Goetz, Meyer, Schroeder: A fragmentary tale from the German literary scene (Part 5)

 First, though, we have to take a step back and consider the social and political changes in Germany in the Noughties, because otherwise the particular way in which literary history (as the official representation and interpretation of the mass of literary production) developed at that time cannot be understood.

By the middle of the decade the chimera of a new buergerlichkeit (I think there is no proper English translation, it's not exactly being posh or belonging to the middle-class) had cast its treacherous shadow over German society. Post 9/11 in Germany meant not only more rigid social control, it also meant the gradual introduction of certain policies and regulations that were very often based on models in anglophone countries. Regarding the cultural and the academic sphere, this meant that these sectors of production and education had to establish certain tools that served efficiency and the simplification of selection processes. I have already mentioned the "Bologna Reform" and schools of creative writing. 

This change of the zeitgeist was also clearly visible in the development of cultural production itself. The steady erosion of middle-class security resulting in an undeniable polarization was reflected in popular culture. "Whatever happened to (our) Rock 'n' Roll?" was a question that could be asked in Germany, too, since this kind of music seemed to have disappeared from mass media, contemporary Rock 'n' Roll in Germany was to be found on small record labels in the provinces, but it had dropped out of mainstream representation that was dominated by the conscious antithesis of shallow "indie pop" (with a few exceptions, like Wir sind Helden and Stereo Total) and "gangsta" rap mostly from Berlin. It was as if young people were to be guided in the right direction according to their social status, like saying "This is for you", "This is not for you". Die Schere geht weiter auseinander was a typical phrase in Germany at the time meaning exactly the polarization of wealth and poverty with the middle-class now in fear of a precarious existence and seeing itself constantly degraded and pushed towards the poor part of the spectrum. I remember a small talk with a shop assistant who said to me that he didn't care as long as he belonged to the right part of the spectrum. He was apparently not affected by the infamous Hartz IV laws that were used to regulate the sphere of employment. The new kind of German society that was created in the Noughties was characterized by a diminished sense of solidarity and a heightened rejection of traditional left-wing politics in general. In addition, a new nationalism and an alarming crypto-fascism developed (it was the time of the NSU murders), but both of them wouldn't be clearly visible until the next decade.

In this society, what the Germans call bildung (without understanding what it really means), "education" functions only as a means of distinction, a way to secure prerequisites in order to avoid precariousness. That means, it functions mainly as knowledge, as access to an accumulation of facts. I think that this ideology of distinguishability explains, at least partly, the success that writers like Daniel Kehlmann and Richard David Precht had around the mid-Noughties in Germany. Books and authors that presented a certain level of education as a sine qua non in order to participate in the cultural discourse went very well with an audience that watched Wer wird Millionaer? and was desperately holding on to more and more endangered privileges. Even Schroeder, as I imagine him, might at that time not have been successful as a new writer, if he hadn't been well-educated, relatively gebildet and thus able to promote his kind of sophisticated retro pop effectively.

So the year is 2007. The creative writing schools have formed some talent, though very few are as gifted as, say, Juli Zeh, I remember leafing through the pages of an anthology of the Hildesheim school and somehow I couldn't relate. What was missing? Some kind of aesthetic grit, some kind of necessity. There is a melancholy, a young innerlichkeit that 



5.


in the best cases shows an existential authenticity, like the story collections of two female writers that both don't publish any more, for ten years or so. Symbolic?

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