catching up with the films at last,’ says Florence
Britainand France have had their colonial literary kickback for the last forty years. Now it’s Germany’s turn, based on a similar relationship with Eastern Europe Turkey and other countries. Sasa Stansic is a case in point: he’s funny, energetic and totally not what you expect German literature to be. It’s a huge change – with writers doing really interesting syntactical things with the language - and this new writing reflects it.’
Rebecca Morrison, editor of New Books in German, offering publishers a guide to new titles, agrees:
‘As with every country there are certain stories and experiences that can only be told by those who are there, in the heart of it. Berlin of course is thrumming with fascinating stories but the whole proximity of Central Europe, the melting pot of that part of Europe now, gives access to tales that would have been hard to hear before or can only gradually be written about now.’
Barbara Haus Schwepcke, publisher of Haus Publishing, argues that Germany
also has a new found status as a place for political asylum. ‘Ian McEwan, who introduced the Penguin edition of Peter Schneider’s The Wall Jumper, A.S. Byatt, Mark Ravenhill, Anne McElvoy, Brian Sewell, Patricia Duncker and BBC reporter Rosie Goldsmith, amongst others, attend Goethe Institute events regularly and are keen ambassadors. Harvill Secker’s Geoff Mulligan when asked why we should read German novelists simply says ‘Because there are some wonderful writers like Julia Franck, Juli Zeh and Jan Costin Wagner.’
‘Sometimes publishers and the public assume that German literature is heavy, long, weighty, probably too cerebral. But there’s now a whole range of brilliantly readable stuff,’ believes Lynn Marven, translator of OUP’s Berlin Tales and a lecturer in German at Liverpool University
‘The market has changed markedly since 1990 too; in both the DDR and FRG literature was a kind of substitute public sphere and authors made a point of addressing ‘big issues’, but since then it has become much more market and audience driven.’
Unquestionably as a theme the fall of the Wall is a key one for young writers in Germany
many of whom have lived through this momentous historical time and its consequences.‘The fall of the Wall and re-unification was a real turning point in people’s lives and German and European history,’ says Katy Derbyshire, translator, writer of the Love German Books blog and co-editor of Oxygen Books’ city-lit Berlin anthology. ‘In the East, one day you were being told that Marxist-Leninism was the key to a successful life; the next day you weren’t meant to believe in it.’
Editing city-lit Berlin, which contains over sixty writers on Berlin, Derbyshire included many contemporary authors, from the old East and West Germany along with more recent arrivals from Eastern Europe and Turkey. Among these are Thomas Brussig’s satire on the fall of the Wall, already available to Anglophone readers in Heroes Like Us (Harvill), and extracts from the yet to be translated Animal Triste by Monika Maron and Michael Wildenhain’s Russisch Brot (‘Russian bread’).
Lynn Marven highlights a non-fiction trend in Germany for GDR memoirs and childhood stories from authors like Jana Hensel which address an interest in the real-life experiences of those who were young in the 1980s and which are also part of a more general nostalgia for that decade.
As the new capital of a united Germany Berlin has re-invented itself as the country’s literary and artistic capital. Today the leading German publishers have moved back to the city, while it is claimed to have more writers per square metre than any other European city. Thanks to generous public subsidies literature has a higher profile than in many other European countries and there is a palpable sense of excitement about writing and reading among its population.
But while Germany itself has changed the question remains of whether our attitudes to the country because of the war still affect how we see it – and also what we publish?
Meike Ziervogel, from new publisher Peirene Press, agrees that the British are obsessed with World War II but so are the Germans although she sees the perspective of some younger German writers as providing a very interesting shift.
‘While even five years ago German novels were dealing mainly with German guilt, now writers like Julia Franks in The Blind Side of the Heart and Friedrich Christian Delius’ Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman try to look at it more open mindedly, examining questions like: why did normal Germans support Hitler? What could be the psychological causes behind it?’
There’s also little doubt, that as with other foreign literature, German crime writing in translation is a big growth area. As Henrick Menkell’s success has shown it’s one of the few genres where English readers don’t seem to be too bothered by the fact that something hasn’t originally been written in English. Andrea Maria Schenkel, Friedrich Glauser, Hans Werner Kettenbach and Jakob Arjouni are all crime writers with growing readerships.
The Goethe Institute in this country has a well-funded translation programme and an on-going programme of introducing new writers to UK audiences and publishers. At the same time, as Katy Derbyshire points out, the annual German Book Prize set up five years ago, and which can be seen as the German Booker, now makes it even easier for UK publishers to cherry pick the very best titles.
Inevitably, there is the question of translated writing and its related challenges but this is not a particularly German phenomenon. And Haus’s Barbara Haus Schwepcke asks us to look at Bernard Schlink and Patrick Suskind as proof that German books sell –‘not one bookseller has lost money on these’ she adds. On the eve of Berlin’s twentieth birthday celebrations new German writing has never looked stronger nor its supporters more convinced that more of their good books will be coming our way very soon.
This feature appeared in The Bookseller, 25 September 2009.
Malcolm Burgess is a publisher of city-lit Berlin
You mean, it is twenty years, not weeks, since the wall came down...
Posted by: Peter | October 01, 2009 at 01:52 PM