Goetz, Meyer, Schroeder: A fragmentary tale from the German literary scene (Part I)

 It's a strange feeling to witness the publication of certain German literary works in Britain fifteen or more years after they appeared on the German market. A strange feeling - at least for me, living in Germany until 2015.

Living in Germany, writing in German, trying to get a foot in the door, the entrance door into the literary establishment. Or at least to be published, to find a publisher that shares or understands my literary concept, a concept that, I believed, had a certain appeal to the market as it presented itself around the mid-00s.

In retrospect I'm glad that my two novels (2005-06) weren't published, not taken in account the money a potential bestseller would have brought me. The novels were typical for a person in their early thirties, a time when you feel the need to systematize your experiences so far, to tell others about them, to use them as a starting point to create a work of art, if you happen to be an artist.

On the way, naturally, you are looking for other works of art and other artists that might inspire you, that may experience a somehow similar development or have experienced it in the past. Even more importantly, you may have read books that accompanied you in the course of the period you are so eager to write about. They may have been guiding lights that have kept you company on your way, that helped you or lead you astray.

In this post, I won't write about such guiding lights. I've done that elsewhere and I will do it elsewhere in the future. Here, I'll write about a few books and writers that just happened to be there, to be contemporaries when I was a reader in my teens and twenties and became a writer in my thirties. A German writer in Germany. The cause - you might have guessed by now - is the publication of works by Rainald Goetz and Clemens Meyer in Britain, in both cases by the remarkable Fitzcarraldo Editions. I admit that I deliberately didn't sketch a concept for this post. I just see myself entering the deceptive sphere of memory, the nebulous path of old aspirations (let Iggy Pop's Baby play in your head, if you like, like the song)... I imagine something like a fragment, no clear beginning and end, no symmetrical form...

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...which is the way that Rainald Goetz writes, used to write when I was reading him. This way is the reason that he functions as one pole of my poetological reminiscences...

There was a time when it was almost impossible for me to acknowledge traditional forms of prose writing. It's hard for me now to believe my former self in that respect, but, apparently, there was such a time. When I later read about Joerg Fauser's beginnings, I could relate. A certain kind of experience, a certain kind of intensity that cannot be captured in a poem and is pushing towards prose requires more experimental forms, requires fragmentation and collage, maybe even cut-ups. There is a rich counter-tradition of such writing. In Germany not so much as in the anglo- and francophone sphere, I guess, but there had been dadaists in Germany, and there were writers in the 1960s and 1970s that were inspired especially by more experimental anglophone writers, people like Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and the aforementioned Joerg Fauser. In the 1980s, experimental writing had the same prestige as more traditional forms of narration, sometimes it even looked as if a certain strangeness, an attitude to hinder common forms of understanding, were seen as the sine qua non of literary quality, and also a certain kind of boring writing, as some critics would say.

Somewhere at this point Rainald Goetz enters the stage. He emerges out of the German punk/new wave scene, but he is also an academic, he will obtain a PhD in medicine and also one in history. This hints at a kind of hybridity that will show in his writing. I happened to know a psychiatrist who was a colleague of Goetz's in Munich, in the clinic where the latter found so much material that he would use in Insane (Irre). This doctor told me that they had to hide Goetz whenever the professor came along, because of Goetz's strict punk style.

Goetz was lucky (?) to land a deal with Suhrkamp early on in the 80s, that made sense in its own way, I mean, there was this new wave thing happening and here you had an experimental, well-educated writer with a connection to that scene, I don't know who was resposible for the deal, but for them it made sense. So Goetz published throughout the 80s, he seemed to be an enfant terrible, he had his Spiegel story. But his true decade, the decade that his writing mostly had to do with, were the 1990s.

Why?

I think that the 1990s were, especially in Germany, to a certain extent an anti-literature, an anti-book decade. On the one hand, it was plain to see that it wasn't easy for the literary sphere to maintain its status particularly regarding a younger audience. As far as my own generation was concerned, it became normal even for educated people not to read, to exclude books from that sphere of entertainment and spiritual development that is part of everybody's life. There are very clear sociological reasons for that, like the accelerated rhythm of public life, but also regarding the activities in the citizen's spare time. The reign of Cable TV began in Germany in the 90s, dance music became techno, and the "unification" of the Western and Eastern part of the country created not only in a strictly political sense a nervous, feverish atmosphere.(No wonder that there were also cultural anti-movements of slowing down, of escapism, a near-epidemic of recreational drug use and very different music like trip hop, like grunge, even in Germany.)

Why read a book of 400 pages when there's so many other things that lead to an easier and faster kind of satisfaction? Besides, apart from music, there's TV, there's magazines, and newspapers, if you belong to the very few that take an interest in politics. Wolfgang Pohrt said that journalism is "the only literary genre that's left". There was a lot of truth in this provocative statement.

So, in retrospect, the 1990s in Germany appear as the decade when literature, having been pushed aside in the wider sphere of cultural production, still hadn't found a way to properly commercialize and professionalize itself in terms of PR and marketing (literary agents, schools of creative writing in Leipzig and Hildesheim, Deutscher Buchpreis, other prizes). In that sense, the ridiculous "popliteratur" was a transitional phenomenon that was taken much too seriously. (There were even attempts to link this crap to traditions like beat literature and new journalism. But it became all the more clear that there was a dividing line, represented, for example, by the work of Fauser.)

And the 1990s in Germany are also the decade when literature in the public eye gradually loses its aura of autonomy, of being clearly separated from other forms of cultural production. I think that this is the main reason why Goetz's work appeared to be so relevant at that time, thanks to its hybridity. Rave, his best book in that period, is not what it is without a soundtrack accompanying the words. I don't read it as an immersing celebration of nightlife, as many do, but as a document of exactly that hybridity that includes activities at all times of day, reflections, theoretical fragments intertwined with the experience of music and going out.

In that way, it seemed to me that Goetz provided the notion of an aesthetic path that as well paved the way back to the historically inaccessable complex of 1960s beat/psychedelia as it opened up perspectives of future writing characterized by transcendence of genre and form, collage, fragmentation and, last but not least and very important, politics of freedom and emancipation.

In that respect, I found it, to be honest, a bit disappointing that this Bavarian new wave freak accepted the role as Nestor of the dull aristocratic "popliteratur" bunch, the Uslars, Barres, Nickels and so on. Kracht stood out for him, that was understandable, but none of them had that kind of true critical spirit that shines so bright in the polemical passages of Goetz's more theoretical works, like Abfall fuer alle. They were opportunists, boring bobo dandys, nothing else.

And, as we progress in the 1990s, as the new millenium approaches, the road to that glorious path to a new kind of German literature gets out of sight, it is lost somewhere between not only Goetz's inability to maintain and systematize a critical spirit, dull hedonism, the commercialisation of literature, consumerism and the advance of the globalized post 9/11 society.

Welcome to the new millenium. 

Do you consider yourself to be a writer? A German writer?

In this case, we suggest that

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you might join one of the new schools of creative writing, this is one of the many things that we have imported from the anglosphere. Craft, handwerk, as they say in German, is of some importance, isn't it?

I imagine a guy that has turned thirty around the start of the millenium, of the new decade. He (a male) wants to be a writer. He has German nationality. I call him August Schroeder, though he mostly signs with "A. Schroeder", or sometimes just "Schroeder".

TO BE CONTINUED

or

FORTSETZUNG FOLGT (as they say in German)