The problem with the German novel

In his The German Novel, published in 1956 and for a long time a standard reference work in the English-speaking world, Roy Pascal averred that even the very best of German fiction was marred by a ‘sad lack of the energy and bite of passion’. It was impossible to deny, the British critic claimed, that there was ‘something provincial, philistine’ at its core. Indeed, he concluded, German writing was strangely lacking – ‘Altogether the characters in the German novels seem less alive, less avid of life, less capable of overflowing exuberances, than those of the great European novels.’

Pascal’s oddly damning assessment of his object of study might today be merely of historical interest as an example of the supposition of a German Sonderweg (special path) apart from other European nations, widely promulgated in the countries that had defeated Nazism only a few years earlier, if it were not for the fact that similar indictments feature throughout the 1990s in a series of debates on the German novel’s postwar development. These more recent criticisms, however, were voiced not by critics outside Germany seeking to identify its ‘peculiarity’ but in the Federal Republic itself. While scholarly attention has focused, then, on Ulrich Greiner’s attack on Christa Wolf’s alleged cowardly opportunism in waiting until the collapse of the GDR before publishing Was bleibt (What Remains, 1990), an account of the way the East German security service had hounded her composed ten years previously, of greater interest here are the broader criticisms of the German novel elaborated by Greiner and his fellow conservative critic Frank Schirrmacher around the same time with regard to its ‘provinciality’ and its bland, post-Nazi ‘aesthetics of political conviction’ (Gesinnungsästhetik). As if echoing Pascal’s comment of three decades earlier, Schirrmacher declared that contemporary German fiction was ‘lifeless, lacking in confidence, copied; in short: lacking in originality’.