This chapter explores how authorship plays out in literary texts and in the wider world. The starting premise is that canonical authors, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, function as focal points for the flow of both cultural and monetary value. The agency inherent within their ‘world author’ persona is accordingly distributed across a wide variety of actors. This leads to a much broader discussion of ‘world authorship’ as an extended process whereby literary writing both shapes and is shaped by the world(s) in which it exists. This process is headed up by individuals who are placed into an attitudinal relationship towards such activity, ranging from celebration through to satire an involving both human and non-human actors. I consider this first in theoretical terms, keying Goethe’s holistic understanding of how art and architecture intersect to concepts around ‘worlding’, ‘authorship’ and ‘literary imagination’, as developed by Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault and Leslie Adelson respectively. I then examine the historical context of West German publishing and how the attitudinal ‘modes of authorship’ this particular context makes apparent prefigure a contemporary turn towards a broader model of authorship that is deliberately inclusive. The recent work of the prize-winning German-language writer, Katja Petrowskaja, which builds on deep-rooted global flows of people, concepts and things and points to new ways of accessing these through language, illustrates this point.

WHEN DIE VERMESSUNG DER WELT (Measuring the world) appeared in 2005, Daniel Kehlmann could hardly have been described as a new writer. He had already published three other novels, a novella, and a collection of essays, with the most recent previous novel, Ich und Kaminski (Kaminski and I, 2003), achieving a print run of thirty thousand copies in hardback alone. However, where the author had spent the previous ten years slowly making a name for himself in publishing circles, now he suddenly became a household name even for those with only a passing interest in German literature. The novel spent thirty-five weeks at the top of the Spiegel bestseller list and was quickly translated into over forty different languages, while Kehlmann was awarded numerous prizes and called upon to give countless media interviews. Indeed, over the following months he was repeatedly confronted with his own authorial persona to such an extent that he made the public’s interest in the famous author into a guiding theme of both his Göttingen poetics lecture series, Diese sehr ernsten Scherze (These very serious jokes, 2007), and his next prose work, Ruhm (Fame, 2009). Die Vermessung der Welt thus marks the beginning of a new stage in Kehlmann’s career that coincides with the point at which he was publicly “made” as a noteworthy young author. He entered into the world of international literary acclaim and the processes of celebrity and intellectual fetishization that this entails.

The spectacular success of Die Vermessung der Welt encourages us to think about the nature of what I am terming, following the celebrity studies scholar Chris Rojek, “celebrification.” Celebrity, as a product of sophisticated mediation, relies on the way in which a famous person is both socially removed from the public and yet appears so familiar in all the intimate aspects of his or her personality as to be a part of our everyday lives. This curious mix of social distance and personal proximity is maintained by the “celebrifying” media, which prioritize image over substance. Their coverage concerns the way in which a person represents public achievement, rather than offering an in-depth engagement with the achievement itself, and thus for many cultural critics, such as those of the Frankfurt School, celebrity is a fundamentally empty phenomenon that reflects negatively on the nature and quality of human relations in contemporary society.

When Günter Grass’s long-awaited ‘unification novel’ Ein weites Feld (Too Far Afield) was published in 1995, the media furore that surrounded it was intense. It was widely felt that the author – with a 780-page book that wends its way across some 150 years of German history as its largely male, ageing characters meander through former Prussian/East German territories – had created a literary work that was aesthetically and politically out of step with the forward-looking times. Such opinion can be understood as a resurgence of the programmatic attempt, led by the journalists Ulrich Greiner and Frank Schirrmacher at the beginning of the decade, to declare as passé the kind of overtly socio-politically engaged writing associated with such ageing writers as Günter Grass and Christa Wolf. There was, however, also a distinctly personal element to much of the polemic. Not only had Grass taken an unpopular stance on unification that had made him enemies across the political spectrum during the unification period, he had also been falling out of favour with leading literary critics since the mid-1980s. With publications such as Die Rättin (The Rat, 1986) and Zunge zeigen! (Show Your Tongue!, 1988), his work was judged to be becoming ever more whimsical in style and overly didactic in its political message, suffering, in short, from Grass’s outmoded sense of his own importance. If there was one thing that was not new in the united Germany, it was the idea that Grass, as both a cultural and political icon, was old.

In fact, Grass’s literary output since the mid-1980s, from Die Rättin through to the autobiographically styled Die Box (The Box, 2008) and Unterwegs von Deutschland nach Deutschland (Travelling from Germany to Germany, 2009), merits being collectively considered as a body of ‘late writing’, in the Shakespeare-scholar Gordon McMullan’s definition of the term. McMullan explains that while late writing is generally associated with the end of an author’s career and thus the proximity of death, it is most useful as an aid for interpreting the author’s wider significance when applied to a certain manner of reading – late writing is a category that is invoked retrospectively by those evaluating a writer’s work. Whatever the author may think he or she is doing at the time, lateness can be construed within both his or her person and work by others, and this can happen quite independently of biological age. With this, ‘late style’ as discussed by Theodor Adorno in 1937 and, more recently in 2006, Edward Saïd is above all a literary-critical construction, an approach to interpretation forwarded by cultural critics that pertains to the way an author’s positioning in relation to his or her era is perceived. Although his overall argument is a little different to McMullan’s, Saïd also makes the artist’s relation to the era central to his description of late style as ‘in, but oddly apart from the present’. In other words, an author’s late work may be characterised by a kind of quirkiness, a peculiarity of style or theme that deviates from dominant trends whilst at the same time refusing to be declared irrelevant to them, and this leads critics to construct arguments about its relationship to the cultural epoch. Specifically, in Saïd’s late twentieth-century construction of lateness, late work is modulated by a mixture of nostalgia, melancholic leave-taking, and obdurate ongoing self-assertion, and readers are likely to perceive within it a certain doggedness, wilful difficulty and a tendency towards deliberately unresolved contradiction.

WHEN, IN AUGUST 2006, it became public knowledge that Günter Grass had served for a short time in the Waffen-SS at the end of the Second World War and had finally admitted to this in his new autobiography, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion), the story unfolded not just in the German but also in the world media. Not only were the basic facts echoed in short press releases across the globe, consideration of the way Grass had related to this incriminating aspect of his biography throughout the course of his subsequent career ensured that the story continued to run in the world media for several months. Whether the angle taken was to explore the moral issues of joining the Waffen-SS in the first place (such an approach particularly suited the sensationalist reporting characteristic of the Bild-Zeitung, for example), or to question Grass's later legitimacy as a self-made “moralische Instanz,” or moralist, in postwar Germany (a line largely followed by his critics, many of whom collaborated on a lengthy cover story for Der Spiegel), ethical questions of “right” and “wrong” behavior were once again at the center of public debate in and about Germany.

This essay explicitly addresses such ethical issues of public self-presentation and reception. “Ethics,” understood in line with The Oxford English Dictionary definition as “a branch of knowledge that deals with the principles of human duty or the logic of moral discourse,” as well as “the rules of conduct recognized in a particular profession or area of life,” is a useful term through which to approach the sense of public accountability that has accompanied both scholarly and journalistic discussion of Grass in particular and of German postwar writing in general. I use the term in line with this common parlance quite deliberately, for although there is a growing body of specialist scholarship on the complex philosophical relationship between ethics and narrative discourse, it has so far tended to yield either abstract literary critical theory that is more concerned with reflecting on the general potential of narrative than to explain a text's immediate significance for its readers, or jargonized evaluation of an author's supposed “message.”

WHEN THE RESEARCH COUNCILS IN THE UK recently required researchers to fill out an “impact” statement in their applications for public funding, resistance among the academic community was strong. The emphasis, all parties were quick to surmise, was primarily on justifying government spending of taxpayers’ money in terms of measurable economic returns, and a majority of academics across both the arts and sciences felt that such an approach to evaluating research projects was inherently misguided. In a lead article in the Times Higher Education (THE) in April 2009, not only was it judged to be a “pretty fruitless task” to try to devise a meaningful way of putting a price tag on the benefits of research, economic impact in itself was considered an insufficient category for capturing the various ways in which research brings value to the wider community. As the argument has unfolded, however, supporters of a “blended approach” to impact measurement that would also cover social benefits and more narrative accounts of impact have begun to embrace the idea of explaining at some level the value to society of the innovative work they do. “To reduce everything to just one number would not accurately capture the impact of research … But that is not to say that everything is so intangible that you can’t measure anything,” commented the chief executive of the National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts in the same THE article.

Considered in the broader context of cultural output, this most recent attempt to quantify the effect or value of certain cultural activities is far less of an anomaly than some of the initial reactions might imply. As far back as the mid-nineteenth century the British poet, critic, and schools’ inspector Matthew Arnold programmatically sought to instrumentalize culture — meaning something akin to the recognized canon of highbrow cultural works at that time — as a means of social engineering, as laid out in his Culture and Anarchy of 1869. Throughout the twentieth century, leftand right-wing governments alike across the United Kingdom, United States, Continental Europe, and Australasia have seen nothing untoward in aligning cultural activity with key public discourses such as urban regeneration, national heritage development, and racial or national identity.

WRITING IN 1994 ABOUT THE EFFECT OF media profiling on authors’ social visibility, Günter Grass explained how authors can find themselves, as discrete individuals, disseminated and discussed against their best literary interests. He referred to the reception of Thomas Mann’s work, which continues to be biographically led, and explained how the author’s private diaries were finally invoked as the last word in these public debates:

Grass’s description of how an author is presented to the mass public in such a manner as to dispense with any need for further engagement with his or her literary work is couched in a speech that programmatically speaks out against the literary critical establishment and the German feuilleton, and bears the rather prickly title, “Über das Sekundäre aus primärer Sicht” (On the Secondary from a Primary Perspective, 1994). It came at a time in his career when Grass was feeling particularly misunderstood in both literature and politics. Indeed, it fits in with a growing sense of discomfort that persists to this day between German authors and the reviewing industry at large, and the uneasy meditations it contains about how a literary author enters into broader contemporary cultural discourse and is assigned a lasting place within it resonate far beyond either Grass’s or Mann’s personal circumstances.

It is worth focusing for a moment on this bigger picture, for in examining the ways in which authors have been ascribed wider cultural significance, it is important to distinguish between the fate of the author as a biographical individual and the fate of his or her individual literary works.

When, in late 2006, it was revealed that Günter Grass had served for a short time towards the end of World War II in the Waffen SS, shock waves spread not just through Germany but the world. The German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel summed up much of the hostile media coverage with a belligerent cover page and title story, 'The Tin-Drummer: A Moral Apostle's Late Confession' (21 August), while fellow author John Irving fought back, writing in the British newspaper The Guardian, 'Günter Grass is my hero, as a writer and a moral compass' (19 August). At stake throughout the debate was Grass's public renown as Germany's leading commentator on moral issues, since the 1960s often summed up in the trite phrase 'Gewissen der Nation', or 'conscience of the nation'. The fact that Grass had not given an entirely accurate account of his actions during the war whilst at the same time shaming other public figures with skeletons to hide was not only felt seriously to undermine his moral standing. In the eyes of some of the author's harshest critics, it also called for a complete re-evaluation of his literary work to date, including a return of the Nobel Prize for Literature awarded in 1999. Such outrage can only properly be understood in the wider context of Grass's public image. Like him or loathe him, media commentators and readers alike have been unanimous in seeing in Grass a straightforward example of a politically engaged author whose fiction can be readily interpreted in the context of current socio-political issues.