Goetz, Meyer, Schroeder: A fragementary tale from the German literary scene (last part)

 The year is 2009. And I should slowly think about ending this series of fragments that hopefully have been an enjoyable, maybe even inspring read, especially for those that are somehow familiar with the German literary scene as it presented itself in the last decades. Of course I haven't even mentoined a couple of good or interesting books and authors. My idea was to just sketch the direction of my own - largely unpublished - writing at a time that bore some significance, culturally and also politically, not only in Germany.

Fictional Schroeder is a writer that may come quite close to what my career possibly would have been like if the circumstances would have been a bit different, especially if I would have had German parents, that means, if I would have been accepted as a writer and, most importantly, as a citizen. But, no, I had to leave the country where I was born, where I grew up, where I was educated, went to university, graduated with a PhD and whatnot.

I spent 2008 not just writing (some short stories) and looking for a publisher, but also translating from the Greek and therefore studying the developments also in the Greek literary scene in the last decades and following what happened on that market, new publications, debates et cetera. I falsely assumed that I soon would translate a contemporary Greek novel for some renowned publishing house in Germany, but that never happened. I have written about my "career" as a translator from the New Greek elsewhere, mostly in a small collection called Hellenika (2015) that may some day be published.

But the year is 2009 and a global financial crisis has taken shape. Meanwhile, Schroeder has left Lindenblock Editions that - surprise, surprise - have sold him to Suhrkamp. The responsible editor expected a deliberately controversial figure, maybe even an enfant terrible, but Schroeder wasn't like that at all, and the ice broke when the author of the Sumpfroman admitted that he had an almost religious relationship to Suhrkamp's traditional self-coloured pocket editions.

Schroeder has started to write a second novel (the second part of the trilogy) and has also published a more experimental short story called Nu(n) Metal: Meuterei auf der "Tranquilla Fudge" in the BellaTriste magazine.


Last chapters of Grunge


Chapter 11: Through Schmoldt Schrader meets Bernard and Neuillinda, both of whom have left university as part of their neo-bohemian lifestyle. The same evening Schrader writes in his diary: Ich spuere, der Sumpf zieht mich hinab. Gerade als ich raus zu sein schien, zieht der Sumpf mich wieder hinab.


Chapter 12: Going out and partying with Bernard and Neuillinda.


Chapter 13: More going out and partying with Bernard and Neuillinda.


Chapter 14: Going out and partying with Bernard and Neuillinda becomes the predominant part of Schrader's life. Busty Karina and the other flatmates are worried about him.


Chapter 15: Neuillinda, kind of a strange cross between a severe hanseatic fraulein and a Parisian coquette, suggests to Schrader that they should go away together and leave everything behind. One Saturday morning, they take a train to Amsterdam, into an unknown future. END


(The novel is about 250 pages long, because it is filled with many reflections about pop culture and musical preferences and even a few thoughts about politics.)


*


2009 was the year when I started blogging. (I should collect the entries that I wrote until the autumn of 2011 and publish them together with my reviews as a journalistic work, as Schroeder might have done with his own reviews, articles, columns, blog entries.) Meanwhile, Goetz has returned (Loslabern, 2009) with a kind of rundumschlag, he seemed to prefer a more compact form now, I haven't read his later works,

but

I want this tale to end at this point. A lot has been left out, the titles of the chapters of Grunge, impressions from Schroeder's book tour, inspiring reads like, for example, Ulrich Peltzer's Teil der Loesung (2007) and Thor Kunkel's Kuhls Kosmos (2008), my thoughts about crime fiction, and there is also the whole complex of the diminished importance of highbrow literature in general in Germany, something that became quite evident for people of my generation around 2012. I think that it was Ambros Waibel (a Fauser co-biographer) who hinted explicitly at this, and maybe, maybe the truly ridiculous Helene Hegemann/Airen scandal at the start of 2010 was the clearest exterior sign of this development.

All of this and more may be addressed at some later point.


Blogging was a good thing to do back then and it feels good and right again, at least when there is enough time fot it like now that, to my own surprise, I have finished a seven entries series about a guy who, long ago, wanted to become an established German novelist. That is that then, and in this respect I say

SCHOENEN DANK, AUF WIEDERSEHEN

and, as always


FORTSETZUNG FOLGT




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