German Pop Literature: A Companion 9783110275766, 9783110275759

Citation preview

Margaret McCarthy (Ed.) German Pop Literature

Companions to Contemporary German Culture

Edited by Michael Eskin · Karen Leeder · Christopher Young

Volume 5

German Pop Literature

A Companion Edited by Margaret McCarthy

ISBN 978-3-11-027575-9 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-027576-6 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-038130-6 ISSN 2193-9659 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Dejan_Dundjerski/iStock/thinkstock Typesetting: Dörlemann Satz GmbH & Co. KG, Lemförde Printing and binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ∞ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents Margaret McCarthy Introduction | 1

Section 1: Historical Roots and Official Stories Enno Stahl An Alternative History of Pop | 31 Sabine von Dirke Under Construction: Andreas Neumeister’s Pop Modern Historiographies | 53

Section 2: Alternative Voices and Vantage Points Hester Baer The Pop-Nostalgia of Sven Regener and Leander Haußmann | 79 Claudia Breger Pop-Cultural Camera Interventions: Kanak TV | 101

Section 3: Pop and Gender Molly Knight Bodily Harm: Pop Masculinity in Benjamin Lebert’s Crazy and Der Vogel ist ein Rabe | 123 Emily Spiers ‘There’s No Lobby for Girls in Pop’: Writing the Performative Popfeminist Subject | 143 Corinna Kahnke Generation Golf Meets Zonenkinder: Gender, (N)ostalgia and the Berlin Republic | 167

VI 

 Table of Contents

Section 4: Pop in the New Millennium Gillian Pye The Party’s Over: PeterLicht and the End of Capitalism | 187 Gary Schmidt Fear of the Queer? On Homosexuality, Masculinity and the Auratic in Christian Kracht’s Anti-Pop Pop Novels | 209 Carrie Smith-Prei ‘Pop Eats Itself’: Crisis Discourse, the Literary Market and Pop Performance in Joachim Lottmann’s Novels | 237 Thomas Ernst Pop vs. Plagiarism: Popliterary Intertextuality, Staged Authorship and the Disappearance of Originality in Helene Hegemann | 263 Pop Literature: A Bibliography | 285 Index | 299

Margaret McCarthy

Introduction Exemplified in novels by Christian Kracht, Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre, Alexa Hennig von Lange, Florian Illies and Benjamin Lebert, pop literature of the late 1990s garnered bestselling success, extensive but sometimes bluntly derogatory critique and ever-expanding scholarly analysis despite pop’s presumable demise in the new millennium. On the feuilleton front, Iris Radisch’s labelling of pop literature as ‘young German mail order catalogue literature’ says it all.¹ Not surprisingly, in the wake of September 11, literary critics brought down the curtain on the ‘Spaßgesellschaft’ [fun society] by proclaiming ‘that’s it for pop tralala’.² This vague epithet was aimed more broadly at German youth-culture of the 1990s, its wilful superficiality and disdain for history and politics. More recently, however, less censorious, more differentiated scholarship on pop literature has emerged, and given its breadth in 2014 one could speak of a veritable boom. As Enno Stahl trenchantly observed, ‘Once something is really dead and disposed of Germanists wake up and take notice’.³ Beyond the pronounced ire that characterized some of pop literature’s initial reception, one finds considered analysis and sometimes even celebratory admiration. Now, twenty years after the publication of Christian Kracht’s seminal novel Faserland in 1995, mostly German scholars have created a richly complex terrain that situates pop novels from the 1990s within a larger history of aesthetic practices. In general terms, contemporary analysis of pop often attempts to define the genre, locate its earlier, twentieth-century precursors and test its ability, then and now, to challenge the status quo. This approach, however, often merely but-

1 See Iris Radisch, ‘Vom Mi, Ort der Seele. Was der jungen deutschen Neckermannliteratur fehlt’ (http://www.zeit.de/2003/35/Glosse-Lit-35). 2 Der Spiegel made this proclamation in an overview of the Frankfurt Book Fair in the fall of 2001. In a more objective vein, Volker Hage observed: ‘Hardly had the untroubled, amusing narratives of love and the everyday established themselves among German-speaking authors […] than it became questionable. Because: who’s afraid of difficult things when reality borders on the unimaginable?’ His article highlights older authors like Ulla Hahn, Bodo Kirchhoff, Durs Grünbein and Uwe Timm, who all share ‘a more serious, almost profound tone in an old fashioned sense’ that requires a ‘long preparatory time’. See ‘Frankfurter Buchmesse. Literatur: Vorbeben der Angst’ (http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-20289368.html). 3 Enno Stahl, ‘Popliteratur  – eine fragwürdige Kategorie. Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsproblematik inklusiv eines Exkurses zu Thomas Meineckes Produktionsästhetik’, Closing Borders, Bridging Gaps? Deutscher Pop an der Jahrtausendwende, special issue of Literatur für Leser, ed. by Anke Biendarra, 31. 2 (2008), 65–79 (p. 65).

2 

 Margaret McCarthy

tresses divides between historical forms and their seemingly frivolous progeny. In order to challenge such strict separation, this introduction will widen the parameters a bit more, specifically between pop literature and other genres, given pop’s frequent intertextual allusions. In the process, the political dimensions of more recent pop selfhood will clearly manifest themselves. To wit: Johannes Ullmaier’s oft-cited phrase ‘pop is everything that Martin Walser is not’ suggests a wide divide between pop’s surface sensations and the historical consciousness fed by ‘Gesinnungsliteratur’ [aesthetics with a moral imperative].⁴ Yet the tormented protagonist of Faserland, decked out in a Barbour jacket that hardly shields him from the fatherland’s contemporary traces, makes such distinctions erroneous, as do the novel’s many allusions to Thomas Mann. This volume both challenges pop’s status as a flash-in-the-pan phenomenon and questions the ‘official history’ that has taken root in recent German scholarship. Instead, it provides alternative accounts of its origins, rectifies insufficient attention to gender, manifests the range of voices within the genre, and demonstrates how pop literature has evolved in the new millennium via expanded thematic concerns and alternative aesthetic forms. The lop-sidedness of scholarship on pop, i. e. its abundance in Germany compared to work by Anglo-American Germanists, deserves mention up front. Beginning with Thomas Ernst’s Popliteratur (2001), over a dozen anthologies on pop literature and pop culture more generally have been published in Germany.⁵ Scholarship in the U.S. and Great Britain, by contrast, has been limited

4 Johannes Ullmaier, Von Acid nach Adlon. Eine Reise durch die deutschsprachige Popliteratur (Mainz: Ventil, 2001), p. 12. The full quotation reads: ‘Pop literature tends to be whatever Martin Walser isn’t’. 5 On pop literature specifically titles include: Thomas Ernst’s Popliteratur (Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 2001); Moritz Baßler’s Der deutsche Pop-Roman. Die neuen Archivisten (Munich: Beck, 2002); Eckhard Schumacher’s Gerade Eben Jetzt. Schreibweisen der Gegenwart (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2003); Johannes G. Pankau’s edited volume Pop Pop Populär. Popliteratur und Jugendkultur (Bremen: Universitätsverlag Aschenbeck & Isensee, 2004); Frank Degler and Ute Paulokat’s Neue deutsche Popliteratur (Padeborn: Fink, 2008); Sandra Mehrfort’s Popliteratur. Zum literarischen Stellenwert eines Phänomens der 1990er Jahre (Karlsruhe: Info, 2008); Christoph Rauen’s Pop und Ironie: Popdiskurs und Popliteratur um 1980 und 2000 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010); and Olaf Grabienski, Till Huber and Jan-Noël Thon’s Poetik der Oberfläche. Popliteratur der 90er Jahre (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011). Beyond these titles some works look more generally at popular culture in the German context, like Marvin Chlada, Gerd Dembowski and Deniz Ünlü’s Alles Pop? Kapitalismus & Subversion (Aschaffenburg: Alibri, 2003); Hans-Otto Hügel’s edited volume Handbuch Populäre Kultur. Begriffe, Theorie und Diskussionen (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2003); Sascha Seiler’s Das einfache wahre Abschreiben der Welt. Pop Diskurse in der deutschen Literatur nach 1960 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006); Kerstin Gleba and Eckhard

Introduction 

 3

to mostly individual essays in journals and anthologies.⁶ Germanists across the Anglo-American/German divide, of course, are well aware of Germany’s late entrance into the aesthetic arena of postmodernism, timing which points to a general suspicion of pastiche and citation for presumably losing touch with history.⁷ The need among German scholars to catch up no doubt accounts for an intense engagement not only with pop literature, but also with popular culture more generally, particularly as seen through a cultural studies lens that validates its uses far more than a Frankfurt School vantage point. This shift has made it possible to move beyond pop literature’s initially heated reception and provide a more nuanced understanding of German identities with fluid boundaries across a global landscape.

Schumacher’s Pop seit 1964 (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2007); Thomas Hecken’s Populäre Kultur (Bochum: Post, 2006); Kaspar Maase’s edited volume Die Schönheiten des Populären. Ästhetische Erfahrung der Gegenwart (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2008), and Thomas Hecken’s Pop. Geschichte eines Konzepts 1955–2009 (Bielefeld: transcript, 2009). 6 Despite being a frequent topic at the annual German Studies Association convention over the last decade, only a few volumes and anthologies on pop culture more generally have appeared, including Gerd Gemünden’s Framed Visions. Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination (1998), Agnes C. Mueller’s German Pop Culture. How ‘American’ Is It? (2004) and Gerd Bayer’s Mediating Germany. Popular Culture between Tradition and Innovation (2006). Anke Biendarra’s recent Germans Going Global focuses on a range of pop authors, but her broader aim is less about defining pop literature or understanding popular culture’s status in Germany. Instead she assesses the impact of global and neoliberal factors, as well as of 9/11, on the literary aesthetics of contemporary German writers. See Germans Going Global. Contemporary Literature and Cultural Globalization (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012). Individual essays on pop literature have appeared in anthologies and journals, yet their number again remains small relative to German scholarship. An MLA database search on the term ‘Popliteratur’ yields twelve items, all written in German; only two essays, written by German scholars Torsten Liesegang and Carsten Rohde in English, appear when one searches ‘German pop literature’. See Torsten Liesegang, ‘“New German Pop Literature”: Difference, Identity, and the Redefinition of Pop Literature after Postmodernism’, Seminar, 40.3 (September 2004), 262–76 and Carsten Rohde, ‘German Pop Literature: Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and What Came After’, in German-Language Literature Today. International and Popular, ed. by Arthur Williams, Stuart Parkes and Julian Preece (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2000), 295–308. One has to dig to find additional essays in English by scholars like Sabine von Dirke, Gillian Pye, David Clarke and Richard Langston. 7 See, for instance, Heidi Schlipphacke’s essay ‘Melodrama’s Other: Entrapment and Escape in the Films of Tom Tykwer’, Camera Obscura, 21.2 (2006), 112–13. She argues that Jürgen Habermas and the Frankfurt School fomented an anti-postmodern attitude in Germany, later echoed by critics who associate postmodernism’s ‘anything goes’ approach with an unethical disinterest in recent history. This critique follows Fredric Jameson’s argument that postmodern pastiche and over-coded citations generally point away from history and invoke a problematic nostalgia.

4 

 Margaret McCarthy

Lest this altered trajectory sound simplistically optimistic, this introduction will underscore how ‘fluid’ identities signal something more than a slick worldliness lacking in complexity. Instead, the expanded signifying possibilities of a global arena often function as an enlarged echo chamber that preys upon pop protagonists’ psyches. And when history takes up residence within the echo chamber, its function is often less about underscoring its own diminished, postmodern status than revealing how protagonists with ‘fluid’ identities, like the protagonist in Faserland, struggle with a seemingly Nazi-ridden contemporary landscape. In addition to making a broader swathe of Anglo-American Germanists familiar with pop scholarship and how it has reshaped questions regarding Germany identity, the essays in this volume also refract Germany’s evolving identity in a post-millennial, media-saturated world.

What is Pop? Though the term ‘Pop-Literatur’ was first used by Austrian writer Hans Carl Artmann in 1964, it became ubiquitous in the late 1990s, as Frank Degler and Ute Paulokat observe in the introduction of Neue deutsche Popliteratur (2008).⁸ What they deem a ‘hardly a more controversial and heatedly debated term’, also functions as an all-purpose label that brought together very different kinds of texts.⁹ In most general terms, it tends to inspire long strings of splashy adjectives like ‘colourful’ and ‘shrill’. In a similar vein, some critics go with a general feeling, what Johannes Ullmaier, whose volume Von Acid nach Adlon (2001) evokes Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and Ralf-Rainer Rygulla’s 1969 ACID anthology, describes as one of vitality, speed and lightness.¹⁰ More concretely, Ullmaier also

8 Torsten Liesegang writes about Artmann’s attempts to search for a broader definition of literature in order to challenge the aesthetics of high modernism, years before Leslie A. Fiedler gave his seminal lecture at the University of Freiburg on literature and postmodernism in 1968. Liesegang observes: ‘Artmann had envisaged new academic approaches similar to what later came to be called cultural studies, and he underlined the necessity of accepting comics, films, etc. as cultural expressions of no lesser value than traditional forms of literature’. See ‘New German Pop Literature’, p. 263. 9 Anke Biendarra makes this point in her introductory ‘Editorial’ in Closing Borders, Bridging Gaps, 61–63 (p. 61). 10 Brinkmann and Rygulla’s Acid brought comic strips, pop art, photo montage and trivial literature to the German reading public, together with prose relating to the German student movement. The various definitions cited here from Ullmaier appear on pp.  13–14 in Von Acid nach Adlon.

Introduction 

 5

points to the accessories and rituals associated with pop’s heady mix of youth and popular culture; his richly illustrated volume features album and book covers, advertisements, posters and photos of performative events, from rock concerts to poetry slams. In temporal terms, the historical artefacts he collects reveal earlier attempts to construct a history of the present, what Eckhard Schumacher emphasizes in his volume Gerade Eben Jetzt. Schreibweisen der Gegenwart (2003). This fixation on the present, he argues, articulates itself in a writing process that quotes, copies and provides inventories. Surface-level aesthetics also become apparent in acoustic terms given that the word pop simulates ‘everything that makes a bang’.¹¹ Taken together, everyday objects, straightforward inventories of the present moment and imitative acoustics deflect attention from ‘big meaning’.¹²

Pop as Literary Genre Loose generic contours suggest themselves in the general shape of 1990s pop literature, which Torsten Liesegang has described as a ‘catchy brand name for a recognizable group of authors and for a fast-written, easy-to-digest commodity, produced for and well-received by a young audience’.¹³ The texts themselves, he observes, tend to take place in the present or immediate past and feature a young, first-person narrator lacking in the stable bonds of peer groups, family, class and subculture, and who ‘takes an unfocussed position within society, orienting himself according to attitudes of style and an affirmative response to consumer society’.¹⁴ Sandra Mehrfort emphasizes a darker underside in pop literature’s adolescent struggles, prompted by ‘love, misery, grief, alienation, existential crises initiated by drug experiences, sexuality and violence’.¹⁵ Placed in a longer historical context, works like von Stuckrad-Barre’s Soloalbum [Solo Album] evoke classic literary hallmarks of selfhood, like the loss of childhood innocence

11 Schumacher cites Jost Hermand as the source of this quotation, which dates to the early 1970s. More often critics cite Rainald Goetz as the source. See Schumacher, Gerade Eben Jetzt, p. 14. 12 Cited in Biendarra, ‘Pop & Politik: Formen von Engagement in der zeitgenössichen Popliteratur’, p. 127. Seiler also cites Roger Behrens’ observation: ‘Pop doesn’t necessarily mean the popular. But rather the boom or the puff (taken from the English “pop”)’. Quoted in Seiler, Das einfache wahre Abschreiben der Welt, p. 25. 13 Quoted in Liesegang, ‘New German Pop Literature’, p. 262. 14 Ibid., p. 263. 15 Mehrfort, Popliteratur, p. 47.

6 

 Margaret McCarthy

and the entry into the world of adults, as Katharina Rutschky argues.¹⁶ As I will discuss further below she plumbs connections between von Stuckrad-Barre’s initially angst-riddled protagonist and Kafka, as well as between Goethe’s young Werther and the protagonists of both Soloalbum and Faserland.

Pop and Affirmation While coming-of-age rubrics appear in works by Kracht and von Stuckrad-Barre, as well as by Hennig von Lange, Benjamin Lebert, Elke Naters, Florian Illies, Sven Regener and Rebecca Casati, a work like Tristesse Royale. Das popkulturelle Quintett [Tristesse Royale. The Popcultural Quintet] (1999), however, exhibits its own unique contours. In it five prominent male pop authors  – not just Kracht and von Stuckrad-Barre, but also Joachim Bessing, Eckhard Nickel and Alexander von Schönburg  – hold court at the Hotel Adlon, making pronouncements on politics, fashion, music, relationships and lifestyle trends, among other topics. Strikingly, this work exhibits pop literature’s less genre-bound and more attitudinal aspects, what Ullmaier defines more generally as a self-conscious demeanour and posturing that may inspire revolt or affirmation.¹⁷ If contrary political aims add to already blurry pop contours, Thomas Ernst’s critique of this text was unequivocal. Aligning it with snobbish, neoconservative values, he proclaimed: ‘This new pop literature is no longer an enraged protest against the status quo but rather pleasant background music to the Berlin Republic’.¹⁸ Wanton apoliticism does indeed appear to manifest itself as the protagonists observe a demonstration outside the Hotel Adlon and assess it solely in terms of its participants’ fashion sense. In more neutral terms, Sabine von Dirke actually identifies revolt in their overt posturing insofar as the quintet rejects the political terms with which their forebears, i. e. leftward-leaning 68ers, would assess a demonstration. Their ‘dandyism’ quite emphatically challenges the sanctimonious derision associated with a once rebellious, now establishment-based genera-

16 Katharina Rutschky, ‘Wertherzeit. Der Poproman  – Merkmale eines unerkannten Genres’, Deutsche Zeitschrift für europäisches Denken, 57.2 (February 2003), 106–17 (p. 107). 17 Chapter one, ‘Republik Royal’, of Von Acid nach Adlon lists these characteristics, defining pop as well in relation to ‘current music charts; folk and medial popularity; a complex frame of aesthetic traditions; a variegated style of music; a direction of art that is in no way cohesive; but also a creative attitude and approach to incorporating material’, pp. 13–14. 18 See Ernst, Popliteratur, p. 75.

Introduction 

 7

tion.¹⁹ Yet many critics nonetheless have questioned whether the pop quintet’s ironic, disdainful proclamations have served a larger, specifically literary function.

Aesthetic Strategies and Marketing Imperatives A fifteen-year gap between then and now has given scholars ample time to locate earlier forms of literary dandyism, which makes it harder to reduce the popcultural quintet to some kind of youthful, ill-advised aberration unique to own historical moment. Sandra Mehrfort, for instance, cites authors writing at the end of the nineteenth century whose decadent attitude emphasized aestheticism and l’art pour l’art in order to critique a progressive, science-driven modernity.²⁰ Kaspar Maase’s Die Schönheiten des Populären. Ästhetische Erfahrung der Gegenwart makes it possible to link the ‘Eventisierung’ [eventification] that characterizes pop and the pop quintet’s posturing in particular with tendencies that began in the 1980s, namely an ‘aestheticization of the everyday’. Maase traces an even longer history of middle class subjects striving for ‘a sensual-creative styling of life and environment’ that historically characterized nobility alone.²¹ An emphasis on styling, as opposed to high culture aesthetics, suggests on the one hand cultural studies’ more egalitarian approach to the semiotic possibilities of the social field. Yet to ‘aestheticize the everyday’ elevates it to a more rarefied realm where hierarchies inevitably result, despite the otherwise populist nature of consumer culture. As I will discuss further below, when pop transforms consumer choices into ‘Geschmacksterrorismus’ [terrorism of taste] – what von Stuckrad-Barre’s Soloalbum appeared to embody to many – it transforms cultural studies’ belief in empowering, subversive semiotic possibilities available to all into something more narrowly self-interested. At the same time, the performative nature of pop marketing events may in fact involve something more complicated than putting superior taste on display.

19 Von Dirke points out that many contemporary politicians – perhaps most notably Joschka Fischer – as well as novelists, media personalities and intellectual figures were once 68ers and are now quite firmly positioned within the establishment, a trajectory which would seem to justify a modicum of pop disdain. See ‘Pop Literature in the Berlin Republic’, in Contemporary German Fiction. Writing in the Berlin Republic, ed. by Stuart Taberner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 108–24. 20 Mehrfort, Popliteratur, pp. 30–31. 21 Maase, Die Schönheiten des Populären, pp. 9–11.

8 

 Margaret McCarthy

Degler and Paulokat observe: ‘The marketing of the pop novel as cult and its creators as pop stars is one of the most important and striking characteristics in the production and reception of 90s pop literature  – just as much as the selfevident manner and virtuosity with which producers and recipients of pop culture move about the medial world’.²² Though they describe this particular aspect of pop literature in neutral terms, other critics were often wary of the commercial marketing strategies employed by pop authors to promote themselves.²³ These strategies make sense, however, given the fact that many pop authors began their careers in the media branch: Alexa Hennig von Lange was once a Benetton model and the moderator of a children’s television show; Florian Illies was a FAZ journalist; and Christian Kracht wrote for Der Spiegel. Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre’s media-based résumé includes editing the German Rolling Stone, writing for talk show host Harald Schmidt, hosting an MTV show on literature and working as a free-lance journalist for major newspapers such as FAZ, Die Woche, Stern and taz. Their various activities both before and behind the media curtain appear to collapse the divide between star and employee in the media industry, a strategy no doubt meant to empower them in the face of marketing imperatives that normally override individual egos. In this sense the pop quintet’s dandyism could be understood as its own kind of performance, and one which displays media expertise rather than simple egotism. Melding these two roles, however, to the point where only the shiny surface of celebrity remains deserves critique. On the one hand, it belies the authors’ journalistic roots insofar as this role requires detached observation capable of seeing past the surface to expose what lies beneath. Earlier journalists like Günter Wallraff, of course, quite emphatically and literally embodied this imperative, given his undercover efforts to expose a whole variety of societal ills, perhaps most famously racism in his controversial work ganz unten [Lowest of the Low] (1985). Strikingly, by disguising himself as a Turk, he, too, adopted his own kind of performative stance, even if one of hidden subterfuge, which positioned him like the pop authors as the medial protagonist of his own narratives. At the same

22 Degler and Paulokat, Neue deutsche Popliteratur, p. 9. 23 In the introduction to Neue deutsche Popliteratur, editors Frank Degler and Ute Paulokat observe: ‘The feuilleton critique was based on a few recurring arguments: they mainly accused the pop authors of lacking political ambition. Furthermore their business smarts were viewed with suspicion. The authors’ blunt marketing strategies and resulting commercial success appeared to large parts of the literary establishment highly dubious; what is more, through them the young authors challenged the traditional concept of the author: their public image as such – unfazed by the marketplace, the unabashed pursuit of literature as entertainment – was a provocation’, pp. 7–8.

Introduction 

 9

time it is hard to imagine Wallraff wearing his frequent disguises with the postmodern insouciance that characterizes Tristesse Royale if the point is to crack the surface of things. Equally important, both a leftist alienation from the status quo that motivates gonzo journalism and a selfhood that appears to possess the keys to the (postmodern) master’s house bespeak an agency not available to everyone.

Pop and Gender In this regard, gender should immediately come to the fore when one assesses the relationship between pop and marketing. If we bracket performative dandyism and provocative pronouncements and focus on image alone, Alexa Hennig von Lange’s face on the cover of Relax and von Stuckrad-Barre and Kracht modelling men’s fashion in a 1999 Peek und Cloppenburg advertisement bear comparison. Emphasizing the ad as another way of marketing his works, von Stuckrad-Barre cites an emphatic unwillingness to ‘torture’ himself with the suitability of this venue and casts it instead as a stylized challenge to boring book publication events.²⁴ He thus views his modelling gig in practical, reactive terms and overall creates a sense of himself as the impresario of his own objectification. Given the more complicated relationship between women and popular culture, one wonders if von Hennig von Lange exercises the same degree of agency over her image as book cover. If one considers the roughly contemporaneous literary phenomenon of the ‘Fräuleinwunder’ [miraculous young women], which slapped an antiquated label on women of different ages and writing in very different styles, then the answer is probably no.²⁵ Yet if one looks beyond the cover of Relax, one finds Hennig von Lange’s protagonist struggling with unresolved issues of power, with stakes far too high for the mocking condescension so often evident in novels by male pop authors. Issues of alterity automatically enter the picture when women try to find their identity in the mirror of consumer culture. In Relax this realm includes the comic book character Vampirella, whose phallic breasts and dominion over men make her a particularly unattainable feminine ideal.

24 See ‘Wir tragen Größe 46’ (http://www.zeit.de/1999/37/199937.reden_stuckrad_k.xml). 25 Peter J. Graves has critiqued the lumping together of women with different writing styles with the belittling ‘Fräulein’ label as both artificial and misleading. In this instance, however, the fault lies not with marketing strategies but Der Spiegel journalist Volker Hage in a March 1999 essay for the magazine. See Graves’ ‘Karen Duve, Kathrin Schmidt, Judith Hermann: “ein literarisches Fräuleinwunder”?’, German Life and Letters, 55.2 (April 2002), 196–207.

10 

 Margaret McCarthy

Cultural studies again emphasizes individually salutary, subversive uses of popular culture available to everyone, a position which bends over backwards to correct the wide divide between the ‘haves’ with access to high culture and the ‘have nots’ who must make do with mass culture and improvise an empowering relationship to it. The ease with which male pop authors appear to meld self with image, however, deserves close analysis, particularly if one tries to imagine what a ‘have’ might be in postmodern terms. On the one hand this stance appears to avoid the alienation that characterizes coming-of-age narratives. Instead it links the pleasurable doubling of credulous children before the mirror – where self is synonymous with image – with an effete, less credulous adult who nonetheless finds his identity there as well, simply in more detached fashion. At both ends of the spectrum, one senses identities that anchor themselves in a comforting play of sameness, rather than in more estranging symbolic forms. As much as male pop authors manifest adult ironic detachment, the manner in which they use pop culture as a form of primal differentiation – think again of the pop quintet assessing demonstrators in terms of their fashion sense – suggests the more childlike impetus to meld with imaginary forms as the means to assert selfhood. Even if Kracht’s and von Stuckrad-Barre’s protagonists, as I have suggested, use popular culture in a manner that subtly highlights deeply troubled identities, their personas in the public sphere smack of privilege, particularly when Kracht describes how he likes to use vacation photos on his book jackets because he looks so nice and tanned.²⁶ However ironic this statement may be, it feels like another form of disdain for those with lesser financial means. Overall one gets a sense of someone viewing things not so much from the outside looking in, but from above looking down.²⁷

26 ‘Wir tragen Größe 46’. 27 Irony itself, as one of the most oft-cited characteristics of pop, has inspired its own share of scholarship, including Christoph Berlin Rauen’s Pop und Ironie: Popdiskurs und Popliteratur um 1980 und 2000. As with other scholars who provided a longer historical frame for the pop quintet’s dandyism, he also cites earlier examples of irony, including Friedrich Schlegel’s early Romantic conception of it. Even more broadly, he assesses irony in anthropological and even evolutionary terms. Degler und Paulokat insert pop literature’s uses of irony within a specifically twentieth-century frame: ‘Irony enables popmodern literature to move itself out of the aesthetic dead end of silence – the silence of Modernity which, in the face of a morally complex world, can hardly trust its own language anymore’. See Neue deutsche Popliteratur, p. 107. At the same time one wonders if the pronouncement on the back of Kracht’s 1999 volume of essays Mesopotamia – which quotes the Jarvis Cocker line ‘Irony is over’ – suggests a change of course or is simply a retort to literary critics.

Introduction 

 11

Pop and Music Other basic characteristics of pop, however, make it possible to shift the discussion from snobbish bravura and gendered inequities to pleasurable somatic responses, which open the door a bit wider for easy identification despite the tyrannies of taste. Many scholars have identified the centrality of music, as both theme and structuring model, in pop novels. Though it functions, as Pierre Bourdieu has argued, as one of the main expressions of personal taste, which aligns music with social categories of class and education, it also fuelled the collective, orgiastic experiences of rave and the Love Parade as cultural touchstones for the 1990s.²⁸ As one critic put it, ‘one can easily find oneself in pop novels because one knows the albums’.²⁹ But as much as dissolving bodily boundaries on the dance floor appear to obliterate the distance between self and symbolic form, part of music’s appeal also rests on the promise of authenticity and individuality, most enticingly embodied in its underground forms. In other words, a somatically induced, seeming loss of self can simultaneously affirm selfhood as wholly unique, providing one picks the right soundtrack to conjure this effect. Indeed, precisely these characteristics of authenticity and spontaneity  – the various unmediated elements one associates with live performances  – began attracting pop artists in the early 1960s.³⁰ If, as scholars of pop often point out, German literature took longer to embrace pop, part of the problem might have been the manner in which authenticity and spontaneity seem antithetical to a notion of art with timeless qualities. Peppering novels with clearly recognizable, contemporary mass culture forms may merely assure a short shelf life, a familiar charge against popular culture in general which Moritz Baßler underscores in his work Der deutsche Pop-Roman. Die neuen Archivisten (2002). In fact, music itself may be the arena where pop

28 Chlada, Dembowski and Ünlü, for instance, observe how Bourdieu emphasizes ‘the particular suitability of music to determine social distinctions. No practice can stratify more powerfully (i. e. nothing signifies social class and cultural capital better) than the regular attendance of concerts and playing a musical instrument’. See Alles Pop?, pp. 17–18. 29 See Jörg Sundermeier, ‘Neue deutsche Vague: Pop-Romane sind da, wo eine Heimat ist’ (http://jungle-world.com/artikel/2000/18/27872.html). 30 Schumacher observes: ‘If one revisits the debates about the nature of pop literature at the end of the 1960s, the new view of literature that emerged in events like poetry slams is not so novel after all. Even twenty-five years ago spontaneity and directness, the reflection of daily life and currentness, wit and the pleasure principle were central to the demand for new ways of writing which were to realize in literature what had already become normal in pop art and pop music’, Gerade Eben Jetzt, p. 25.

12 

 Margaret McCarthy

most clearly ‘eats itself’, as critics are fond of observing. As Chlada, Dembowski and Ünlü assert in the introduction to Alles Pop? Kapitalismus & Subversion: ‘The music industry can feed any street slang and any electronic beep into the mainstream and make it mass compatible’.³¹ They also argue that the music industry upholds the categories of mainstream and underground as a way of cultivating identification based on hierarchical distinctions. In this manner that powerful, somatically-induced sense of uniqueness that music conjures has already been culturally underwritten.

Pop and Generational Rubrics As much as music invites immediate, difference-levelling bodily responses that art likes to imitate, it also cultivates identification along more psychological lines, what in the 1990s often played out in terms of generational differences. This aspect bears close examination first off for offering a middle-ground between cerebral dandyism on the one hand and music’s more egalitarian ubiquity on the other. And a psychological approach could also explain some of pop’s basic contrarian impulses. Wilful superficiality may actually be as much about the need to separate from a parent generation by cultivating its disdain as being wantonly affirmative of consumer and popular culture. As Dirk Frank observes: If the parents have made their quest for self-fulfilment and eternal youth a perpetual project, the subsequent generation can at least practice a form of resistance to which they can have an exclusive claim for a long time: that of a divergent style.³²

Florian Illies’s bestselling Generation Golf (2000) provides the most obvious alignment of pop literature with a generational rubric, and in it ‘divergent style’ purposefully ensconces itself within the mainstream. Illies’s autobiographical work alternately chides and celebrates a generation of Germans, including himself, born between 1965 and 1975, whose identity rests firmly on the consumer artefacts that populated their childhood, like plastic Playmobil figurines. Significantly, within Illies’s overt, if self-consciously adolescent jibes at 68ers,

31 Chlada, Dembowski and Ünlü, Alles Pop?, p. 24. 32 Dirk Frank, ‘“Talking about my generation”: Generationskonstrukte in der zeitgenössischen Pop-Literatur’, Deutschunterricht: Beträge zu seiner Praxis und wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen, 52.5 (October 2000), 69–85 (p. 75).

Introduction 

 13

Liesegang identifies a more conservative undertone. More specifically, he identifies affinities in Generation Golf with Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ theory, which argued that dissent was obsolete, and with Martin Walser’s disgruntlement over the perpetual demands of ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ [coming to terms with the past].³³ Yet when consumer artefacts like Playmobil figurines populate the text’s surface, one senses a quite purposeful switch of register, in this case from the political to the trivial, which again displays differentiation in highly pronounced form. Like the pop quintet, who assess the fashion sense of demonstrators in downtown Berlin, Illies attempts to completely undo the very terms with which selfhood was construed by an earlier generation. And if fashion works metaphorically in postmodern terms to signal something loosely donned, toys take us back to an earlier moment utterly lacking in self-aware detachment. Instead toys provide for children a means to begin laying the very foundations of identity. As metaphor they work well with Frank’s more psychologically than politically-based vantage point. His analysis of pop literature actually takes stock of a variety of generational constructs that emerged during the 1990s, which include not only Generation Golf, but also the 78ers, 89ers, Generation Berlin, Generation XTC and Generation @.³⁴ Critiques of youthful differentiation along generational lines invariably underscore the problems of insularity. Enno Stahl has observed that pop literature communicates via ‘key stimuli’ more social/cultural in nature than literary.³⁵ Similarly, Torsten Liesegang argues that 1990s pop literature differs from earlier experimental pop forms because the later was in search of adequate expressions for new experiences, which underscores a struggle that plays out on a linguistic level.³⁶ Implicitly, one senses a contemporary generation too immersed in the here and now to tap into a longer literary history in which linguistic struggles feel noble by comparison. Frank adds wilfulness to the equation when he writes: ‘One practically “invents” one’s past according to the needs of contemporary definitions and distinctions’.³⁷ So not only do pop authors purportedly ignore an implicitly more exalted literary past, they use a ‘gerade eben jetzt’ [just now] principle to rewrite the past according to highly individual needs. In this regard one gets a sense of cultural studies’ emphasis on the particularities of individual reception – on what we do with culture, not what it does to us – operating in a

33 Liesegang, ‘New German Pop Literature’, pp. 269–71. 34 Frank, ‘Talking about my generation’, p. 69. 35 Stahl, ‘Popliteratur – eine fragwürdige Kategorie’, p. 67. 36 Liesegang, ‘New German Pop Literature’, p. 274. 37 Frank, ‘Talking about my generation’, p. 70.

14 

 Margaret McCarthy

much narrower sense. Rather than resisting power blocks and dominant culture, youthful subjects operate in a much more self-interested, rather than subversive way.

Pop and Subversion While opposition constitutes one of pop’s core elements, its shape-shifting quality should also be emphasized. Not only do historical circumstances change over time, but their contours will always look different at any given moment depending on the person observing them. Pop artists of the 1960s and German post-World War II left-wing intelligentsia, of course, made critiquing the status quo their modus operandi; a younger generation’s psychological imperative to differentiate itself may have pre-ordained challenges to parental dogmatism via irritatingly affirmative effects. If Gerhard Schröder’s red-green coalition embodied to many the triumph of a generation that came of age during the student movement, pop literature was often equally persuasive in conjuring 68ers as dreary, superfluous has-beens.³⁸ With this disdain so clearly on display it should hardly surprise that critical response to pop has often consisted of a simple refusal to bequeath an older generation’s leftist patrimony. A singular focus on political rebellion, however, may overlook the myriad political resonances of aesthetic form. If an egalitarian cultural studies approach makes an emphasis on aesthetics look misguided, Hans-Otto Hügel insists on retaining it as a category of analysis for popular culture. For him the social and the aesthetic are two sides of the same coin, and scholars should observe not only what recipients make of cultural forms, but also the intended meanings attached to them as well.³⁹ Various scholars have in fact looked beyond all the obvious forms of superficiality, apoliticism and adolescent gestures of differentiation in pop literature, identifying in the process more than simply a ‘divergent style’.

38 In Faserland, for instance, the narrator describes 1990s student protesters tripping over their Doc Martens’ shoe laces at demonstrations; von Stuckrad-Barre’s protagonist is equally contemptuous, imagining roommates hanging their SPD magnets on refrigerators next to cleaning schedules. 39 He writes: ‘Researching popular culture is a science in the sense that it has to consider, in equal terms, the meaning of entertainment offerings and the actual entertainment consumption in their interdependence, accounting for social and medial contexts in which both are grounded; thus both the intended meaning and the reception through real users become visible’. See HansOtto Hügel, ed., Handbuch Populäre Kultur, p. 18.

Introduction 

 15

Instead they have pursued intertextual traces within a longer literary/historical frame, which in turn situates selfhood in relation to Germany’s weighty historical discourses and perennial debates about historical consciousness.

Pop Intertextuality and Canonical Works Various scholars, for instance, have noticed the manner in which Thomas Mann hovers over Faserland, beyond the protagonist’s search in its final pages for his grave.⁴⁰ David Clarke and Gary Schmidt have mined the novel’s links to Tod in Venedig [Death in Venice] (1911) for instance. Mann’s Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen [Reflections of an Unpolitical Man] (1918) also comes to mind given the apoliticism with which pop authors have been charged. Apoliticism in Mann’s case, of course, belies his nationalistic support of a German ‘Sonderweg’ [separate path] in Betrachtungen and his post-World War II attempt to ascribe guilt to all Germans, including his expatriate self. At the other end of the century, Kracht’s protagonist clearly suffers the ever-present effects of National Socialism as the ‘Sonderweg’s’ calamitous endpoint. But unlike the political evolution that Mann’s example suggests, Kracht’s protagonist merely manifests a range of contradictory attitudes – a hatred of anything that seems even vaguely fascist, but also unwittingly reactionary tendencies. Overall one senses a profoundly fractured identity only nominally held together by that much vaunted Barbour jacket. Apoliticism in his case lays the groundwork less for a self-satisfied, unified ego than bipolar extremes which consumer artefacts hardly contain and abate. The opening of Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre’s Soloalbum, as Katharina Rutschky has argued, clearly references Kafka, as the protagonist lies in bed, imagining a foreign presence about to break into his apartment and assault his bodily boundaries.⁴¹ (She also argues that the unrequited love that drives the plot alludes to Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers [The Sorrows of Young Werther] (1774). With the primal Angst that initiates Soloalbum in mind, the many consumer artefacts that the protagonist catalogues throughout the novel could be understood as a form of armour, as a way to thicken the parameters of selfhood in the face of imagined threats.⁴² Pop culture as salve rather than source

40 Many critics, too, underscore affinities between Kracht’s work and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991). 41 Thomas Ernst also notes the novel’s similarities with Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity (1995). 42 See Margaret McCarthy, ‘Somnolent Selfhood. Winterschläfer and Generation Golf’, New German Critique, 37.1 (Winter 2010), 53–74 (p. 69).

16 

 Margaret McCarthy

of ‘Geschmacksterrorismus’ shifts the discussion considerably, since it deflects attention from the façade to a wounded, fragile interiority. Gender comes into play again if one considers the degree of damage done and how to repair it. Degler and Paulokat have argued that Arthur Schnitzler’s 1924 novella Fräulein Else [Miss Else] provides a literary template for Alexa Hennig von Lange’s protagonist in Relax, with each work depicting a young woman’s striving for emancipation in the face of patriarchal power.⁴³ Relax complicates this struggle by putting on vivid display a female psyche deeply confused by the emancipatory politics associated with the second-wave and the more performative, exhibitionistic style of thirdwave feminism. The protagonist’s complicated fantasies about the aggressively phallic Vampirella combine both performative pleasures with a second-wave aim to correct sexism, even if Vampirella herself embodies a sexist ideal.

Historical Roots and Rolf Dieter Brinkmann Vampirella’s comic book form and soft-porn look invites comparisons to the many forms of American popular culture that Rolf Dieter Brinkmann embraced in his work, their effect on his own identity and critical/scholarly reaction to his literary endeavours. Various scholars have looked closely at his translations and appropriations of American underground culture, particularly the Beat Poets and works of Frank O’Hara, as well as Hollywood film, film noir, B-pictures, pop art, comics, advertising and pornography. Brinkmann’s mistrust of verbal communication led him to embrace the surface of things, an aspect that suggests basic affinities with emerging postmodern theory and later pop forms in the 1990s. In Framed Visions. Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination (1999) Gerd Gemünden cites an essay Brinkmann wrote about O’Hara which announces: ‘We live in the surface of things, we make up this surface, there is nothing on the other side – the back is empty’.⁴⁴ Spatial metaphors as touchstones of postmodernism invariably collapse distinctions not only between surface and depth, but also more generally challenge the binaries that underpinned modernism in order to cultivate its exalted aura.⁴⁵ When Gemünden describes the avant-garde aim to turn art into something prac-

43 See Degler and Paulokat, Neue deutsche Popliteratur, pp. 74–84. 44 Quoted in Gemünden, Framed Visions. Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), p. 43. 45 Gemünden cites Dada and Surrealism in particular as having already challenged the autonomy of art long before postmodern theory began underscoring art’s mediated status: ‘The denial

Introduction 

 17

tical and to aestheticize the social realm as a means of ‘closing the gap between art and life’, he echoes Leslie Fiedler’s famous 1968 lecture at the University of Freiburg, ‘Close the Border  – Cross the Gap’. In arguing for a new postmodern literature that closed the gap between high and low culture, Fiedler legitimated the kind of intense, subjective engagement with American low and underground culture that figured centrally in Brinkmann’s works. His seminal text serves as an omnipresent touchstone for contemporary scholars of pop, who understand Brinkmann, and sometimes him alone, as having followed Fiedler’s mandate. Drawing on Michel de Certeau, Gemünden argues that Brinkmann rewrites German cultural traditions by ‘fusing and refusing, using and abusing, forming and transforming’ them to create a hybrid and genuine form of artistic expression, if not to challenge German culture with ‘impurity, playfulness, subversions, ambiguity, and irony’.⁴⁶ This process, in turn, transforms the alienation normally prompted by alterity into something more pleasurable, with Brinkmann cultivating ‘a sensibility […] that knows how to react to contemporary impulses without feeling guilty, and yet without losing itself in these impulses so that it would produce a mere doubling’.⁴⁷ Brinkmann’s assertion that it matters ‘in which images we live and with which images we combine our own images’ underscores a staging of the self in ways that alter selfhood, as well as traditional forms of German culture.⁴⁸ In this sense he not only enacts the basic cultural studies imperative to subvert the status quo with everyday forms of culture, but also embodies something more exalted and indeed humanistic in literary terms insofar as he struggled with language to alter and improve a specifically German selfhood.

Pop Scholarship since the 1980s Yet forty-year-old aesthetic strategies may have pre-programmed tunnel vision among contemporary critics if one considers a provocative statement from Fiedler’s lecture: ‘Established critics may think that they have been judging recent literature; but, in fact, recent literature has been judging them’.⁴⁹ Certainly one

of depth is first of all a polemic against the elitism and esotericism of abstract expressionism and against the legacy of modernism in general’. Ibid., p. 46. 46 Ibid., pp. 17, 36. 47 Ibid., p. 63. 48 Ibid., p. 65. 49 ‘Cross the Border – Close the Gap’, p. 461.

18 

 Margaret McCarthy

would hope that the time-lag between literary critics writing about newly published works in the 1990s and Germanists swooping in to autopsy the ‘Spaßgesellschaft’s’ corpse would have enabled the latter to adjust their approach in order to understand an altered literary landscape. Fiedler’s notion of critique capable of doing justice to a then emerging postmodern literature emphasizes, for starters, attitude as much as artful exegesis. In this regard critic Diedrich Diederichsen may be pop’s best advocate for his exuberantly impious observations. In his review of Lady Gaga’s album Born this Way, for instance, he lauds her performance art strategies but bemoans her ‘talent for vapid hymns for those under the age of five and sentimental night owl gunk’.⁵⁰ Edgy cant notwithstanding, Diederichsen, former editor of the magazine Sounds, was part of the new theory culture of the 1980s and became one of its prominent pop theorists.⁵¹ And rather than simply melding his voice with the spirit of pop, Diederichsen does, in fact, provide useful taxonomies for critics and scholars, while also issuing a call for more considered assessment of pop literature of the 1990s. In an essay entitled ‘Die 90er, und dahinter die Unendlichkeit’ [‘The 90s and Then Infinity’], written in the late 1990s, Diederichsen meditates on the ubiquity of the term pop. The wide-ranging forms he identifies – from Guildo Horn to Harald Schmidt  – make one wonder if Fiedler’s injunction to close the gap resulted in a big, diffuse entity that in no way, as Diederichsen insists, reflects the triumph of an earlier generation’s democratizing impulses.⁵² In attempting to give pop as ‘dummy term’ well-defined contours, he does echo pop literature’s initial detractors, particularly when he underscores the distance pop has travelled from rebellious roots. ‘Pop I’ and ‘Pop II’, as he defines them, stand principally for pop from the 1960s through the 1980s and later pop in the 1990s, with the former invested in border-crossing impulses of all sorts and the latter more generally in a pluralized public sphere which includes all voices. Diederichsen argues that all too often the public sphere’s many voices  – on talk shows and news programs and in the ‘edutainment industry’ – tend to reproduce authori-

50 See ‘Ich will deinen Whiskey-Mund’ (http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/lady-gaga-ich-willdeinen-whiskey-mund/4213554.html). 51 Sascha Seiler cites him as having used the influence of punk and new wave in the late 1970s and early 1980s to articulate a new poststructuralist, Birmingham School-inspired concept of pop. See Seiler, Das einfache wahre Abschreiben der Welt, p. 15. 52 Diederichsen writes: ‘While there is no institutional mainstream anymore which used to assimilate codes of pop culture into commensurable codes of the dominant underling culture, one should not fall back on crazy extremes like that ‘we’ had won and a new age of democracy had begun’. See Diederichsen, ‘Die 90er, und dahinter die Unendlichkeit’, in Der lange Weg nach Mitte. Der Sound und die Stadt (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1999), pp. 272–86 (p. 282).

Introduction 

 19

tarian stances.⁵³ Voices of dissent become part of a homogenizing whole whose overlapping forms of pop no longer cultivate individual communities but instead feed a larger, undifferentiated matrix. Similar bifurcating impulses emerge among critics who underscore the opposing camps of Suhrkamp vs. KiWi (Kiepenheuer & Witsch) pop, two publishing houses with presumably differing aesthetic/political aims. Older authors from the 1980s like Thomas Meinecke, Rainald Goetz, Andreas Neumeister and Dietmar Rath comprise the Suhrkamp fraction, with Kracht, von Stuckrad-Barre and Hennig von Lange in the KiWi camp. Eckhard Schumacher’s description of writing practices centred very much in the present identifies formal complexities in Suhrkamp authors, specifically a form of writing that produces that which it describes: ‘currentness, the present moment or at least the “illusion” of the present moment’.⁵⁴ Neumeister’s book Angela Davis löscht ihre Website [Angela Davis Deletes her Website] (2002) provides a compelling example: its shortened words, brand names, news fragments, sentences and quotes from public and private discourse, transformed in rhythmical and repetitive ways, demonstrate how the impression of ‘currentness’ is produced in mass, medial form. Literary traditions provide a less useful point of reference for this process than pop music; in fact, critics often compare Thomas Meinecke’s style to his alter ego as DJ.⁵⁵ Drawing on a more diachronic temporality, Moritz Baßler describes pop as a ‘literature of secondary words that work with the material of what has already been said’.⁵⁶ What interests him is a pop author’s ‘feel for linguistic games, severed ties, cultural paradigms and dialogism’ collected on the page in archival fashion, and the critic’s task becomes analysing the innovations that result.⁵⁷ In Der deutsche Pop-Roman he examines the archiving tendencies among pop authors that draw on a larger cultural encyclopaedia. Strikingly, Baßler focuses on authors that cross the divide between Pop I (Thomas Meinecke) and Pop II (Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre and Christian Kracht). Yet good pop to him neither

53 Ibid., p. 277. 54 Schumacher, Gerade Eben Jetzt, p. 17. 55 Echoing this approach, Stahl describes Meinecke’s method in terms of his long-term work as a DJ, emphasizing how he uses ‘found items, things already said, set pieces from secondary literature and the Internet’. He then combines these elements in his texts to create a melting pot or stream of data. Stahl quotes Meinecke making the connection to his work as DJ explicit: ‘So I sit here at my desk between piles of books, which are also records, and pull my material from them according to the musical logic of a DJ’. Quoted in Stahl, ‘Popliteratur – eine fragwürdige Kategorie’, p. 75. 56 Baßler, Der deutsche Pop-Roman, p. 185. 57 Ibid., p. 186.

20 

 Margaret McCarthy

affirms nor challenges the status quo but simply immerses itself in the semantic possibilities of a cultural encyclopaedia. It goes without saying, of course, that disadvantaged groups often have bigger aims in mind when they tamper with signifying processes, namely exposing or blunting the effects of traditional social divisions.⁵⁸ Not surprisingly, Baßler’s work and many other volumes on pop feature little or no attention to female writers. If Pop I describes the kinds of aesthetically innovative authors that generally please literary critics, their scholarly reception, as Baßler’s work demonstrates, sometimes brackets politics, ironically just the thing that scholars and critics so often blame Pop II for lacking. And narrow assumptions about Pop II may also ignore the manner in which KiWi has long nurtured anti-establishment writers, including Brinkmann. Kerstin Gleba and Eckhard Schumacher’s anthology Pop seit 1964 [Pop since 1964] (2007) showcases a long, distinguished line of KiWi authors, including Peter Handke, Hubert Fichte, Brinkmann and Ralf Rainer Rygulla, Elfriede Jelinek, Jörg Fauser, Diederichsen, Goetz, Neumeister and Meinecke, alongside later pop authors like von Stuckrad-Barre, Hennig von Lange, Elke Naters, Joachim Bessing, Katrin Röggla, Rebecca Casati and Kerstin Grether. It should be emphasized that this volume goes a long way towards correcting the gender imbalance in other works on pop that focus, as I have mentioned, solely or mostly on men.⁵⁹ KiWi’s affiliation with Kölner Realismus or New Realism of the 1960s also provides less-respected Pop II authors with ‘an earnest underbelly […] that grapples with the cultural, social, and even political markers informing personal and indeed national conceptions of self’, as Carrie Smith-Prei has argued.⁶⁰ Dieter Wellershoff, KiWi editor from 1959 to 1981, defined this genre in various essays in terms of a reality captured by a protagonist whose perceptions are coloured by emotional, psychological and physical particularities.⁶¹ With this literary backdrop in mind, Smith-Prei focuses specifically on disruptive bodies, particularly

58 I make the same point in an essay entitled ‘Feminism and Generational Conflicts in Alexa Hennig von Lange’s Relax, Elke Naters’s Lügen, and Charlotte Roche’s Feuchtgebiete’, Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature, 35.1 (Winter 2011), 56–73 (p. 57). 59 In less generous terms, however, it could be understood as a rear-guard action to legitimate fluffy 1990s authors, as Enno Stahl has argued: ‘It’s obvious why Kerstin Gleba, as chief editor at Kiepenheuer & Witsch, would be interested in making such a connection: this enhances the value of the KiWi authors of the 1990s, gives them a literary historical meaning that they lost long ago in the literary establishment’. See ‘Popliteratur – eine fragwürdige Kategorie’, p. 69. 60 Smith-Prei, ‘Kölner Realismus Redux. The Legacy of 1960s Realism in Postunification Literature’, in Closing Borders, Bridging Gaps, ed. by Anke Biendarra, 81–93 (p. 82). 61 Ibid., p. 83.

Introduction 

 21

in Faserland. Given the manner in which the protagonist shits and pukes his way across Germany, one observes the ‘difficulty in establishing an individual identity within the international world of style, media, and brand names by rupturing the otherwise immaculate surface of the pop narrative’.⁶² Similarly disruptive are what Adorno has called the ‘distortions of late modern society’, which emerge, as Anke Biendarra has argued, in novels by Katrin Röggla. In them she reveals how neoliberal power structures create self-alienated, degraded, zombie-like subjects. More pointedly, such subjects perform and continually reconstitute the power structures that determine them, in a negative rendition of Judith Butler’s theories of selfhood.⁶³

New Critical Approaches With these examples in mind, the critic’s task should extend beyond searching for successful examples of subversion in order to witness instead how often subjectivity falters and fails, particularly at the hands of a commodity-driven culture. If one searches for both the deformities that Horkheimer and Adorno imagine the culture industry inflicting and the tactics that Michel de Certeau argues we use to negotiate our everyday lives, complex and often contradictory identities emerge. Seemingly smug and undivided characters, in fact, may begin to betray traces of ennui and melancholy, and one might notice the narrative elements that Degler and Paulokat identify in 1990s pop novels, namely illness, death and cruelty.⁶⁴ Equally important, agitated bodies in more contemporary pop works suggest something different than Brinkmann’s pleasurable doubling with non-German pop culture forms. Oddly, in trying to blend with forms that hardly constitute a form of alterity in a contemporary world of global consumerism, some pop protagonists nonetheless experience a psychic and physical unease rather than a comforting sense of sameness. Once somatic and psychological responses become a defining narrative element, Brinkmann’s statement about how ‘it matters in which cultural images we merge ourselves’ takes on new meaning insofar as staging selfhood with the accoutrements of consumer culture can prompt subjective responses hardly pleasurable. Brinkmann finding himself in non-German forms should be the more

62 Ibid., p. 92. 63 See Biendarra, ‘Pop und Politik: Formen von Engagement in der zeitgenössischen Popliteratur’, pp. 133–41. 64 Degler and Paulokat, Neue deutsche Popliteratur, p. 13.

22 

 Margaret McCarthy

difficult endeavour because it requires prying himself loose from ‘big meaning’ and traditional, high cultural forms. Yet literary critics prefer this high-minded aim, even if activated by low culture forms, to far less lofty struggles in which protagonists demonstrate the difficulty of staging selfhood along empowering lines. If we set aside our own political and aesthetical expectations for what selfhood should aspire to be, we see it in all its complex, misguided messiness. And possessing more fluid boundaries across a global landscape simply brings a new set of problems that depart from those we associate with ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’. In spatial terms, one could understand coming to terms with the past as a form of anchoring; fluid, global Germanness may conversely dilute the processes by which selfhood takes on defining, sustainable contours.

The Essays Diederichsen’s essay ‘Die 90er, und dahinter die Unendlichkeit’ ends with the observation that Pop II is ‘neither good nor bad, but precisely because it is there for all who want to make money with it, who want to make their voices heard or live correctly in false forms, it should become an object of analysis for state supported scholars’.⁶⁵ He continues with the injunction that Pop II’s relationship to Pop I, as well as its oppositional tendencies, should be studied and strengthened. As this introduction’s overview of scholarship on pop reveals, a surge of attention to pop has indeed ensued. The essays in this volume respond to Diedrichsen’s call as well, while often implicitly or overtly challenging initial critical responses to pop along lines made possible by scholarship from the last decade. Without recognizing the longer literary history embedded within pop literature’s ‘presentness’, early critics often simply activated a pre-programmed non-affirmative attitude towards the consumerist bases of identity. Yet Werther-like progeny requires a ‘caveat emptor’ stance towards protagonists who may be pre-programmed to flail and go under. And if postmodern theory has rendered naïve the dream of rebellion against cultural parameters  – the traditional romantic outsider that Werther recalls – the more postmodern strategy of subversion within them may be equally deserving of critique. In this regard, another look at pop’s roots in the 1960s and Rolf Dieter Brinkmann’s strategies as the favoured template for subsequent literary subversions is required. Enno Stahl’s essay mines a rich variety of sub-literature from the

65 Diederichsen, ‘Die 90er, und dahinter die Unendlichkeit’, p. 286.

Introduction 

 23

1960s that extended well beyond Brinkmann’s oeuvre and includes authors like Jürgen Ploog, Jörg Fauser and Hadayatullah Hübsch. Hübsch’s influence and actual presence, particularly at live literary events, extended into the 1990s, in which Stahl documents a lively underground literary scene of poetry slams far removed from the mediated celebrity of pop’s more visible authors. Strikingly, Stahl finds little literary merit in 1990’s variants of pop, and in this sense one hears in his essay continued echoes of pop’s early detractors who pitted the ‘Spaßgesellschaft’ against the 68ers. But the rich underground literary scene he documents, particularly its continuities from the 1960s into the 1990s, suggests a more nuanced history of pop than generational rubrics would allow. I would also emphasize that the spontaneity of the poets that Stahl lauds, which implicitly elevates authenticity in an ever more mediated cultural landscape, taps into older notions of subversion embodied by iconoclastic outsiders. His stance thus belies the manner in which subversion can, in fact, occur from within the confines of more conventional, seemingly affirmative texts. While re-examining pop literature’s history functions as one worthy aim of evolving scholarship, it provides a fairly straightforward means for revising our understanding of it. History’s place in pop novels provides another arena for re-evaluation if one considers the charge of ahistoricism that critics initially levelled against the genre. In her analysis of works by Andreas Neumeister, Sabine von Dirke argues that rather than obliterating the past, his works reveal how its traces remain embedded in contemporary surfaces. In addition, Neumeister challenges the correlation between aesthetic avant-garde techniques and social/political emancipation. Her essay thus offers a more differentiated assessment of pop in relation to traditional avant-garde aims, particularly when the latter is closely critiqued rather than simply exalted. Implicitly, she challenges a basic opposition in which left-wing approaches presumably cultivate subversive tactics, whereas pop’s investment in surfaces cuts itself off from deeper historical structures. Too often, critics and scholars of pop merely activate, rather than question this divide. Section two of the volume manifests the variety of voices and alternative vantage points that articulate themselves within the domain of pop, beginning with Claudia Breger’s essay on Feridun Zaimoğlu’s Kanak Sprak. In it she situates pop in relation to both a German and a transnational history that extends beyond American pop forms from the 1960s. By contrast, Zaimoğlu draws on African diaspora-inspired forms like ‘spoken word’ and the poetry slam as a response to the rise of Neo-Nazi violence and revitalized nationalism in post-unification Germany. Equally important, Breger positions Zaimoğlu as a direct challenge to educated white male authors like Kracht and von Stuckrad-Barre whose accessible works presumably represent a democratic, popular culture sphere. Like Stahl, she identifies forms of rebellion that issue from the cultural margins, which may

24 

 Margaret McCarthy

be more truly democratic insofar as Zaimoğlu’s works not only articulate a minority perspective but also issue from a range of medial contexts, including television. Hester Baer’s essay on Sven Regener’s 2004 novel Neue Vahr Süd [New Vahr South] and Leander Haußmann’s 2005 novel and film NVA [National People’s Army] expands pop’s parameters in geographical terms as well. She helpfully underscores East German forms of pop like Ulrich Plenzdorf’s pivotal texts, the subculture punk rock and beat poetry scene that began in Prenzlauer Berg in the late 1970s and 80s and some of DEFA’s transitional films of the 1980s. Unlike previous scholarship on pop with its focus on definitions and predictable divides, she meditates on pop’s ability to function in psychologically salutary ways in the wake of reunification. In both Neue Vahr Süd and NVA she identifies not only a pop-nostalgia that engages with transformations of time and space in contemporary Germany, but also local, peripheral stories that critique the dominant social, cultural and political norms imposed by West Germany during the Cold War. Pop as salve rather than irritant suggests a new approach to the genre, without reducing it to an unreflective form of self-affirmation. Section three concerns itself with issues of gender, and some of the various texts examined underscore again pop’s salutary effects, while others manifest the unruly body that Carrie Smith Prei observed perforating the pleasing surface of pop texts. Corinna Kahnke’s comparative reading of Jana Hensel’s Zonenkinder [After The Wall. Confessions from an East German Childhood and the Life that Came Next] (2002) and Florian Illies’s Generation Golf identifies common ground between the two works, namely an indexing of brand names and slogans which facilitate a nostalgic withdrawal into childhood memories. If Baer identified nostalgically coded pop texts which enabled East and West Germans to negotiate altered reunification circumstances, Kahnke observes a somewhat different dynamic, one in which gender affects one’s relationship to the present. Whereas Illies experiences a break-down of masculine roles, Hensel learns about the power of attitude and performance in assuming a Western identity. Implicitly, Kahnke’s reading reveals an undercurrent of third-wave feminism in Hensel’s autobiography – i. e. the idea that women can empower themselves in their uses of pop culture. Emily Spiers’s essay on Kerstin Grether’s novel Zuckerbabys [Sugar Babies] (2004) and Charlotte Roche’s bestselling, controversial Feuchtgebiete [Wetlands] (2008), by contrast, reveals a more complicated process. Spiers situates these works in relation to popfeminism, which emerged in works like Jana Hensel and Elisabeth Raether’s Neue deutsche Mädchen [New German Girls] (2008) and was specifically coined by Sonja Eismann, editor of Hot Topic. Popfeminismus heute [Hot Topic. Popfeminism Today] (2007). On the one hand, the protagonists of Grether’s and Roche’s novels attempt to articulate deeply psychological needs via the cultural forms available to them, a process underwritten by both third-wave

Introduction 

 25

feminism and a neoliberal belief in the powers of individual choice. The complicated, ambiguous identities that emerge, however, provide ample opportunity to meditate on the efficacy of such approaches, particularly where they pave the way for self-destructive tendencies. In both novels the unruly bodies that Judith Butler lauds give way to those identified by Smith-Prei, i. e. bodies that reveal the difficulty of establishing an individual identity within the international world of style, media and brand names. To choose to perform a feminine ideal may simply lead to anorexia, as in Grether’s text; and even Roche’s raucous protagonist, who smears the surface of her body with vaginal secretions, also nearly bleeds to death due to a self-inflicted wound. Mary Knight’s essay on Benjamin Lebert’s novels Crazy (1999) and Der Vogel ist ein Rabe [The Bird is a Raven] (2003) pursues its own analysis of disruptive bodies, in this case perhaps more in line with the break-down of male identities that Illies bemoans in Generation Golf. She looks to Klaus Theweleit’s seminal work Männerfantasien [Male Fantasies] (1977) to understand young male protagonists’ struggles with uncooperative bodies and their abject substances. In their own manner they strive to create the hardened carapace or ‘exoskeleton’ that Theweleit identified among early twentieth-century para-military groups. As I argued above about other pop protagonists, Lebert shows us contemporary attempts to thicken the parameters of selfhood as the antidote to a wounded, fragile interiority. Strikingly, the performative arena of gender reveals its own kinds of problematic and surprising divides which differ from that between a leftward-leaning parent generation and its annoyingly affirmative offspring. Problematic instead describes the younger generation’s relationship to popular culture, which it may consciously affirm but simultaneously protest via agitated bodily responses. A divided, warring selfhood obviously complicates the process of rebellion highlighted in pop novels, since it undermines the agency that subversive tactics require. Too often a singular focus on subversion ignores what I referred to earlier as the complex, misguided messiness of selfhood. It also makes the agency required to stage subjectivity in newly improved, politically subversive ways look rather romantic. The volume’s final section examines pop works written within the last decade, providing the opportunity to reflect on: 1) whether pop itself as a genre has evolved; 2) pop’s ability to challenge the status quo at this particular moment; 3) and to what extent an aesthetic based on copying and quotation, when pushed to an extreme, remains viable. Gillian Pye examines the texts of Cologne musician and author PeterLicht, who appeared on the scene in the early 2000s with his album Vierzehn Lieder [Fourteen Songs] (2001) and later won two of four awards at the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize ceremony in 2007. Her essay examines the manner in which PeterLicht, in the wake of 9/11, transformed the often hedonistic

26 

 Margaret McCarthy

discourses of pop by returning to its roots, namely Dada, Surrealism and Expressionism. His eclectic mix of lyrics, prose texts and poems manifests, Pye argues, a ‘double perspective’ which relies on narrative distance and critical awareness, while also manifesting empathy. In this manner, his own forms of self-reflexive cultural archiving reveal neither an outsider’s perspective nor a position of generational superiority. As perhaps the original enfant terrible of pop literature, Christian Kracht provides a test case for the genre’s ability to expand in new directions. Not surprisingly, he continues to provoke his readers, lately for the presumably reactionary elements in his 2012 novel Imperium [Empire]. Some critics deemed this work racist and anti-democratic given how its early twentieth-century protagonist travels from Germany to Africa and devolves into a cannibalistic anti-Semite. Gary Schmidt’s essay on Kracht’s 2008 novel Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten [I Will Be Here in the Sun Shine and Shadow] addresses its own troubling aspects, which include abject, queer elements. Schmidt understands this work as Kracht’s attempt to transcend pop’s beautiful surfaces in order to achieve interiority, perhaps an unsurprising aim given the distanced relationship that Kracht has always maintained to the genre. Yet this goal also creates a range of fraught polarities, since the protagonist’s attempts to achieve aesthetic authenticity align with a struggle for heterosexual masculine identity perpetually undermined by recurring abject and queer elements. These Schmidt links to a modernist literary aesthetic challenged by queer politics which underscore the illusoriness of cohesive identities. However reactionary the novel’s queer elements appear, they underscore the roadblocks in place when pop tries to evolve beyond a surface aesthetic; there is no going back to earlier, now discredited modernist models of authentic selfhood or auratic art. Schmidt’s reading of the text reveals an author deeply aware of and immersed in not only canonical intertextuality, but also twentieth-century aesthetic practices that hinder his ability to bring pop to a new place. Carrie Smith-Prei examines the three most recent works by Joachim Lottmann, the self-proclaimed ‘inventor of pop literature’ whose first work Mai, Juni, Juli [May, June, July] appeared in 1987. In Die Jugend von heute [The Youth of Today] (2004), Zombie Nation [Zombie Nation] (2006) and Der Geldkomplex [The Money Complex] (2009), an alter-ego named Johannes Lohmer enables Lottmann to observe his authorial self, the writing process, as well as the German literary market and media landscape. All three novels create ‘a scrapbook of the Berlin Republic of the 2000s’ and the crises which dominated the post-2000 public sphere: demographic change, family politics and the global financial collapse, all rendered in good pop form as hype-driven events. More specifically, she identifies a circular criticism in Lottmann’s performance of authorial identity in relation to

Introduction 

 27

these crises, which encourages readers to reflect on their own position as well. And given the fact that Lottmann’s novels quote his blogs, the reader’s relationship to media culture becomes as potentially interactive as the author’s. Most important, Lottmann’s self-aggrandizing tone sets the stage for a different kind of critique than that of iconoclastic outsiders or ironic dandies; instead it prompts readers to reflect on and critique the many ways in which they, too, get swept up in hype-driven event culture. In the volume’s final essay, Thomas Ernst assesses the controversy surrounding Helene Hegemann’s novel Axolotl Roadkill (2010), whose myriad quotations from various media forms  – television, film, music and blogs  – were only partially cited in the first edition. Nominated for the Leipzig Book Prize in May of 2010, her work, though not named, was implicitly labelled ‘criminally liable’ in the ‘Leipzig Declaration for the Protection of Intellectual Property’. This document was signed by, among others, Günter Grass and Christa Wolf. Beginning with a historical excursion back to eighteenth-century concepts of originality and genius, Ernst proceeds to do a close reading of Hegemann’s text. Recognizing the manner in which the novel itself quite explicitly highlights its intertextual bases and employs overt autobiographical traces, he argues for an understanding of Axolotl Roadkill not as a form of plagiarism but as an intertextual, popliterary, self-reflexive text. Crucially, Ernst argues that her performance of authorship, unlike Lottmann’s, ‘poses the impossibility of distance from societal structures’. I would argue that we witness instead something more akin to the protagonist’s frequent bodily distress in Faserland. In fact, after the protagonist of Hegemann’s novel wakes up from a nap she observes: ‘so many thoughts […] one can’t separate one’s thoughts from others’. Not long after she notices two pieces of clothing ‘with puke all over them’ and wonders if the abject substance belongs to her or someone else. Despite the fifteen year gap which separates Faserland from Axolotl Roadkill, each work centres on a coming-of-age narrative of youthful protest, often in the form of sex, drugs and alcohol, against middle-class values. This generic continuity may be too broad to make larger pronouncements about pop literature, though its ‘flash in the pan’ status has certainly given way to a longer shelf life. More striking still are the heated responses to both works, which speak to a continued and deep investment in what German selfhood could or should be. Mediated selfhood, writ large in texts that overtly if not grotesquely address the historical, cultural and consumer bases of identity, simply will not go away as an object of literary inquiry. The essays in this volume take that as a given and help us to understand a key literary phenomenon that has ushered German selfhood into the new millennium.

Section 1: Historical Roots and Official Stories

Enno Stahl

An Alternative History of Pop So what is pop literature exactly? This ‘genre’, though this word pushes the definition about how this type of writing could be best described, has received an impressive amount of attention among Germanists. Whereas until recently German literary studies remained on firm ground and studied authors whose reception lay thirty or even fifty years in the past, a younger generation has since the 1990s gradually discovered contemporary literature and made pop as well as other literary trends its subject. Here we can see a shift in the mentality of German-language literary scholars. They are more interested in the present and in the analysis of appearances than in deep hermeneutic interpretive work. Thus, their work shows certain parallels to their subjects: the pop literature authors as well as non-pop contemporary writers whose works are characterized by an uninhibited, even naïve, uncritical view of the world. Eckard Schumacher correctly argues in his book Gerade Eben Jetzt. Schreibweisen der Gegenwart that pop literature ‘aims at a specific relationship to the present, not only thematically, in its choice of subjects and plots, but in a way that has also become evident at the level of a specific way of writing’.¹ The same is true for the scholarship on pop. It is for this reason not immune to ‘memory lapses’ – the output dedicated to the pop literary protagonists of the 1990s like Christian Kracht and Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre has been truly extraordinary. This despite the fact that Kracht has a relatively small oeuvre and has consistently resisted categorization under the pop label.² And von Stuckrad-Barre has written only one novel, Soloalbum [Solo Album] (1998), and since then published nothing but collections of his newspaper pieces, which no doubt display wit and verve, but should hardly be considered literature. Similar attention has justly been paid to the 1960’s protagonists Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and Nicolas Born, though it takes great effort to see both the subversive gestures of Brinkmann and the affirmative dandyism of Kracht and von Stuckrad-Barre as having much in common. Until recently, however, a certain

1 Eckard Schumacher, Gerade Eben Jetzt (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2003), p. 12. 2 For example, he refused to contribute to the volume Pop Since 1964, ed. by Kerstin Gleba and Eckard Schumacher (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2007), which is more of a problem because this book was an ambitious attempt by Kracht’s own publisher to position itself as a publisher that has been traditionally responsible for literature that challenged the cultural establishment. For the one author who initiated all the hype about pop literature in the 1990s to refuse to participate hurt the project substantially.

32 

 Enno Stahl

continuity of tradition has been ignored, that of a German ‘pop-socialized literature’.³ I mean by this other examples of the so-called German underground literature, which this essay will explore in all its variety as a supplement to pop history which focuses primarily on Brinkmann. In fact, no one spoke of ‘pop literature’ in the 1960s (with the exception of Leslie Fiedler, who had something else in mind), but instead of ‘underground literature’.⁴ Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and his Cologne circle, especially Ralf Rainer Rygulla and Rolf Eckart John, were heavily influenced by the kind of revolutionary ‘sub-literature’ that was propagated by independent publishers and journals in the U.S. in the 1960s. Brinkmann, John and Rygulla channelled the American underground into the literary discourse in Germany with various anthologies and individual publications.⁵ Most important, of course, was the anthology ACID, edited by Brinkmann and Rygulla in 1969, which appeared ‘in an initial printing of twenty thousand copies and which with additional printings quickly became the most important document of the literary subculture of the late sixties’.⁶ This book bursts with provocative texts and illustrations, some with clearly pornographic content. Brinkmann was himself, despite his often vulgar attacks on the establishment, always writing within established literary protocols (at least until the ‘machine gun affair’); he published all of his major collections of poetry and his novel Keiner weiß mehr [No One Knows More] (1968) with the renowned publisher Kiepenheuer & Witsch.⁷ Yet in Germany at that time there was an explosion of independent, self-published little magazines, early examples of literary fanzines. In Cologne, for example, well out of Brinkmann’s sphere of influence, a lively underground pub-

3 See my article ‘Popliteratur – eine fragwürdige Kategorie. Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsproblematik inklusive eines Exkurses zu Thomas Meineckes Produktionsästhetik’, Closing Borders, Bridging Gaps? Deutscher Pop an der Jahrtausendwende, special issue of Literatur für Leser, ed. by Anke Biendarra, 31.2 (2008), 65–79 (p. 73). 4 Leslie A. Fiedler, ‘Überquert die Grenze, schließt den Graben!’ in Mammut. März-Texte 1 und 2, 1969–1984, ed. by Jörg Schröder (Herbststein: März, 1984), pp. 673–97 (p. 677). 5 They edited between 1968 und 1971 nearly all influential pop publications in Germany, including Fuck you (1968), edited by Ralf-Rainer Rygulla; Brinkmann’s translations of Frank O’Hara (1969) und Ted Berrigan (1970); Rolf Eckart John’s translation of John Giorno’s Cunt (1970), as well as his anthology of new English prose Silverscreen (1971). 6 Jörgen Schäfer, Pop-Literatur: Rolf Dieter Brinkmann und das Verhältnis zur Populärkultur in der Literatur der sechziger Jahre (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998), p. 95. 7 At a roundtable in the Berlin Academy of Arts Brinkmann confronted the (Jewish) literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki with the words: ‘If this book were a machine gun I would gun you down’. Such a statement must have cut deeply given that Reich-Ranicki himself was persecuted by the Nazi regime.

An Alternative History of Pop 

 33

lishing community developed whose publications included Henryk M. Broder’s popopo [Pop Politics Pornography], Jens Hagen’s Jensimaus or Fred Viebahn’s eiapopeia; these works show from their titles alone that they were neither earnest nor respectful.⁸ Hagen also worked on the ‘Kölnisches Volksblatt’, Ana & Bela and in 1969 and 1970 he, together with Tita Gaehme, Rolf Henke and Dorothée Joachim, published seventeen issues.⁹ Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, later with Rolf Eckart John, founded the hectographically produced magazine Der Gummibaum [Rubber Tree], a rarity today, as well as the magazine Der fröhliche Tarzan [Joyful Tarzan], also edited by John. Achim Schnurrer put out sixteen issues of Virginity with a very hand-made look, but which contained texts by Allen Ginsberg, Ed Sanders, John Giorno, John Lennon, Peter Handke, Ernst Jandl, Joe Brainard, Gottfried Benn, Kurt Schwitters and many others, in all likelihood reprinted without permission. Later Hansjürgen Bulkowski edited the journal PRO in Krefeld, then in Meerbusch, which published such diverse authors as Volker Braun, Horst Bingel, Nicolas Born, Brinkmann, Peter O. Chotjewitz, Hilde Domin, Max von der Grün, Eugen Gomringer, Hadayatullah Hübsch, Günter Kunert, Josef Reding, Fred Viebahn, Wolfgang Weyrauch und Gerhard Zwerenz, but also Ralph Gleason and Tuli Kupferberg of the Fugs. PRO was published from the mid-1960s through the late 1970s.¹⁰ The Rhine-Main region was a centre of German underground literary activity, with the most influential publishing houses of the changing times’ rebellious literature there. The most important independent press of that era, also the publisher of the ACID anthology, was März in Darmstadt. Founded in 1969 by the gifted impresario Jörg Schröder (b. 1938) as a ‘secession’ from the Melzer publishing house, which Schröder led beginning in 1965. Schröder had incorporated so much underground literature into the Melzer list that the publisher Joseph Melzer finally reined things in and fired him. So Schröder founded his own cultural-revolutionary publishing house with its unmistakeable cover style – MÄRZ in bright red, poster-style lettering against a bright yellow background, omnipresent from the late 1960s through the early 1970s. Interestingly, Schröder financed this project mainly with funds from a parallel project, Olympia Press, which specialized in more or less literary pornography. Pop authors of that era who were pub-

8 On this point see Satisfaction und ruhender Verkehr. 1968 am Rhein, ed. by Kurt Holl and Claudia Glunz (Cologne: Schmidt von Schwind, 1998), pp. 116–19. 9 Ibid., pp. 116–19. 10 See Enno Stahl, ‘Popliteraturgeschichte(n)’, in Texte Schriften Bilder LAUT! Dichtung, exhibition catalogue, ed. by Joseph A. Kruse (Düsseldorf: Heinrich-Heine-Institut, 2007), which contains many images of these and other underground journals of the period.

34 

 Enno Stahl

lished by März included, alongside Brinkmann and Rygulla, Peter O. Chotjewitz and Bernward Vesper. It also published several highly successful how-to books on sexuality, drugs and reform pedagogy. Until its bankruptcy in 1974 März had sales into seven figures. Several of the most important authors of the German underground lived in Frankfurt: Jürgen Ploog (b. 1935), Paul Gerhard, known after 1969 as Hadayatullah Hübsch (1946–2011) and Jörg Fauser (1944–1987), all of whom had direct influence on later generations and who witnessed these early beginnings. The most important translator of American underground literature was Carl Weissner (1940–2012), also from Frankfurt, who spent the years 1966–68 in New York on a Fulbright grant where he developed close contacts with the Beat poets and the underground scene. He translated William S. Burroughs, Nelson Algren and Charles Bukowski, the latter of whom became enormously popular in Germany in the 1970s. Weissner translated other Beat poets: Mary Beach, Claude Pelieu, Charles Plymell, Allen Ginsberg and Harold Norse, as well as books by Andy Warhol and J. G. Ballard. Weissner was clearly the most important intermediary for American counter-culture literature in Germany, more so than Brinkmann. In fact he continued this project until his death, having also in the meantime translated the complete lyric texts of Bob Dylan and Frank Zappa into German. He founded, together with Jörg Fauser and Jürgen Ploog, the legendary underground magazine Gasolin 23, which published eight editions from 1973 to 1986.¹¹ It understood itself as a mouthpiece for ‘independent, uncensored writing’, that is Beat and cut-up literature.¹² Ploog and Walter Hartmann were in charge from the second volume on, with help from Weissner and Fauser. The magazine ran pieces by the editors, but also by their American role models Bukowski, Burroughs, Neal Cassady (Dean in Kerouac’s On the Road), Ginsburg, Brion Gysin, Jack Kerouac, Norse, Plymell and some younger German authors either imitating these writers or others taking their own literary first steps in new directions, such as Michael Buselmeier, Helmut Eisendle, Bodo Morshäuser or Wolfgang Welt. Ploog, Fauser and Hübsch represented direct continuity with the American Beat generation, so the reception history being sketched here can been seen as stretching all the way back to the 1950s. Just as Hübsch was influenced by Allen Ginsburg, Jürgen Ploog and Jörg Fauser were influenced by the early cut-up technique of William

11 The first volume was circulated only among a private circle of readers and is not counted; numbers 2 through 9 were actually distributed. 12 Jürgen Ploog, ‘Gasolin Connection’ http://gasolinconnection.wordpress.com/2011/04/26/ gasolin-23/.

An Alternative History of Pop 

 35

S. Burroughs. Ploog, who spent time in New York regularly because of his job as a long-route pilot for Lufthansa, was a good friend of Burroughs. Melzer published in 1969 Ploog’s cut-up book Cola-Hinterland [Cola Outback], which can be considered the first original German publication of the literary underground and can still be found in antiquarian book shops.¹³ It contains illustrations, much like Rolf Dieter Brinkmann’s essays, as well as excerpts by others, old or altered photos (such as an image of Mata Hari) and nudes of contemporary beauties. The text is full of sexual innuendo and foul language; in fact these elements cut a marked line through the flow of the language: ‘Ich bin in Cuntsville in ihr Kommunikations-System geraten // atomare Fotzen-Medien’ [I have come into the communication network in Cuntsville / atomic twat-media].¹⁴ These sorts of typical provocations of the time, aimed directly at the bourgeois literary establishment in the prudish Germany of the 1960s, were most effective, though their sexist tendencies were impossible to ignore: ‘im Inneren des Planeten Orte trocken-heiß wie eine beschnittene Vulva mit dem Gefühl als seinen Hoden explodiert’ [Deep inside the planet, places dry-hot like a circumcised vulva with the feeling of his balls exploding].¹⁵Another example: ‘mittags in Antipolis ekstatische Ehemänner an überdimensionalen Fotzen’ [mid-day in Antiapolis ecstatic husbands on massive twats].¹⁶ Michel Foucault both understood and criticized such moves in 1976 when he pointed out that when sex as a fact is repressed, made into a taboo topic, ‘then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression. A person who holds forth in such language places himself to a certain extent outside the reach of power; he upsets established law; he somehow anticipates the coming freedom’.¹⁷ This statement explains quite accurately the strategic intent of the sexualized texts by Ploog (and so many other authors of the late 1960s and early 1970s). The limits of this strategy become equally clear when society eliminates the taboo and the subversive speech loses it explosive power right away. Just as with the cut-up technique, the text is energetic, eruptive, cut with poetic images like an experimental film: schraffierte Vorstellungen menschlicher Wirklichkeit in schwankender Musik des sphärischen WIEDER: verloren unbekannt erschlagen überm Oxford Circus damals in anonymer Kif-Atmosphäre aus Gehirn-Zellen vegetativer Fauna gefärbten Nachrichten & undurch-

13 Jürgen Ploog, Cola-Hinterland (Darmstadt: Joseph Melzer, 1969). 14 Ibid., n. p. [p. 1]. 15 Ibid., p. 7. 16 Ibid., p. 8. 17 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. by Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 6.

36 

 Enno Stahl

schaubaren Dimensionen  – Paul Caruso sieht sich als von Koordinaten gekrümmter Archäologe des Raums nach einem Kaffee im Gedränge von Präservativen/ [crisscrossed ideas of human reality with the swaying music of the spherical AGAIN: lost unknown struck down back then at the Oxford Circus in the anonymous joint scene of secret brain cells of vegetative fauna of dyed news & opaque dimensions – Paul Caruso sees himself as an archaeologist of space bent by the coordinates of space after having a coffee in a crowd of condoms.]¹⁸

Breaks occur not only at places marked with dashes, but also apparently within the phrase as well (‘of secret brain cells of vegetative fauna of dyed news’). In the later sections three periods, or sometimes two, mark the ends of the cuts (similar to those used by Louis-Ferdinand Céline), which makes the style seem even more breathless and hurried. Indeed sometimes the text is made up of only sentence fragments: ‘Fieber-Kif-Fêten in der Hitze … Mädchen für die Deutschen … Veränderung der Planeten … Mafia der Erde’ [fever-roach-festivals in the heat … girls for Germans … transformation of the planets … mafia of the earth].¹⁹ A linear reading is impossible for this text, but that is precisely the intention of the cut-up technique,²⁰ which, as a specific descendent of surrealist écriture automatique seeks to bring subconscious content to light in this manner.²¹ This is perhaps why Ploog presents content saturated with sexual content that, according to Freud, was supposed to be repressed. Ploog’s cut-up text represents a theory of sexual revolution following Wilhelm Reich, who also played a central role for Williams S. Burroughs. (He, in turn, tirelessly defended Reich’s para-scientific orgone theory.) Ploog has stayed true to his cut-up style to this day, still practicing it at an advanced age. It is not without a kind of wild-west romantic mentality, as a form of partisan writing at the edge of a literary establishment that is becoming ever more aligned and mainstream. Ploog’s recent texts contain breaks that are less obvious, and he does without typographic oddities. The texts are easier to read,

18 Ploog, Cola-Hinterland, p. 1. 19 Ibid., p. 9. 20 An explanation of the idea and practice of the cut-up method, developed in 1960 by Brion Gysin and brought to complete fruition by William S. Burroughs, can be found in, among others, Florian Vetsch, ‘Ploog im Fokus’, in Ploog-Tanker, ed. by Florian Vetsch (Herdecke: Rohstoff, 2004), pp. 278–85, especially 278–79. 21 On écriture automatique see Enno Stahl, Anti-Kunst und Abstraktion in der literarischen Moderne. Vom italienischen Futurismus bis zum französischen Surrealismus 1909–1933 (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 1997), pp. 400–03.

An Alternative History of Pop 

 37

but they include cut-up technique nonetheless, as he pointed out very clearly in an interview about his book Unterwegs sein ist alles [To be on the Move is Everything]:²² Ich schneide immer. Das ist die Grundlage meiner Arbeitsweise. Ich schneide immer. Das Schneiden ist jetzt in den letzten Jahren wohl nicht mehr so sichtbar als Technik, daran liegt mir auch gar nicht, ich kümmere mich um die Ergebnisse, die kommen aus dem Schneidevorgang nach wie vor heraus, natürlich mischt sich das mit Erinnerungen, mit Szenen, die bei mir beim Schreiben im Kopf auftauchen, wenn ich die verfolge. Es ist eine Mischung aus Dingen, die im Prozess des Schreibens auf mich einströmen und dieser Prozess löst oder öffnet mein Bewusstsein für alle möglichen Dinge, die ich mitverarbeiten will. [I always cut. That is the basis of my way of working. I always cut. Cutting has certainly become less visible in recent years as a technique but that does not matter to me. I’m only interested in the results. Those result from the process of cutting just as before. Naturally that’s mixed up with memories, with scenes that come into my head as I write if I follow them. It is a mixture of things that flow into me in the process of writing and this process dissolves or opens up my consciousness for all kinds of things that I want to work in.]²³

Ploog has published over twenty books, mainly with small or alternative presses. The better known of these are Motel U.S.. Amerikanisches Tagebuch [Motel U.S.. American Diary] and Nächte in Amnesien [Nights in Amnesia].²⁴ The extensive collection of materials Ploog-Tanker appeared in 2004 and contains in addition to many reprints of Ploog’s works also homage texts from many of his literary friends.²⁵ Yet most of his individual publications were published by the Verlag Peter Engstler in Ostheim/Rhön. The owner of this little press is an important figure in Germany’s literary underground in his own right; in the provinces he published German alternative literary texts for decades without regard for market concerns. It was through Engstler that Ploog published essays in which he engaged with new theorists like Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio. It is no accident

22 Jürgen Ploog, Unterwegs sein ist alles/Tagebuch Berlin – New York (Aachen: Sic Literaturverlag, 2011). 23 ‘Gelebte Ambivalenz als Credo des SIC-Literaturverlages. Jürgen Ploog in an interview with Enno Stahl’, Deutschlandfunk (9 June 2011), Büchermarkt. http://www.dradio.de/dlf/sendungen/ buechermarkt/1547822/. 24 Jürgen Ploog, Motel U.S.. Amerikanisches Tagebuch (Basel: Nachtmaschine, 1979); Jürgen Ploog, Nächte in Amnesien (Schönbeck/Elbe: Moloko Print, 2014). 25 Ploog-Tanker. Texte von & zu Jürgen Ploog, ed. by Florian Vetsch (Herdecke: Rohstoff-Verlag, 2004).

38 

 Enno Stahl

then that Ploog’s cut-ups consistently present openings for new theoretical conceptions. His Berlin – New York-Tagebuch [Berlin – New York Diary] points by way of a certain obsession with topography to current conceptualizations of space as part of the spatial turn. The undeniable mediality of his writing continues to interest artists in other disciplines, such as experimental media artists and directors. One example is the film portrait Die Cut-up-Connection [The Cut-Up Connection] (1998) by Daniel Guthmann. It is in this kind of positive, and at the same time, critical engagement with media and the linguistic material where Ploog’s relevance to pop literature is grounded. A thoroughly modern, future-oriented interface characterizes Ploog’s imagery, though music, song titles and quotations from songs play less of a role than for Hübsch, for example. The breaks in time and space in his texts that probably seem quite normal in his own life as a pilot create a futuristic hyperspace as if in a sci-fi film; he seems to be quoting from a popular set of memes. Although Ploog receives hardly any attention either from scholars or critics, his name is nevertheless virulent in Germany. He is known to many as the ‘father of the underground’, a title he vehemently rejects.²⁶ Jörg Fauser has received, already a few years after his death, more widespread attention. During his lifetime he was known among a broader public mainly as a crime novelist, but especially for his final books, a biography of Marlon Brando and his crime novels Der Schneemann [The Snowman] (1984) and Das Schlangenmaul [Mouth of the Snake] (1985). Some titles were even made into movies.²⁷ There have also been two editions of his collected works published, one in 1990, three years after his death, and a second between 2004 and 2009.²⁸ Yet he has seen almost no recognition among scholars. There is a biography written more from the perspective of a fan than a scholar and an article on the novel Der Schneemann.²⁹

26 See ‘Gelebte Ambivalenz’. Here Ploog says ‘there are no fathers and no children, not even an underground, but instead just a scene that is not part of the mainstream’. This scene doesn’t show up in the culture pages and is not quite invisible either. But Ploog agrees that it is clear that he belongs to that scene. http://www.dradio.de/dlf/sendungen/buechermarkt/1547822/. 27 Jörg Fauser, Marlon Brando (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1978). Der Schneemann (Hamburg: Rogner und Bernhard, 1981); Jörg Fauser, Das Schlangenmaul (Frankfurt a. M.: Ullstein, 1985). 28 Jörg-Fauser-Edition, 8 vols (Frankfurt a. M.: Rogner und Bernhard bei 2001, 1990); Jörg-Fauser-Edition, 9 vols (Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2004–2009). 29 Matthias Penzel and Ambros Waibel, Rebell im Cola-Hinterland. Jörg Fauser. Eine Biografie (Berlin: Edition Tiamat, 2004); Anthony Waine, ‘Anatomy of a Serious Thriller: Jörg Fauser’s Der Schneemann’, Neophilologus, 77.1 (1993), 99–112.

An Alternative History of Pop 

 39

At first Fauser, influenced also by William S. Burroughs, tried the cut-up technique, especially in his debut books Aqualunge und Tophane.³⁰ But more than the literary influence from Burroughs, it was his life and his existence with drugs that rubbed off onto Fauser.³¹ Like Burroughs, who spent many years in Tangiers, Fauser was also drawn to the Orient, or at least to its threshold, namely to Istanbul. In 1966 he lived for nearly a year in the Tophane neighbourhood, the namesake for his second book, and was at the time seriously addicted to heroin.³² Fauser describes the content of his second book as ‘notes on addiction against the background of anonymous ghost cities of the West and of an Orient that is far from that of any travel romanticism […]. It is an attempt to find language for describing the disease of addiction’.³³ Tophane was published by Maro in 1972. This little publisher, at the time in the rural Bavarian town of Gersthofen, later in Augsburg, became an important alternative press throughout the 1970s. The press became quite successful from its publication of the first German editions of many of Charles Bukowski’s books.³⁴ Fauser’s book does not hold back on the main theme at all. Already on the first page of Tophane there is a very naturalistic and detailed description of how one shoots up in the bathroom at the Club Voltaire in Frankfurt, a bar that still exists today. One notices from the very beginning that Fauser’s cut-ups are more worldly than Ploog’s or Burroughs’s; the realist style that Fauser favoured in his later books is already apparent here, despite the cut-up technique: Auf der Rolltreppe erbrach ich mich – kotzte einem Computergesicht den Gabardine voll und der wollte Schmiere holen und wieder mußte ich wetzen – machte immer mehr als ich vertrug – Mülltonnen voll Dolantin plus der geklauten Rezepte – linksdrehendes Polamidon – der Mangel stülpt ihren Deckel über das Flüstern meiner Krankheit. [I threw up riding the escalator, puked on a computer-faced guy’s gabardine suit and he wanted to call the cops and I had to beat it again – I always did more than I could handle – trashcans full of Dolantin plus the stolen prescriptions – clockwise Polamidon – not having enough puts the lid on the whisperings of my disease.]³⁵

30 Jörg Fauser, Aqualunge [Ein Report] (Göttingen: Breger, 1971); Jörg Fauser, Tophane: Roman (Gersthofen: Maro, 1972). 31 See Matthias Penzel and Ambros Waiber, Rebell im Cola-Hinterland, p. 39: ‘Finally he comes across a writer whose life and works would influence him forever: William S. Burroughs’. 32 Penzel and Waiber, Rebell im Cola-Hinterland, p. 46. 33 Cited here from Jörg Fauser Edition, vols 1–4, ed. by Carl Weissner (Frankfurt a. M.: Rogner und Bernhard, 1994), III, p. 40. 34 On the history of the Maro Verlag to the present, see https://www.maroverlag.de/geschichte. php. 35 Jörg Fauser, Edition, p. 44.

40 

 Enno Stahl

Drug slang and street language increase the authentic character of his text that contains some dialogue passages alongside the spotlighted scenes of addiction. There are actually bits of dialogue that expose the petite bourgeois world through its own stereotypical language: ‘Erinnerse sich noch an damals das Mädel vom Bethanienkrankenhaus  – die blonde Schwester dies nicht lassen konnte  – son flottes Mädel  – tat mir direkt leid  – aber Dienst bleibt Dienst und Schnaps’ [R’member that gal from the Bethany Hospital – the blond nurse who just couldn’t stop – felt sorry for her –but you gotta do your job].³⁶ Everyday racism gets its due as well: ‘hat die Zelle versabbert daß die Putzfrau sich morgens fast geweigert hat – na ja die kommen auch von da unten – Itaker und Kanaken – verseuchen unsere Jungs und Mädels’ [Fucked up his cell so bad the cleaning lady almost refused – yeah, they’re from down there too – Wops and Mehmets – infecting our boys and girls].³⁷ Later the author reports on how he travels through Bulgaria and finally ends up in Turkey, where as a fixer he falls apart completely. The cut-up style, marked by long dashes, transforms itself finally into relatively coherent montage technique that could well be derived from other kinds of experimental literature. These include the historical avant-garde or the language games of the Vienna Group or the French Oulipo Group, though without their existential undertones, of course, since Fauser himself experienced what he described here, and that included hallucinations while he was high: Luft. Regen. Fächer. Blätter. Stille. Sand zwischen Fingern. Sie starren mich an. Die blauen Gesichter. Nüstern voller Rauch. Schwärme durch mein Blut. Jukebox plärrt: Come together. Rauch kriecht über mich. Gelächter. Am Boden: Schaff mich schaff mich schaff mich. Mein Haar gefesselt. Disteln unter mir. Glotzende Fischaugen. Licht. Kaltes Metall. Come together. Yeah, Yeah. Ich krieche. In mich hinein. Zum einen Wunden. Allen Worten. Alles endet auf Angst. Angst Angst. Krank krank krank. Der Fluß wirft Blut über den Sand. Jemand vergaß mich zu töten. [Air. Rain. Lockers. Pages. Silence. Sand through fingers. They are staring at me. Blue faces. Nostrils full of smoke. Swarming in my blood. Jukebox blaring: Come together. Smoke crawling over me. Laughter. On the floor: Do me, do me, do me. My hair tied up. Thistles under me. Staring fish eyes. Light. Cold metal. Come together. Yeah, Yeah. I am crawling. Into myself. To the wound. To all the words. Everything ends in fear. Fear. Fear. Sick sick sick. The river throws blood onto the sand. Somebody forgot to kill me.]³⁸

36 Ibid., p. 44. 37 Ibid., p. 44. 38 Ibid., p. 148.

An Alternative History of Pop 

 41

Withdrawal follows, in an eerily alienated atmosphere, or perhaps only an imagined horror vision, like the Dr. Benway passages in Burroughs’s Naked Lunch: Kaum Licht. Nackte Öffnung vergittert in einer der Mauern. Angeschnallt auf das Metall der Pritsche. Geblendet. Stimmen: Nichts mehr zu machen. Was das nicht vorauszusehen. Meine Herren. Was zu erreichen war, wurde erreicht. Aber das Programm – wird jetzt abgeschlossen. Keine Tupfer mehr. Weiß ich was es zu wissen gibt? Was ich war? Wer ich sein werde? Immer noch erinnere ich mich, wenn die Zangen mich wieder fassen, wenn die kalten grauen Feuer des Fleisches mich verlassen, wir waren es. Es waren wir. [Hardly light. Naked opening barred into one of the walls. Strapped on to the metal cot. Blinded. Voices: Nothing more to be done. Didn’t see it coming. Gentlemen. What could be achieved was achieved. The programme – will now be concluded. Not another cotton ball. Do I know now what is to be known? What I was? Who I will become? I still remember when the pincers get me again, when the cold grey fire of flesh leaves me, we were the ones. We were the ones.]³⁹

But what does this example of deepest despair, the expression of a person who is at the bottom, have to do with pop? Pop has a certain glam factor, something light and unserious. The few references to songs (like the Beatles in the quotation above) are hardly enough to make a stable connection. Indeed it is the case that, purely connotatively at least, aspects such as relationships to Beat, drugs and being part of the scene, despite the addictive depression, take on a kind of attitude of hipness, though perhaps less now than in the 1970s and 1980s. Authors like Fauser and Ploog were always surrounded by a mysterious aura, different from that of the canonical bourgeois literati. Young, up-and-coming authors and alternative readers identified with these writers, not with Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll or even Martin Walser. As Johannes Ullmaier

39 Ibid., p. 153.

42 

 Enno Stahl

observed, ‘Pop literature is the tendency toward everything that is not Martin Walser’.⁴⁰ So it is not surprising that Kerstin Gleba and Eckard Schumacher included an excerpt from Tophane in their KiWi Pop-Sampler in 2007. This text is such an exception compared to the mass of polished, pleasing, tendentious fiction out there. The criterion of setting the scene that comes off so well through the use of slang and the technical language of the milieu is very present in one poem in the volume Die Harry-Gelb-Story, which appeared in 1973, one year after Tophane.⁴¹ ‘Mister Go goes kaputt’ Berlin 68, runtergekommene Kommune Bülowstraße, Harry allein auf Achse, meilenweit nichts als schwarze Hinterhöfe, Junk-Akrobat ohne Netz auf der Suche nach der Paranoia die die Paranoia erklärt ... rote Schlußlichter der U-Bahn Richtung Krumme Lanke oder Schlesisches Tor, im VW-Bus versucht Hübsch dem fuchtelnden Kunzelmann zu erklären warum er noch schreibt, kurzes Gespräch über Gedichte, Beat Generation, Harry schluckt einen Eimer AN1, ‘The Beat Goes On’, Nadine irgendwo mit Humphrey, Bogey, Kino am Kudamm, ‘Der Schatz der Sierra Madre’ später ein Joint unter der Eisenbahnbrücke Yorckstraße, gegenüber ‘Mister Go’, die RD-Streife checkt ihre Kundschaft im Geflacker der Lightshow ... Hübsch flippt aus der K1, der Film läuft ab wie jeder Film abläuft, überall werden Einsätze verpaßt, Harry kocht in der Küche einen Schuß, Berge von Müll, dreckiges Geschirr, eingefrorene Spaghettisoße, die ganze verwanzte Schau, zuviel Speed im Trip,

40 Johannes Ullmaier, Von Acid nach Adlon (Mainz: Ventil, 2004), p. 12. 41 Jörg Fauser, Die Harry-Gelb-Story (Gersthofen: Maro, 1973).

An Alternative History of Pop 

der Zirkus fing Feuer, kaltes Grausen in der Gummizelle, Bonnies Ranch wenn du die Kurve nicht kratzt. ‘2000 light-years from home’ das Hickhack der Gelatine-Schwulen vom Savigny-Platz, Kunzelmann untergetaucht, Hannibal mit lackiertem Fingernagel ... Zuletzt kein Horse mehr. Harry nagt an seinen Paranoia-Schrippen und nichts ist erklärt, Koma im Schmargendorf, Charlie kaputt mit Lou Reed unterm Dach, ‘Schreiben gegen das Leben, Leben gegen die Realität’, Irgendwann wird der Gitarrist aufgekocht ‘and he had to / run run run’ – zehn Jahre später aufwachen nochmal als Harry, Mister Go ging kaputt aber der Alptraum geht weiter ...⁴² [‘Mister Go Goes Kaput’ Berlin 68, rundown commune Bülowstraße, Harry alone at the axis, nothing but black courtyards for miles, Junk acrobat without net on the hunt for paranoia that can explain the paranoia … red taillights of the subway leading to Krumme Lanke or Schlesisches Tor, in the VW bus Hübsch tries to explain to flailing Kunzelmann why he still writes, short conversation about poems, Beat Generation, Harry downs a bucket of AN1, ‘The beat goes on’, Nadine somewhere with Humphrey, Bogey, movie house on the Kudamm ‘Treasure of the Sierra Madre’, later a joint in the train underpass

42 Quoted in Jörg Fauser Edition, pp. 23–25.

 43

44 

 Enno Stahl

Yorckstraße, across from ‘Mister Go’, the narcs check on their customers in the flashing light show … Hübsch flips out at K1, the film is playing like all films, missed opportunities everywhere, Harry cooking up a hit in the kitchen, mountains of trash, dirty dishes, frozen spaghetti sauce, the whole infested show, too much speed on this trip, the circus caught on fire, cold chills in the padded cell, Bonnie’s Ranch if you don’t come down. “2000 light years from home” the bickering of the jiggly gays at the Savigny Platz, Kunzelmann goes underground, Hannibal with painted fingernails … finally no more horse. Harry nibbles on his paranoia rolls and nothing is explained, coma in Schmargendorf, Charlie kaput with Lou Reed in the attic, “writing against life, life against reality,” somewhere the guitarist gets cooked “and he had to / run run run” – wake up ten years later as Harry again, Mister Go went kaput but the nightmare goes on …]

This text also addresses Fauser’s drug addiction. It contains a number of references to the ‘scene’: the infamous K1 (Kommune 1), known throughout the country from a cover photo of the popular magazine Stern that showed the commune members posing naked in front of a wall. Rainer Langhans and Uschi Obermaier lived there, and the K1 was also a frequent haunt for Paul Gerhard Hübsch und Jörg Fauser, though Fauser, according to Hübsch, would visit mainly to take drugs and would then disappear after a few weeks.⁴³ Dieter Kunzelmann, another famous figure of the 68-era gets mentioned as well, and references to film and music are woven

43 Paul Gerhard Hübsch, interview with the author.

An Alternative History of Pop 

 45

in as is more typical for a casual understanding of pop literature (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground piece ‘Run, Run, Run’ from the New York band’s legendary first album – which deals almost exclusively with heroin addiction – with the banana cover by Andy Warhol). Here, too, there is drug and scene language: ‘The narcs checking out their customers’, ‘Bonnie’s ranch (meaning the Karl-Bonhoeffer Neurological Clinic in Berlin-Reinickendorf) and ‘all out of horse’ (i. e. heroin). Similar to Tophane, Fauser’s poem describes in a highly compact form the nightmare-like process of addiction and withdrawal and presents at the same time a survey of the times, the atmosphere of the hippest scenes in Germany. Fauser himself was not really a part of the hip circle described in this poem, however, but rather more of an outside observer. Later, after he had recovered from his heroin addiction, which he exchanged to a degree for alcohol, he changed his environment, working for a while at the airport in Frankfurt and hanging out at working class bars in Frankfurt. His writing, both in his stories and his reportage, began to accommodate itself to his new way of perceiving the world (while also being influenced more by Charles Bukowski and less by Burroughs); it became strictly realistic. Pop references disappear, though his 1984 novel Rohstoff [Raw Materials], probably his most important novel, still shows some pop elements. Fauser writes very autobiographically in the novel, describing his development into a professional writer from his time in Istanbul through the 1970s. In passing he sketches the mutation of the post-68 generation, the postflower-power community, to a group of successful consumers. Fauser succeeds in representing the milieu of the subculture of the time accurately by keeping his distance and maintaining a sceptical attitude as a reflective outsider, rather than by actually taking part in the scene, which was well on its way through various phases to becoming a culture of success. He mirrors its hypocrisy, its paradoxes and contradictions, in his representation of Kommune 1.⁴⁴ This finally manifests itself in his unmistakeable avowal of his own difference. He, or rather his protagonist Harry, had informed a pregnant runaway’s father about her whereabouts and a meeting came about with the father, Harry, and others from the commune, though the latter ‘hielten seine [des Vaters, Anm. E.S.] Melancholie für bürgerlich, einen dieser miesen Tricks des Kapitals, und während sie mit ihrem Berliner Anarchistengetue unseren Gastgeber und die chinesischen Kellner in Verlegenheit brachten, wurde mir bewußt, daß ich immer noch nicht wußte, wohin ich gehörte, und ich ahnte, dass ich wahrscheinlich nirgendwo hingehörte’ [felt (the father’s) melancholy was bourgeois, just one of the crummy capitalist tricks,

44 Jörg Fauser, Rohstoff, here from Jörg Fauser Edition. vols 1–4, ed. by Carl Weissner (Frankfurt a. M.: Rogner und Bernhard, 1994), II, pp. 29–40.

46 

 Enno Stahl

and while they made our host and the Chinese waiter nervous with their typical Berlin anarchist posing, I came to understand that I still did not know where I belonged and I felt that I probably didn’t belong anywhere].⁴⁵ This book is important because it shows, perhaps as no other one does, the essence of the Federal Republic during the last decade of its existence. It makes clear many characteristics of public discourse that hold for Germany today and shows to what extent the hegemony of the generation of 68 was determinate. The late Hadayatullah Hübsch (as Paul Gerhard called himself after his conversion to Islam in 1969) deeply integrated, actually until his recent death, literature and pop in a completely different manner. Though he published over one hundred books, including poetry, prose, as well as numerous non-fiction books on Islam, his real importance stems from his work as an author on stage, as the spiritus rector of all spoken word art in Germany. Even as early as 1967 he began, along with the writer and magazine editor Hansjürgen Bulkowski, a memorable tour through several cities in North-Rhine Westphalia called ‘Beat & Lyrik’. There is almost no scholarly treatment of this early live literature show that combined verse with the beat music of a band called ‘Free-Group’. But there does exist a thorough and detailed WDR television documentary about the project, which includes a lengthy audio segment produced by the group.⁴⁶ Alongside Hübsch and Bulkowski, authors Martin Jürgens, Vagelis Tsakiridis and the Amsterdam Hippie Hans Wesseling appeared together in Wuppertal, Düsseldorf and Münster. They presented not only a new kind of performance combination of text and concert, but in Wuppertal for example, spontaneous outdoor happenings occurred with readings on the streets. During them Hübsch darted in and out of the crowd like an imp handing out poems until the police forbade the literary demonstration. Hübsch describes this period in his memoir Keine Zeit für Trips [No Time For Trips] (1991).⁴⁷ Meeting Wesseling was momentous for Hübsch because Wesseling introduced him at that time to LSD. He shows impressively in Keine Zeit für Trips the suffering that followed over the next two years until he found spiritual salvation through coming to Islam, which opened up a drug-free future for him. The memoir is also a fascinating document of the period because

45 Ibid., p. 37. 46 ‘Beat & Lyrik in Wuppertal’, in Hierzulande  – Heutzutage (8 June 1967), Peter D. Malchus. The materials are housed in the Rheinisches Literaturarchiv im Heinrich-Heine-Institut der Landeshauptstadt Stadt Düsseldorf in the collection Pop am Rhein. 47 Hadayatullah Hübsch, Keine Zeit für Trips. Autobiographischer Bericht (Frankfurt a. M.: Koren & Debes, 1991), pp. 19–25.

An Alternative History of Pop 

 47

of how it shows with great clarity the contradictions and often absurd claims that people vehemently believed then. Hübsch also associated, as mentioned, for a time with the circles around Kommune I. In 1969 he published his first book of poems mach was du willst [do what you want] with the renowned publishing house Luchterhand, which was publishing Günter Grass at the time.⁴⁸ Later on his works, some quite limited editions, appeared mainly with small presses. Formally a very heterogeneous book, mach was du willst does thematize the enthusiasm for the new transformational spirit, combined with opposition against the older generation of fathers and petit-bourgeois values of Germany society during the 1960s. The first poem declares revolt and change: ‘es ist so weit, komm pack die siebensachen / und spuck den paukern auf den kopf … ich lasse mich mit freuden ein- / lullen vom asfalt-gestank und den lang- / mähnigen frauen, die ich so antreffe’ [Enough, come on, pack your things / and spit on the teachers’ heads … / i’ll be lulled with pleasure / by the stink of asphalt and the long- / maned women i happen to meet].⁴⁹ The tone of the poems is consciously unserious; they do not retreat from clichés or puns, as in the following poem beweissführung zur rettung des comic-strips [Proof for Saving the Comic Strip]: ‘beweisführe die / meyne für öfflichegenasführung / blubbte (plab, blap) mynnig sengär- / leyn zu reymen / auf gehodelte spene: scheme / dich: ach du meyne göte’ [ye shall proofe this / mye owne excellent state of being led about by myne nose / blubbered (bloop, blop) singeth the little croaker / with his highest ballsy tones: shame / on ye: ohh my Goethe-ness].⁵⁰ The poem caricatures phonetically an especially archaic formal German style, but does not take much care with coherency of the content. In the last section several comics titles are listed (‘barbarella’, ‘föbeßeitgeißt’, ‘ficks&phocksi’), the last being a rather harmless Disney-style German comic, quite different from the other two raunchy titles.⁵¹ Fix & Foxi is later referred to as ‘ohnlie neschenell aigenthum’ [German phonetic transcription of ‘only national Eigentum’; Eigentum = property]; comparing the standard kiddie comic and the provocative, inciting Barbarella and Phoebe Zeit-Geist points to the relationship between the

48 Paul Gerhard Hübsch, mach was du willst. gedichte (Berlin: Luchterhand, 1969). 49 Paul Gerhard Hübsch, mach was du willst, p. 5. 50 Ibid., p. 11. 51 The first title refers to a French comic that had to fight against censorship because of its open representations of sexual themes, as well as because of Roger Vadim’s 1968 film Barbarella, starring Jane Fonda in the title role. The second reference is to The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist, an American comic by Michael O’Donoghue that was sometimes censored because of its highly pornographic content. The third title is one of the most successful German comics, Fix & Foxi.

48 

 Enno Stahl

backward, stuffy German society and the progressive movements in the U.S. or France.⁵² The stilted, phonetically satirical orthography can be understood as an ironic jab at the warning of the times to parents that comics would make children dumb. Even Fritz J. Raddatz, the influential literary critic of Die Zeit, wrote in 1968: ‘Die neuen Heldinnen der westlichen Welt  – Barbarella, Jodelle, Phoebe Zeit-Geist  – sind Dienerinnen eines modischen snob appeal; entlaufene Vestalinnen, die ursprünglich einem dienen sollten: dem lesenden Analphabeten’ [The new heroines of the western world – Barbarella, Jodelle, Phoebe Zeit-Geist – are servants to a modish snob appeal; virgin runaways who serve one kind of person: the illiterate reading public].⁵³ The guarantors of good taste and culture set themselves up for a response, and Hübsch seems to take them up on it by pretending that his poem was written by someone ignorant of the written word. Otherwise his poems range from a short haiku-like thought (‘ich halte für den igel / auf den ich warte / eine hasenscharte versteckt’ [i stop for the hedgehog / who i was waiting for / a hare-lip hidden]) to ambitious poetic montages like ‘anmerkungen zum bevölkerungswachstum’ [Notes on the Population Increase]: ‘und und wenn / wenn der/ zauberstab das / eingemachte ausgebüchst / die wehen himmelhoch / betrübt das umstandskleid / der broterwerb’ [and and if / if the / magic wand makes the preserves leak / the contractions to high heaven / darkening the maternity dress / making a living].⁵⁴ Hübsch uses these kinds of texts to skewer the conservative sexual mores of the economic miracle years; he points out that the unavailability of contraception led to the problem of self-induced abortions. This densely poetic text soon becomes a rather propagandistic appeal for free love and pure sex beyond reproduction: ‘daß der verkehr weniger abwirft / daß der verkehr mehr einbringt’ [may intercourse have fewer results / may intercourse have more effect].⁵⁵ The motif of opposition against the middle class, their laws and rituals, runs through all of Hübsch’s literary oeuvre, just as does the influence of Beat literature and a propensity for American landscapes. Hübsch often sprinkles his texts with quotations from British and American pop songs. Even in 1998 in his book of poems Macht den Weg frei [Free the Way/Clear the Path] – a title which suggests both formal and content similarities to his first work – he writes from the perspec-

52 Hadayatullah Hübsch, mach was du willst, p. 12. 53 Fritz J. Raddatz, ‘Die neuen Heldinnen der westlichen Welt’ (http://www.zeit.de/1967/11/ die-neuen-heldinnen-der-westlichen-welt). 54 Hübsch, mach was du willst, pp. 13, 29. 55 Ibid., p. 30.

An Alternative History of Pop 

 49

tive of an alternative culture, but now with a new generation, that of the punks and squatters of the nineties.⁵⁶ ‘Die Wegwerfschlacht in der Pank-Straße zu Berlin’ Die Punks in Kiel wollten es ja nicht glauben, als Ich ihnen erzählte, dass es in Berlin Eine Pank-Straße gibt und außerdem Eine Untergrundstation namens Pank, Aber dann sind wir doch losgedüst, in einem wackeligen VW-Golf oder so ähnlich […] Schließlich erreichten wir das besetzte Haus, Zuerst wollte uns keiner reinlassen, Es war alles verbarrikadiert, Wir trommelten uns die Fäuste wund, Endlich erschein einer mitm Mondgesicht am Fenster Des obersten Stocks und schrie, Verpißt euch, Wir schrien zurück, Wir sind doch die Punks aus Kiel. Der Typ brüllte zurück. Ich kenn euch, alles nur Tarnung, Ihr seid Bullen, Erst als wir geschlossen im Chor Anarchy in You-Key sangen, Glaubte man uns und erklärte nach dem ersten Six-Pack, Daß sie aus sicherer Quelle wüßten, Daß heut nacht die Erstürmung ihrer Heimstatt fällig sein würde. [‘The Throw-away Battle on Pank Street in Berlin’ The punks in Kiel could not believe it when I told them that in Berlin there was A Pank Street and on top of that A subway station called Pank, But then we took off in a rattletrap VW Golf or something […] Finally we go to the squatters’ building, At first no one would let us in, Everything was barricaded shut, We beat our fists raw, Finally a round-faced person at the window, Upstairs, yelled, Fuck off, We yelled back,

56 Hadayatullah Hübsch, Macht den Weg frei (Bad Honnef: Harlemann, 1998).

50 

 Enno Stahl

We’re the punks from Kiel. The guy yelled back. I know you, it’s just a disguise, you’re cops, Finally when we all sang together Anarchy in You-Key, They believed us and explained, after the first six-pack, That they had heard from a good source, That their home was due to be stormed that night.]⁵⁷

The fear manifested itself and there follows a grotesquely exaggerated battle between the police and the squatters, who finally use all the furnishings as weapons against the attackers as they throw everything out on the street. This furious, but very funny long poem was more successful at readings than in book form. Indeed, Hübsch seems not to have taken much interest in copyediting and checking over his published works. They tended to go to the publishers mainly as typescripts straight from the typewriter, as if he had typed everything in one go without touching them again, much less thinking of a homogenous oeuvre.⁵⁸ At his performances Hübsch made his text come alive, long before there was any talk in Germany of spoken word or poetry slams, Hübsch was his own slammer. In the 1970s he toured with jazz bands, and in the 1980s and 1990s he was still doing shows all over Germany, often together with younger groups of poets, such as the ‘Social Beat’ network from the early 1990s.⁵⁹ Performative statements are always of the moment; they have a presence that is difficult for scholars to address, so here I have to rely on my own experiences and things I have observed myself, such as the memorable performance at the 2. Deutschen Literaturmeisterschaft [Second German Literary Competition] in 1995 called ‘Dichter in den Ring!’ [Poets in the Ring!]. This event was one of the earliest German poetry slams, which I and Dietmar Pokoyski organized together in Cologne. (The first of these actionist-satirical ‘poets’ boxing matches took place in 1993 and was the first ever poetry slam in Germany.⁶⁰) Hübsch, who was ultimately crowned as the German Literature Champion in 1995, read a ‘Throw-

57 Ibid., p. 42. 58 This is based on personal knowledge of the author. 59 See Enno Stahl, ‘Social Beat, Trash und Slam  – eine Begriffsverwirrung’, in Popliteratur, ed. by Heinz-Ludwig Arnold and Jörgen Schäfer (Text + Kritik, Sonderband [2003]), pp. 258–78, especially 259–62. 60 In fact, it was Hadayatullah Hübsch who in 1992 put me in touch with Alan Kaufmann and Bob Holman, two members of the American poetry slam and spoken word scene; see ‘Social Beat’ as well as Boris Preckwitz, SLAM POETRY – Nachhut der Moderne. Eine literarische Bewegung als Anti-Avantgarde, M.A. Thesis, Hamburg 1997, especially chapter 2: Historischer Teil, pp. 41–76.

An Alternative History of Pop 

 51

Away Poem’ with verve and vehemence and interspersed it continuously with the following phrases: ‘Dieses Gedicht kannste wegwerfen, du brauchst es nicht zu lessen […]. Dieses Gedicht kannste wegwerfen, du kannst deine Blumen damit düngen, du kannst […]’ [You can throw away this poem, you don’t have to read it (…). You can throw away this poem, you can fertilize your flowers with it, you can (…)]. After every second or third line Hübsch wadded up a sheet of his text and tossed it into the crowd, thus performing the act of throwing away mentioned in the poem. Naturally this performance was a big hit with the audience and it reached its climax when Hübsch declaimed with such exuberance that his dentures flew out of his mouth.

Reception / Personal Matters That Hadayatullah Hübsch, as we have seen, took part actively in the young underground literary scene, pointed already to how substantially the authors discussed here influenced the next generation of writers. Performance literature since the beginning of the 1990s has gained so much from Hübsch because, until his death, he showed up at nearly every live literary event. The Magazine Gasolin 23 had cult status in the 1980s, though Fauser was already dead and in his last years no longer necessarily part of the underground. Hübsch and Ploog were living witnesses to the literary uprisings of the late 1960s. In 1988 a ‘60/90’ meeting of alternative literary figures was organized in the Frankfurt/Mousonturm, though there is no trace of it to be found either on the web or in the scholarly literature. Nevertheless, many participants remember the event well and discuss it to this day. I took part on day two, having just returned from New York, and found a series of participants in the old underground literary scene. But there were also younger authors who saw themselves as part of a Beat tradition; the event was supposed to allow a discussion of strategies and possibilities for an independent literature. I was extremely excited by what I had seen and experienced in New York; it seemed to me to have become the front line of alternative culture at the time. The legendary CBGB was still in full bloom, and I had met the American Ur-punker Richard Hell who organized the St. Mark’s Poetry Project readings in the church of that name in the Bowery, a project which still exists today. It was the New York of the early Sonic Youth; two or three hundred bands played here every week, including all the names. I took in as much as I could of a vibrant scene. In comparison, not quite thirty slightly bored people sitting in a circle in Frankfurt seemed just depressing. I complained that there were no video cameras, there

52 

 Enno Stahl

was nothing modern, nothing contemporary, and I was told that there was film shot the day before. To this day people say that the first day of the meeting – the one I missed – was the really good one, full of meaning and consequence. I cannot confirm this, but Jürgen Ploog, a grey eminence, was there; I got to know him later and he made a very positive impression on me, mainly because of his intellectual attitudes. The other participants argued from their gut with a dogmatic, notorious anger at everything that was not part of the Beat cosmos. Hübsch seemed to me to be of that group, though I knew him before from the Mainz Small Press Exhibition, which was first arranged as a counter-event to the Frankfurt Book Fair and continued for some years as a kind of trade fair of the alternative press. What did indeed happen at the 60/90 meeting (just like my own meetings with Ploog and Hübsch) was bridge-building between generations, like a passing of the baton or a direct continuation of the tradition. That was certainly less the case for me and our activities at KRASH Verlag than for Social Beat, which came into being a few years later; some of the players of this network were also surely at Frankfurt. The influence of the Beat generation is easy to see in the names of the groups. For a series of contemporary writers the tradition of Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac and therefore also of Fauser, Hübsch and Ploog has been, if not a point of direct connection, then at least a strong influence. That is certainly true for many of the authors who appeared in anthologies such as German Trash or Trash-Piloten.⁶¹ The first collection shows the influence directly since Fauser and Brinkmann appear there. Authors like Stan Lafleur, Ulrich Bogislav, Matthias Penzel, Caroline Hartge, Kersten Flenter or Jan Off could be named, but also a group of the newest young German poets who are putting out a flood of work, such as Gerald Fiebig, Björn Kuhligk or Tom Schulz, all of whom at least know the work of Fauser and Ploog. Even if one does not recognize it, the influence is there, and there were and are personal contacts. The publishing world, above all Kiepenheuer & Witsch with its attempt to canonize its own history as the genesis of German pop literature, prefers instead a history of discontinuity and breaking away from traditions in which Rolf Dieter Brinkmann is understood in continuity with the pop literature of the 1990s. But perhaps Brinkmann is best situated in the tradition described here, in the German literary relationship alongside Fauser, Ploog and Born. Translated by Scott Denham

61 German Trash, ed. by Enno Stahl (Berlin: Galrev, 1996); Trash-Piloten, ed. by Heiner Link (Leipzig: Reclam, 1997).

Sabine von Dirke

Under Construction: Andreas Neumeister’s Pop Modern Historiographies Pop hurls itself into the present moment. Pop hurls itself into the formal possibilities the present moment offers. This does not mean that pop turns a blind eye to history.¹

The reception of ‘Neue Deutsche Popliteratur’, to use the term coined by Degler and Paulokat for literary pop of the 1990s, was decidedly mixed.² This genre was embraced by a large audience of young readers who had previously been written off as a generation lost to literature. Yet despite or perhaps because of the success of these works in reaching a fresh audience, the cultural opinion makers in the bourgeois media reacted with hostility. These critics took refuge behind the wall of the high/low culture dichotomy, which has remained in place in Germany despite the encroachments of the first wave of pop in the 1960s. To these high culture mavens, pop literature was suspect because of the savvy marketing strategies employed by both the authors and their publishers in pitching their product – literature – just like any other commodity.³ Not only was pop literature tainted by crass commercialism, it was also chided for its lack of social and political conscience, which had been the hallmark of critically acclaimed and canonized literature in post-war East and West Germany.⁴ It was therefore easy to dismiss pop literature’s pre-occupation with the surface of the world and its ‘Oberflächenästhetik’, i. e. aesthetic of the surface, as irredeemably superficial.⁵ This normative hermeneutic, which privileges depth over surface, extended its

1 Carsten Gansel and Andreas Neumeister, ‘Pop bleibt subversiv. Ein Gespräch’, Pop Literatur, ed. by Heinz Ludwig Arnold and Jörgen Schäfer (Text + Kritik, Sonderband [2003]), pp. 183–96 (p. 185). 2 Frank Degler and Ute Paulokat, Neue Deutsche Popliteratur (Paderborn: Fink, 2008). 3 For an insightful discussion of this issue, see Anke Biendarra, Germans Going Global. Contemporary Literature and Cultural Globalization (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012), pp. 35–46. 4 Degler and Paulokat, Neue Deutsche Popliteratur, p. 7; see also Anke Biendarra’s ‘Pop & Politik. Formen von Engagement in der zeitgenössischen Popliteratur’, Closing Borders, Bridging Gaps? Deutscher Pop an der Jahrtausendwende, special issue of Literatur für Leser, ed. by Anke Biendarra 31.2 (2008), pp. 125–41, which refutes the criticism that pop literature lacks political engagement based on Katrin Röggla’s oeuvre. 5 See as a paradigmatic example of such criticism Iris Radisch’s article entitled: ‘Mach den Kasten an und schau. Junge Männer unterwegs: Die neue deutsche Popliteratur reist auf der Oberfläche der Welt’, in Die Zeit (October 14, 1999), Supplement to the Frankfurter Book Fair, pp. 1–2.

54 

 Sabine von Dirke

critique to temporal concerns. Any appearance of the past in second wave pop was interpreted either as saccharine nostalgia or disrespectful dismissiveness.⁶ From this perspective, pop literature’s emphatic engagement with the here and now was read as a disavowal of historical consciousness and hence another mark of its literary deficiency. Drawing on Moritz Baßler’s theory of the pop novel as literary inventory and archive of pop cultural life as well as Aleida Assmann’s theory of memory, Degler and Paulokat’s scholarly analysis takes a more nuanced approach than literary criticism of the 1990s and persuasively elucidates that second wave pop literature constructs a generationally specific memory of childhood and youth during the affluent 1960s and 1970s in the Bonn Republic. Their analysis concludes that the naïve and nostalgic perspective with which the pop literary texts celebrated these childhood memories was at the root of the critical ire.⁷ Even more provocative, however, was pop literature’s treatment of Germany’s Nazi-past, which had always been the touchstone of canonically validated German literature. Critics took issue with the allegedly flippant references to Nazism, for instance in Christian Kracht’s Faserland, rebuking pop literature for draining meaning from historical symbols and undermining the historical consciousness that had developed in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust.⁸ Such criticism maintains that history crops up in literary pop only as a list of empty clichés because pop literature’s interest in history exhausts itself in the anecdotal and obscure.⁹ Others argue that the articulations of pop literature, especially of the pop-literary quintet (Joachim Bessing, Christian Kracht, Eckhart Nickel, Alexander von Schönburg, Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre), were part of the ‘generational discourse on the legacy of ’68 and the social, cultural and political influence of the former student protesters – now top politicians, leading

6 I am using this term in a temporal sense and as short-hand for distinguishing literary pop of the 1960s from that of the 1990s and beyond. The concept of ‘wave’ implies that there is continuity between waves, i. e. which in pop aesthetic practices of the 1970s and 1980s survived as undercurrents. For a similar historical periodization of pop see Sascha Seiler, Das einfache wahre Abschreiben der Welt. Pop-Diskurse in der deutschen Literatur nach 1960 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006) and Christoph Rauen, Pop und Ironie. Popdiskurs und Popliteratur um 1980 und 2000 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010). 7 Degler and Paulokat, Neue Deutsche Popliteratur, p. 7. 8 See Frank Finlay, ‘“Dann wäre Deutschland wie das Wort Neckarauen”: Surface, Superficiality and Globalisation in Christian Kracht’s Faserland ’, in German Literature in the Age of Globalisation, ed. by Stuart Taberner (Birmingham: Birmingham University Press, 2004), pp. 189–208. 9 Torsten Liesegang, ‘Die Wiederkehr der Popliteratur als Farce’, Krisis 25 (2002), 155–162. (http://www.krisis.org/2002/die-wiederkehr-der-popliteratur-als-farce)

Under Construction: Andreas Neumeister’s Pop Modern Historiographies 

 55

intellectuals and media personalities – claiming pre-eminence in the shaping of contemporary German society’.¹⁰ The vivid, by and large negative response to the book Tristesse Royale (1999), the text with which the entire pop quintet sounded off on contemporary affairs, is the most glaring example of how generational differentiation worked in the 1990s.¹¹ As scholars have pointed out, this conversation piece represents nothing but a mockery of the generation of 1968, the values they uphold and their normative understanding of German history through the prism of the Holocaust.¹² The pop authors themselves, however, would argue that their focus on the present does not mean that they are blind to history, a sentiment expressed in the quote by Andreas Neumeister at the beginning of this article. Neumeister’s oeuvre provides a good example of how pop literary strategies can effectively debunk the above-cited dismissal of pop literature as a mere generational nostalgia and escape from collective history. As the subsequent analysis aims to elucidate, Neumeister’s texts carefully engage with socio-political and cultural history, even as the pop aesthetic of the 1960s remains an important point of reference for him. A key element of 1960s pop, its pre-occupation with the surfaces through and in which the world presents itself, is a fundamental building block in his own pop aesthetic project. Far from obliterating the past, Neumeister’s pop literature registers how traces of the past are embedded in the surfaces in which the current moment manifests itself. His texts exhibit a keen awareness that these traces include many examples of failed political and cultural movements which aimed to resist the dominant powers that mark twentieth-century history. Neumeister’s oeuvre is, therefore, equally conscious that past pop literary strategies cannot be taken over wholesale and uncritically. Instead, it probes claims of a correlation between aesthetic avant-garde and socio-political emancipation. Finally, Neumeister’s prose reconnects literary pop to the broader history of modernity while remaining sceptical of this project and, in particular, its concept of historical progress.

10 Sabine von Dirke, ‘Pop Literature in the Berlin Republic’, in Contemporary German Fiction. Writing in the Berlin Republic, ed. by Stuart Taberner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp.  108–24. Note that Degler’s and Paulokat’s Neue Deutsche Popliteratur, published a year later in 2008, develops a similar argument. 11 Joachim Bessing, Tristess Royale (Berlin: Ullstein, 1999). 12 See Moritz Baßler, Der deutsche Pop-Roman. Die neuen Archivisten. (Munich: Beck, 2002), especially ‘Erinnerung oder Gedächtnis’, pp. 46–49. For a most interesting engagement with this controversial text see Stefanie Roennecke, ‘Adieu Tristesse! Wieviel Camp steckt in Pop? ’, in Poetik der Oberfläche: die deutschsprachige Popliteratur der 1990er Jahre, ed. by Olaf Grabienski, Till Huber and Jan-Noël Thon (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011), pp. 111–21. Roennecke provides a fairly complete list of the relevant scholarly treatments of this text in her first footnote on p. 111.

56 

 Sabine von Dirke

Neumeister’s awareness of the ambivalent path of modernity points to another theoretical context relevant for Neumeister’s pop aesthetic, namely the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. In this regard, Neumeister owes more to Alexander Kluge than Theodor W. Adorno, which suggests that drawing on the terms developed in Kluge scholarship in order to analyze Neumeister’s pop literary texts would be useful. The first part of my study examines the latter, i. e. the conceptual and aesthetic proximity of Kluge’s and Neumeister’s engagement with the political history of the twentieth century. Because of the criticism levelled against the treatment of the Nazi past by second wave pop literature, my analysis concentrates on Neumeister’s engagement with this particularly grim and defining moment of German history in order to demonstrate that a pop aesthetic can engender a critical perspective just as much as Kluge’s representational strategies. The second part of my article examines how Neumeister reconnects the aesthetic strategies of pop to the broader history of modernity in order to investigate the status of avant-garde art and literature in light of twentieth-century history.

Neumeister, Kluge and History Neumeister’s autobiographically inflected debut ‘novel’ Äpfel vom Baum im Kies [Apples from the Tree in the Scree] (1988) and its sequel, Salz im Blut [Salt in One’s Blood] (1990) participate but do not exhaust themselves in what Degler and Paulokat call the constitution of a generationally specific memory of childhood and youth during the affluent 1960s and 1970s.¹³ His best known text Gut laut [At High Volume], published in 1998 and reprinted as Gut laut. 2.0 only three years later, develops an inventory of contemporary popular culture, in particular Giorgio Moroder’s Munich disco sound of the 1970s, thereby making this moment in music culture accessible in a literary form.¹⁴ Unlike some pop works, the archive Gut laut assembles does not consist of high and low end commodity

13 By designating his works as novels, I am following the practice of most reviewers, although only two of his books, Ausdeutschen and the recent Könnte Köln sein, have such a genre designation on their cover. More importantly, none of Neumeister’s books comply with the generic convention typically associated with the term novel. See Andreas Neumeister, Äpfel vom Baum im Kies (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1988); Salz im Blut (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1990). Neumeister’s title utilizes the connotation of the German expression – ‘etwas im Blut haben’ – meaning to be passionate about something. It also refers to Munich’s location at the heart of the salt trade since medieval times. This text was reprinted in 2008 by the Süddeutsche Zeitung as part of their project Süddeutsche Zeitung Bibliothek. All references in this article are to the 2008 edition. 14 See Baßler, Der deutsche Pop-Roman, p. 149.

Under Construction: Andreas Neumeister’s Pop Modern Historiographies 

 57

brand names but rather of pop chart hits and underground bands. Whereas the narrator shows an emphatic allegiance to popular music of the 1960s and 1970s, his view of that era’s politics is less enthusiastic: ‘[…] bin ich froh, dass uns das esoterische 68er-Renegatentum erspart geblieben ist’ [(…) am I glad that I was spared that esoteric renegade attitude of 1968].¹⁵ This explicit positioning of the narrator’s generation against that of 1968 affirms an understanding of second wave pop as an attempt of the ‘Nachgeborenen’ [those born later], to use Brecht’s term, to differentiate themselves from the overbearing generation of 1968 and their normative position as to the appropriate way to cope with Germany’s Nazi past. Yet while these turf wars over generational memory, waged over the inviting terrain of party and pop music culture, provide an important context, it would be a mistake to read these three works or Neumeister’s oeuvre as a whole solely against the backdrop of pop culture.¹⁶ Indeed, Neumeister’s oeuvre can be organized thematically around three historical axes: (1) the history of popular culture, which encompasses music, film, the media and sports; (2) the history of art, architecture and aesthetic movements; and (3) political history, which is the key category under discussion in this section. His first two novels, Äpfel vom Baum im Kies and Salz im Blut, introduce a discourse on political history that continues through most of Neumeister’s oeuvre and that focuses on the following dates: 1918/19, 1945, 1968 and 1977, to which his later texts add 1989/90 and 9/11. These dates mark major caesuras in the history of Germany and – except for 1977 – of Occidental Modernity. We shall see how Neumeister, similar to Kluge’s negotiations of history, mobilizes these dates in provocative and interesting ways that challenge the previously cited criticism of pop literature’s inability to engage with history in a meaningful manner.¹⁷ While Neumeister’s entire oeuvre references the Nazi past, his second novel, Salz im Blut, deals most overtly with the history of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, for instance, in chapter 11, which addresses the past fate of Munich’s Jewish population and how it is represented thereafter:

15 Andreas Neumeister, Gut laut. Version 2.0 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2001), p. 185. 16 For a fruitful assessment of Neumeister’s Gut laut regarding its discourse on history and critical potential, see Geoffrey Cox, ‘The Mensch-Maschine: Constellations of Pop Music History in Andreas Neumeister’s Gut laut’, in Mediating Germany. Popular Culture between Tradition and Innovation, ed. by Gerd Bayer (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006), pp. 54–72. 17 Wolfgang Reichmann, Der Chronist Alexander Kluge. Poetik und Erzählstrategien (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2009), p. 27.

58 

 Sabine von Dirke

[…] obwohl man heute noch in der New York Times nachlesen kann, dass die Juden im März 1934 Hitler den Krieg erklärten, und es dauerte nur fünf Jahre, bis die Juden die Alliierten so weit hatten, dass sie diesen Krieg mitmachten, noch im selben Jahr fanden Verhandlungen statt in den U.S. zwischen Baruch Morgenthau und dem deutschen Aussenminister von Papen, sowie dem päpstlichen Vertreter, wie die in Deutschland lebenden Juden vor dem geplanten Bombenterror der Alliierten geschützt werden könnten, und es wurden die KZs als Lösung bestätigt, diese, weit von jedem Kriegsgeschehen entfernt, sollten die Juden aufnehmen, und so geschah es auch, […] natürlich starben dort auch Menschen während des sechsjährigen Krieges, aber in der Mehrzahl eines natürlichen Todes, wie andere auch, und sicher sind auch welche umgebracht worden, wenn sie Fluchtversuche machten oder Sabotage, doch das Gros überlebte verhältnismässig gut, verhältnismässig im Sinne des Vergleichs mit unseren Frauen und Kindern, die in den Luftschutzkellern zu Millionen verbrannten oder auf den brennenden Asphaltstrassen von Sprengbomben zerrissen und lastwagenweise des Morgens in den Massengräbern verscharrt wurden […] so dass man sagen kann: die Juden haben die gesamte Kriegsgeneration ausgerottet. Wir nehmen kein Blatt vor den Mund. Wir reden frei von der Leber weg. Wir machen aus unserm Mörderherzen keine Judengrube. [(…) although one can still read in the New York Times that the Jews declared war on Hitler in March of 1934, and it only took five years that the Jews got the Allies to join into the war, even in the same year negotiations took place in the U.S. between Baruch Morgenthau and the German Secretary of State, von Papen, as well as with the pope’s representative, how the Jews living in Germany could be protected from the bombing terror which the Allies were planning, and the KZs were confirmed as a solution, those placed far away from the combat zone should take in the Jews, and that’s what happened (…) of course, people died there during the six-year war, the majority of a natural death like others too, and certainly some were killed, if they tried to escape or did sabotage, but the majority survived reasonably well, reasonably well in the sense of in comparison to our women and children who burned to death in the air shelters or were torn apart by bombs in the burning asphalt streets and were dumped by the truck loads into mass graves in the mornings (…) so that one could say: the Jews exterminated the entire war generation. We don’t mince our words. We speak our mind. We do not turn our murderous hearts into a den full of Jews.]¹⁸

The tone of this narrative of Nazi-history sets the passage apart from the main narrative voice because it emulates oral speech in syntax, grammar and semantic register. Furthermore, the speaker aims to remain anonymous and his or her oral narrative ends hastily in a sequence of proverbs as if the speaker anticipates and seeks to cut off objections to the version of German collective history he or she presented. These aesthetic choices, especially the anonymity of the speaking voice and the retreat into proverbial expressions, suggest that Salz im Blut reproduces in this passage the ‘Volksmund’ or ‘the people’s voice’. The ‘Volksmund’ is

18 Neumeister, Salz, pp. 71–72.

Under Construction: Andreas Neumeister’s Pop Modern Historiographies 

 59

characterized by hiding behind the veil of proverbial speech because it knows it can rely on the collective consent that this mode of speech expresses. Interestingly, Neumeister’s Salz im Blut is set in the 1980s, which saw vigorous Holocaust debates.¹⁹ Far from ignoring these debates, Neumeister engages with them, but not in terms of an elevated intellectual discourse as it was carried out in the public discourse’s infamous Historians’ Debate. Consistent with pop literary strategies, Neumeister’s text incorporates popular discourse, which means the previously alluded to ‘Volksmund’ narrative about the Holocaust. This formulation reverses the position of historical perpetrators and victims in such a manner that the Munich population appears as the victims of the Nazis and their war. That the terms of official public discourse on the historical guilt of the German people have become hopelessly garbled in the ‘Volksmund’ is clearly not being presented solely for the reader’s amusement but to provoke further reflection. The deliberate distortion of the last proverb serves aesthetically the goal of undercutting the populist and self-serving victimization tale just as much as deploying the stylistic principle of the grotesque. It makes even gullible listeners or readers ignorant of Holocaust history stumble, since the anonymous speaker quite literally slips up. The speaker’s mouth turns the original version of the common proverb ‘Aus seinem Herzen keine Mördergrube machen’ [not to turn one’s heart into a den of thieves/murderers] into ‘Wir machen aus unserm Mörderherzen keine Judengrube’ [We do not turn our murderous hearts into a den full of Jews]. This Freudian slip reveals the repressed historical truth about the Holocaust: it names the Germans as the murderers and the Jews as the victims whose bodies filled the mass graves in the death camps. Instead of simply parroting the official mea culpa, Neumeister presents the reader with a glimpse into a far less savoury and current facet of the national temperament – the ‘Volksmund’ revisionist tale of Munich’s Nazi past, which is far from flippant. The weight of history is not denied in Neumeister’s literary pop texts, but his writing refrains from articulating a normative position on history. Neumeister’s aesthetic strategy of importing the people’s voice into his text while distorting it ever so slightly aims at working on the reader’s perception. More specifically, it takes the reader by surprise and thereby forces us to pay closer attention to how the current moment and the past surface in oral, visual and written discourse at all levels. The passage previously quoted at some length exemplifies how Neu-

19 The Bitburg debacle, i. e. U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s visit to the military cemetery in Bitburg where SS officers were also buried on the historically significant date of May 8 in 1985 was the prelude to the prolonged confrontation called the ‘Historikerstreit’ [historians’ debate] kicked off by Ernst Nolte’s revisionist history of the Holocaust and Jürgen Habermas’s rebuttal.

60 

 Sabine von Dirke

meister employs pop literary aesthetic principles in order to reveal the absurdity of the ‘Volksmund’. In particular, the cutting up and remixing of a well-known proverb resembles the cut-ups and fold-ins typical for first wave pop literature but also recalls Kluge’s aesthetics and representational strategies.²⁰ Although Neumeister never outright acknowledges Kluge’s influence, the latter’s name and one of his films appear in Neumeister’s oeuvre. In his debut novel, Äpfel vom Baum im Kies, Neumeister refers explicitly to Kluge’s Die Patriotin [The Patriot] (1979), which for most scholars epitomizes Kluge’s main theme – history – and his approach to it: ‘German history as well as the historical implications of the present time. History is not, however, understood as a concrete and comprehensible object of study […], [but] History means active labouring on the relationships of its reception and the constant questioning of how History is represented’.²¹ Gabi Teichert, Kluge’s protagonist and a history teacher disenchanted with the sanitized textbook version of German history in the twentieth century, pursues precisely this strategy. She searches for ‘historischen Zusammenhänge’ [historical connections] that she feels are lacking.²² In Äpfel vom Baum im Kies, Neumeister echoes Kluge’s position on the representation of history in post-war West Germany and his literary writings undertake a similar exploration of past and present.²³ Instead of digging below the surface like Kluge’s protagonist Gabi Teichert, Neumeister’s narrator explores how history manifests itself in surfaces, in the surrounding land- and cityscape, past and current street maps of Munich or Berlin, architecture, photos and the previously discussed ‘Volksmund’. These surfaces trigger the narrator’s memories and associations since Salz im Blut, set in Munich, programmatically pronounces: ‘Von geschichtsträchtigen Orten ausgelöste Assoziationen versetzen die Protagonisten immer wieder in die mit der Stadt verbundene deutsche Vergangenheit’ [Associations triggered by places saturated in history place the protagonists over and over again into German history as it is connected with this city].²⁴

20 On the connection between cut-up and fold-in techniques from Beat to first wave pop, see Dieter Hoffmann, Deutschsprachige Prosa seit 1945. Vol. 2. Von der neuen Subjektivität zur Pop-Literatur (Stuttgart: UTB, 2006), especially chapter 6. 21 Eike Friedrich Wenzel, ‘Baustelle Film’, in Die Schrift an der Wand. Alexander Kluge: Rohstoffe und Materialien, ed. by Christian Schulte (Osnabrück: Rasch, 2000), pp. 103–18 (p. 103). 22 Götz Grossklaus, ‘Katastrophe und Fortschritt. Alexander Kluge: Suche nach dem verlorenen Zusammenhang deutscher Geschichte’, in Die Schrift an der Wand. Alexander Kluge: Rohstoffe und Materialien, ed. by Christian Schulte (Osnabrück: Rasch, 2000), pp. 175–202 (p. 175). 23 Neumeister, Äpfel, p. 23. 24 Neumeister, Salz, p. 181.

Under Construction: Andreas Neumeister’s Pop Modern Historiographies 

 61

While Neumeister trains his eye and ear on the here and now, this statement makes clear that the past inflects the contemporary moment and therefore cannot be obliterated. To be sure, Neumeister eschews totalizing representations of historical developments and thus does not provide the reader with a neat linear historical narrative. Standard generic codes, especially plot, are instead replaced by juxtapositions of fact, quotes and fiction in an apparently unmediated fashion with the intention of disrupting conventional modes of perception. Neumeister’s oeuvre thus shows much similarity with Kluge’s concept of history and aesthetic strategies. Critical reception of Kluge’s complicated collages of the materials that constiute his films and texts has been overall positive. Scholars have coined terms like associative network and work-in-progress for Kluge’s representations of history.²⁵ They particularly praise Kluge’s deployment of montage for prying open the smooth surface of teleological, narrative historiography in order to expose the gaps and fissures of history. Kluge describes his method in very similar terms as a ‘Versuchsanordnung’ [test arrangement] and ‘Baustelle’ [construction site] in order to underscore the deliberate open-ended nature of his texts and films. He believes in the power of the imagination, more specifically his audience’s imagination, which he tries to activate with his representation of history as a matrix of open constellations inspired by the modernist aesthetic principles of montage and collage.²⁶ In an interview published in 2003, Neumeister himself employs terms very similar to Kluge’s and to Kluge scholarship for characterizing his own aesthetic strategies, insisting that his texts from the very beginning were constructed or assembled with many fragments from numerous sources. Textsampling, Textmontage, Vielstimmigkeit, immer wieder die Annährung an das mündliche Sprechen waren vom ersten Buch an wichtiger Bestandteil meiner Arbeit. Thematisch: Pop-Mythen und andere populäre Stoffe haben mich von Beginn an als Quelle für eigene Texte interessiert. [The sampling of texts, textual montages, polyphony, again and again approximating oral speech were an important aspect of my work beginning with my first book. Thematically: Pop myths and other popular subjects have interested me from the very beginning as sources for my own texts.]²⁷

25 Wolfgang Reichmann, Der Chronist Alexander Kluge: Poetik und Erzählstrategien (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2009). 26 See Peter C. Lutze, Alexander Kluge. The Last Modernist (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998). 27 Gansel and Neumeister, Pop bleibt subversiv, p. 189.

62 

 Sabine von Dirke

The novelty of Gut laut, his best known book, was not, therefore, the non-linear, fragmentary narrative for which it was hailed, since this structure also characterized Neumeister’s earlier writing. Instead, as Neumeister himself points out, he explored in this text a new ‘test arrangement’ designed to transfer ‘the technique of sampling which made Techno and Hip Hop so fascinating for me to literature’.²⁸ ‘Sampling’ became the preferred term which Neumeister uses interchangeably with the term ‘montage’ and ‘collage’ because his aesthetic sensibility, like that of his generation, has been shaped as never before by pop musical structures. At the same time, it is important to historically contextualize the term sampling in order to understand Neumeister’s pop literary project as part of a longer history of the aesthetic avant-garde. As Christopher Balme reminds us, sampling might be the product of electro acoustic music and is today an easily applicable technique due to digital technology, but its roots reach back into the first half of the twentieth century. He traces the aesthetic principle of sampling back to the experimental movement of Musique Concrète of the 1940s which utilized the most advanced recording technologies of its time in order to integrate parts of other musical pieces and even various non-musical sounds and noises into its compositions. Two aspects of Balme’s discussion of musical sampling are significant for understanding Neumeister’s literary pop. First, Balme defines the technique of collage which emerged in the fine arts of the interwar period as the original model or blueprint for all aesthetic strategies across the arts which aim at non-totalizing representations of their subject matter. Second, the aesthetic principle of collage criticized, by way of form and structure, the dominant Romantic notion of art as a work which exhibits organic originality and strives for totality in representation. Instead, the aesthetic principle of collage eschews any appearance of totality in favour of articulating the materiality of its individual parts and their relationship to each other. Hence, Balme defines collage as a modernist aesthetic strategy and its musical equivalent, sampling, as an aesthetic practice which links the historical avant-garde and pop.²⁹

28 Ibid., p. 189. 29 Christopher Balme, ‘Heiner Goebbels: Zur Dramaturgie des Samplings’, in Dramatische Transformationen. Zur gegenwärtigen Schreib- und Aufführungsstrategien im deutschsprachigen Theater, ed. by Stefan Tigges (Bielefeld: transcript, 2008), especially ‘Begriffserklärung; Montage und Collage’, pp. 228–30. On the issue of collage and montage see also Enjott Schneider, ‘Von der “niederen” Populärkultur zur Mutter aller Künste. Film, Multimedia, Collage als Ausdruck der postmodernen Ästhetik’, in Was ist Pop? Zehn Versuche, ed. by Walter Grasskamp, Michaela Krützen and Stephan Schmitt (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2004), pp. 141–64 and Günther A. Höfler, ‘Sampling – das Pop Paradigma in der Literatur als Epochenphänomen’, in Kontinuität

Under Construction: Andreas Neumeister’s Pop Modern Historiographies 

 63

Opposition to the totalizing aesthetic of smooth surfaces, which dominates official historiographies and commodity culture, is as constitutive for Neumeister’s intellectual project as it is for first wave pop’s and Kluge’s work. Hence, Gut laut, Neumeister’s best known book that was published at the height of the Neue Deutsche Popliteratur boom in 1998, simply radicalized the author’s previously employed representational strategies by modelling them on ‘sampling’, i. e. an aesthetic principle dating back to the historical avant-garde used in musical composition. Ironically, the unconventional form of this text deflected from Neumeister’s engagement with history in this particular text and in his earlier books. Instead, Gut laut promoted the perception that second wave pop is ahistorical or only exploits history as a repository of obscure pop cultural anecdotes. One might be led to make such a mistaken assumption from a cursory reading of Neumeister’s early works like Äpfel vom Baum im Kies and its sequel Salz im Blut since they indeed invoke key dates of twentieth-century history with rather peculiar references to Friedrich Krohn, General von Epp and Feldafing. The last name is of a village on Lake Starnberg, a region famous for its serene, natural beauty where the narrator grew up in the 1960s and 1970s. While the narrative voices in these two texts pay tribute to the beauty of this ‘Heimat’ [regional homeland] as the setting for an idyllic childhood, they also recall Feldafing’s ‘brown’ or Nazi past, since the village housed a famous boarding school for young Nazi elites during the Third Reich. The train of reminiscences also takes us to the door of Friedrich Krohn, a dentist in Starnberg who remains obscure in spite of the fact that he was a founding member of the Nazi movement and partially responsible for designing its preeminent symbol – the ‘Hakenkreuzfahne’, i. e. the flag with the Swastika on it. Also rescued from oblivion is one General von Epp, a right-wing career soldier who was involved in overthrowing the Munich ‘Räterepublik’, the short-lived Soviet style republic in April of 1919. This Munich ‘Räterepublik’ occupies a central place in Neumeister’s engagement with history, evident in repeated references in his oeuvre, including the following quote from Salz im Blut: München 1918/19 [...] trotzdem kann ich mir eine Räterepublik in München weniger vorstellen als den Stachus als einstige Wiese vor der Stadtmauer. Geschichte ist nie weit hergeholt. Selbst vor dieser vergleichsweise harmlosen Revolution haben sich die Sozis mehr in die Hosen gemacht als vor den Schregen des alten Reiches. Lieber mit den Korps als mit den Räten, so lässt sich die lang ersehnte Machtposition besser befestigen […]. Die Münchner

und Wandel. Apokalypse und Prophetie. Literatur an Jahrhundertschwellen, ed. by Dietmar Jacobsen (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2001), pp. 249–67 which uses Neumeister’s Gut laut as his example.

64 

 Sabine von Dirke

durften nicht sich selbst überlassen werden. Gleich musste sich wieder jemand als Oberaufseher aufspielen und sich eine schlagkräftige Verstärkung holen, um eine Erfindung zu zerstören, die so nicht von den Sozialdemokraten war. General Epp tritt auf. Toller tritt ab. Dass die Sozis diese Verstärkung gegen die ohnehin zahme Revolution vor kurzem noch als ihre ärgsten Feinde bezeichnet haben, stört sie jetzt nicht mehr. [Munich 1918/19 (…) and still, it is harder for me to imagine a Soviet style republic than that the Stachus Square was once just a meadow outside of the city fortifications. History is never from far away. Faced with this harmless revolution, the Social Democrats shit in their pants more so than when faced with the henchmen of the old Empire. Better with the right-wingers than the workers’ councils because it fortifies one’s own position of power (…). Munich’s population could not be left alone. Immediately, someone needed to play the top dog and fetch vicious support in order to destroy an innovative concept which the Social Democrats did not call their own. General Epp appears. Toller steps down. It does not bother the Social Democrats any longer that they had called the very forces they solicited against this tame revolution to be their worst enemy.]³⁰

The harsh words for the power play the Social Democrats engaged in after World War I imply sympathy with the concept of the workers’ councils, and Neumeister’s repeated return to this short-lived moment in Munich’s history suggests a yearning for a truly participatory democracy. At the same time, Neumeister’s preoccupation with this historical date hints at a resigned understanding of history as a sequence of power struggles in which the reactionary forces typically kept the upper hand. Even when they fail, this outcome can also spell disaster for the people, as with General Epp, who let his military allegiance prevail over common sense. Instead of surrendering to the overwhelming power of the Allied forces during the last days of World War II, Epp prolonged the fighting to the detriment of Munich and its population. Äpfel vom Baum im Kies thus suggests that historical developments and consequences can result from individual decision-making as well. The text views history as both driven by collective power struggle and individual actions, by overarching forces and coincidence. While history might be made by numerous factors, including coincidence, and actors, the key to understanding Neumeister’s approach comes in the subtle statement, ‘Geschichte ist nie weit hergeholt’ [history is never from far away] in the previously quoted passage. What appear at first glance to be obscure, purely anecdotal references such as Feldafing, Krohn and Epp provide instead a targeted perspective on the local history of Nazism. Neumeister’s texts do not depict the Third Reich as a distant national history centred in the ‘Reichshauptstadt’ [the Third Reich’s capital] which was Berlin. Instead they shift the gaze to the local

30 Neumeister, Salz, p. 143.

Under Construction: Andreas Neumeister’s Pop Modern Historiographies 

 65

level, i. e. to Munich as the ‘Hauptstadt der Bewegung’ [the capital of the National Socialist movement], and the Starnberg region that Neumeister and his narrative voices call home. Two reasons account for Neumeister’s decision to bring collective German history back home to the level of ‘Heimat’.³¹ First, it allows him to connect the past and the present of the narrative voice more intimately and draws a line from the ‘völkische’ past of the region, or Bavaria’s status as midwife and hotbed of Nazism, to the contemporary remnants of this brown heritage. In addition to the previously discussed textual examples of the ‘Volksmund’ revisionist and exonerating ‘oral history’ of Munich’s Nazi-past, this repressed history subtly yet repeatedly crops up in unassuming contemporary figures such as university professors at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich where Neumeister and his narrator-protagonists were enrolled. For instance, Neumeister’s debut novel refers to the revered professor of Bavarian history, Karl Bosl, with his seamless pre- and post-1945 career in spite of his associations with the Nazi movement.³² Second, depicting local manifestations of the Nazi-past and its current interpretation complicates the concept of history that Neumeister’s literary oeuvre develops even further since the narrative voices have a deep affective attachment to their ‘Heimat’, evident in passages marvelling at the natural beauty of the Bavarian landscape, the architectural appeal of its capital, Munich, and that recall childhood memories fondly. As the narrator of Äpfel vom Baum im Kies put it: ‘Die Welt, in der ich lebte, war nicht nur kaputt und hässlich, sondern vor allem atemberaubend schön’ [The world in which I lived was not only broken and ugly but also of breath-taking beauty].³³ Neumeister’s oeuvre thereby articulates historical awareness of his ‘Heimat’s’ ambivalent character which resonates with Kluge’s engagement with history, especially in his film Die Patriotin that Neumeister explicitly references. Patriotism, of course, rests on an affective attachment to one’s home country, or in Neumeister’s case home region. At stake for both on some level is the need to separate a love of country

31 In one of the very few scholarly articles which treats Neumeister at length, Charis Goer refers to Neumeister as a ‘Heimatschriftsteller’ [an author writing about his regional homeland]. See Goer, ‘Cross the Border – Face the Gap. Ästhetik der Grenzerfahrung bei Thomas Meinecke und Andreas Neumeister’, Pop Literatur, ed. by Heinz-Ludwig Arnold and Jörgen Schäfer (Text + Kritik, Sonderband [2003]), pp. 172–81 (p. 177). 32 Äpfel, p.  207–08. Karl Bosl (1905–1993) was a professor of Bavarian history at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. After 1945 he claimed to have been in the resistance movement against the Nazis and received public awards for his courageous position. However, subsequent biographical research brought to the fore that Bosl had lied and instead was a fellow traveller of Nazism. 33 Neumeister, Äpfel, p. 241.

66 

 Sabine von Dirke

from an unlovable history which Neumeister’s engagement with German collective history shows to be impossible. While Neumeister’s gaze focuses mainly on the twentieth century, he like Kluge demonstrates a keen awareness of the broader sweep of history. In his successive books Neumeister’s perspective becomes increasingly transnational and shuttles back and forth between 9/11 and the Crusades, World War II, the Thirty Years War and the Falkland War in 1982; from Ferdinand V and Philipp II of Spain’s colonization of Central and Latin America to the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City and to Chile in 1973; from the Munich Olympics in 1972 to Tacitus and the Roman Empire; from the German Autumn of 1977 and other dates of political insurrection like 1968, 1918/19, 1848, all the way back to the Peasant Revolt. Neumeister thematizes ‘den historischen Ernstfall’ [the historical state of emergency], i. e. the violent, political struggles which characterize Occidental history – alongside establishing an archive of pop cultural, everyday life in the second half of the twentieth century. Like Kluge, Neumeister’s awareness of these political upheavals punctuates his contemplation of cultural modernity and especially the compromised status of the aesthetic avant-gardes in the twentieth century. The following section examines how Neumeister negotiates the ambivalent history of the aesthetic and political avant-garde in light of his own pop literary aspirations.

Pop Modernity. The Reburial of the Dead West Germany in the 1960s experienced both political and aesthetic upheavals. As to the latter, it was pop art and literature that challenged high modernism which – while once itself an avant-gardist aesthetic – had become canonized and served as the dominant yardstick of artistic accomplishment. Äpfel vom Baum im Kies re-stages this aesthetic confrontation in order to explore the radical potential of the aesthetic paradigms employed by modernism and pop respectively. Quite literally, it is wrapped-up in pop art. The book jacket’s black and white grainy photo shows three men who, with the help of long poles, attempt to retrieve a park bench that has been swept into a body of water. Wrapped around the book, the jacket reveals only segments of the photographic image to the viewer. This principle of visual cut-ups repeats itself within the text in a more radical fashion. The photographic image from the book jacket is cut-up into three segments, each placed so that they mark the three distinct parts of the text. In addition, the book jacket of Äpfel vom Baum im Kies and the three images within the text draw on the supersized, photorealistic representational strategies characteristic of pop art in the 1960s as well the raster-dot technique employed

Under Construction: Andreas Neumeister’s Pop Modern Historiographies 

 67

by Roy Lichtenstein and also the West German artist Sigmar Polke.³⁴ With its book jacket, the novel does indeed recall Polke’s ‘Rasterbilder’ [raster-dot paintings] of the 1960s. For these paintings, which look like blown up newspaper images, Polke imitated the raster-dot technique typical in the mechanical reproduction of photographic images by carefully applying every dot of the image by hand onto the canvas. These pop art strategies aimed to disrupt the smooth and glitzy surfaces of consumer culture by literally cutting and then blowing them up in order to reveal otherwise natural-looking images as nothing but a bunch of dots, or a simulacra of a false totality. Yet while the photo’s grainy, enlarged and cut-up style visually references pop art, the image’s motif counters pop art’s iconography. Rather than an icon from the global world of consumer culture à la Warhol’s celebrity shots or the generic bikini beauties over which Rolf Dieter Brinkmann printed his Godzilla-poems, the book jacket shows a serene nature shot that brings the scene back home to the local level.³⁵ The men’s headgear geographically codes the image because all three wear the traditional Bavarian ‘Seppelhut’, a short-rimmed, boiled wool hat with a rather small, roundish dome. On the most literal level, the image corresponds to the setting of the book, the lakes around Munich and especially Lake Starnberg, where the narrator grew up. The nature shot’s enlargement to the point that the raster dots become visible undermines the naturalizing forces of such imagery employed by the tourist industry’s glossy representations of Bavaria as a place of wholesome ‘Gemütlichkeit’ [cosiness]. Grappling with totality both thematically and aesthetically has, of course, also been a crucial concern for literary modernism, which was itself an aesthetic avant-garde when it emerged at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Neumeister is cognizant of this historical dimension, of the inherent dialectics of temporality in modernity: what emerges as the transcendence of the old – i. e. the new, the modern – cannot sustain its avant-garde status for long in late capitalism. Äpfel vom Baum im Kies engages with this problem by bringing literary high modernism and pop head to head in the concluding section of the book, which quotes and integrates an excerpt from T.S. Eliot’s ‘Waste Land’ into the text.³⁶ It is the first stanza of Eliot’s poem entitled ‘The Burial of the Dead’, which refers to the same region, Munich and Lake Starnberg, where Neumeister situates his text.

34 See on the relationship of Polke’s art to other (pop) artists the exhibition catalogue, In the Power of Painting I. Warhol, Polke, Richter (Zurich: Scalo Publisher, 2001). Polke’s ironic stance towards U.S. pop art also supports my argument that Neumeister’s appropriation of the first wave pop strategies is equally critical. 35 Gozilla (1968) was reprinted in Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Standphotos. Gedichte 1962–1970 (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1980), pp. 159–83. 36 Neumeister, Äpfel, pp. 258–61.

68 

 Sabine von Dirke

The narrative voice’s recalling his past attempts to translate Eliot’s English poem into German underscores his fascination with this earlier articulation of the literary avant-garde and corresponds with a later statement by the author.³⁷ The concluding segment of Äpfel vom Baum im Kies is of primary interest for my discussion, since it emulates high modernist aesthetic principles, especially stream of consciousness. In addition, these concluding pages are typeset so that they resemble verses, which imbue the prose with lyrical pathos. The lengthy quotation of Eliot’s verses abruptly ends, however, in a list of twenty-six words beginning with the letter A. By providing a list of compound nouns with the word ‘April’, Neumeister’s text invokes the famous line of Eliot’s ‘Waste Land’: ‘April is the cruelest month’. While the list of compound nouns begins on a poetic note with ‘Aprilglöckchen’ [April’s bell flowers], it becomes increasingly prosaic with words like ‘Äpfel’ [apples] and ‘Aal’ [eel]. The list culminates in the letter Ä, a phoneme for the sound often used in oral communication when the speaker is either at a loss, embarrassed or both. This prosaic sound of day-to-day speech deflates any previous poetic pathos and leaves the speaker literally speechless, signalling that what once worked as an innovative and avant-gardist aesthetic principle has no more representational power in today’s world. However much Äpfel vom Baum im Kies might privilege the textual-visual experiments of 1960s pop art as an antidote to sclerotic modernism, Neumeister’s oeuvre exhibits increasing scepticism towards visual culture’s ability to resist co-optation as well as of the alleged correlation between the political and aesthetic avant-garde. Beginning with his Ausdeutschen [De-Germanizing], published in 1994, Neumeister’s books contain many captions clearly belonging to an image, though the pictures remain missing.³⁸ This almost iconoclastic rejection of the image relates to the proliferation of the visual in the 1990s which was the result of significant changes in the German media landscape. The monopoly of public broadcasting was broken in the mid-1980s when media companies were allowed to buy broadcasting licenses. The deregulation of the media market quickly led to an exponential increase in the number of television channels. Combined with the equally fast acquisition of personal computers in West German households and the rapid development of the Internet, visual culture appeared to be gaining the upper hand in the Berlin Republic of the 1990s. Neumeister responds by systematically refusing to reproduce images, instead conjuring them verbally via their captions. While this representational strategy appears to break

37 In the conversation with Gansel, Neumeister clearly states his interest in literary modernism. See ‘Pop bleibt subversiv’, p. 194. 38 Andreas Neumeister, Ausdeutschen (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1994).

Under Construction: Andreas Neumeister’s Pop Modern Historiographies 

 69

with first wave pop’s embrace of visual aesthetics and with the filmmaker Kluge, it remains consistent with the primary objective of pop aesthetic strategies. Neumeister’s exclusive reliance on the written word at the expense of pictorial representation frustrates his readers’ ingrained mode of perception, which is itself shaped by a late capitalist phase awash in images and a commodity aesthetic that has successfully integrated the visual strategies of the historical avant-garde. Neumeister’s anti-imagery position resonates particularly in his most recent book, Könnte Köln sein [Could be Cologne].³⁹ In contrast to his previous text, Angela Davis löscht ihre Website [Angela Davis Deletes her Website],⁴⁰ which focused on the flat surfaces of the various media screens which surround us, Könnte Köln sein investigates a three-dimensional environment, the urban landscape, by journeying to different geographical places and playfully invoking the genre of the travel guide. Typically, ample photographic reproductions of remarkable structures and sites worth visiting embellish such guides for the art and architecturally minded tourist. Employing the above described aesthetic strategy of providing captions but no images, Könnte Köln sein raises and then frustrates the reader’s generic expectations, particularly in light of the book jacket. The latter features a photo of Las Torres Satélite, a large-scale, unadorned urban sculpture composed of five rectangular or triangular shaped towers in primary colours that at first glance resemble skyscrapers. Las Torres Satélite was erected in a suburb of Mexico City at the height of international modernism in 1958. The sculpture celebrates the concept of the ‘satellite city’, a planned community of high rise buildings hailed at the time as a progressive form of urban living.⁴¹ Even without knowledge of details about Las Torres Satélite depicted on the book jacket of Könnte Köln sein, the sculpture’s resemblance to skyscrapers pointedly surging skyward expresses trust in the uplifting and progressive force of modernity’s clean, functional forms. The narrative voice of the text is clearly smitten with classical international modernism originating from the interwar period since it emphatically praises the aesthetic appeal of various twentieth and twenty-first-century buildings erected with futuristic aspirations. For example, the contemporary architect Zaha Hadid receives effusive praise for her futuristic looking structures, all completed during the first decade of the twenty-first century: the train stations of the ‘Hungerburg-

39 Andreas Neumeister, Könnte Köln sein. Städte. Baustellen (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2008). 40 Andreas Neumeister, Angela Davis löscht ihre Website (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2002). 41 West Germany has its share of satellite cities erected in the 1960s and 1970s at the periphery of major cities in order to address housing needs for low and middle income families. They often resemble housing projects in the U.S. erected as part of urban renewal programs at the time. Könnte Köln sein repeatedly dwells on one such Munich satellite city – the Hasenbergl.

70 

 Sabine von Dirke

bahn’, the streetcar line in the Austrian city of Innsbruck, a bridge over the river Inn as well as the famous ski jump tower there: Die neue Hungerburgbahn: irakische Architektin! Die neue Brücke der Hungerburgbahn über den Inn. Rechts ab. Bergisel Ski Jump. Das Beste an Innsbruck ist nicht das Goldene Dachl. Das Beste an Innsbruck war nicht die gewonnene Schlacht gegen Franzosen und Bayern. Das Beste an Innsbruck ist Frau Hadids neue Sprungschanze. Vier-SchanzenTournee: Wegen Zaha Hadids neuer Sprungschanze zum ersten Mal ein echtes Skispringen in Echtzeit am Fernseher verfolgt. Wer hat gewonnen? Zaha Hadid. [The new light rail called Hungerburgbahn: Iraqi architect! The new bridge of the Hungerburgbahn over the Inn river. Turn right. The ski jump facility – Bergisel. The best of Innsbruck is not the Golden Roof. The best of Innsbruck was not the battle won over the French and the Bavarians. The best of Innsbruck is Ms. Hadid’s new Ski Jump. Four Jump Tournament: Because of Zaha Hadid’s new ski jump, I watched for the first time a real ski jumping event in real time on television. Who won? Zaha Hadid.]⁴²

Other examples of architectural modernism and its lineage hailed in the text include the Munich modernism of the 1970s, specifically the BMW headquarters building shaped like four engine cylinders and the architectural design of Munich’s Olympic facilities. The Olympic Stadium’s famous tent-like roof, designed by the German architect Frei Otto, receives praise as exuberant as Zaha Hadid’s recent architectural feats because Otto’s lofty structure withstood the aesthetic test of time. According to the narrator of Könnte Köln sein, the Olympic Stadium looks almost half a century later as ‘elegant und futuristisch wie am ersten Tag’ [elegant and futuristic as on its first day].⁴³ At the same time, the narrator remains aware that twentieth-century history did not leave anything untouched and untainted, as we witnessed at the intersection of the Nazi-past with Neumeister’s notion of ‘Heimat’ analysed in the previous section. Hence, the narrator journeys to various cities not simply to record their beauty but also to explore and problematize the history of architectural modernism and thereby of the aesthetic avant-garde. Könnte Köln sein foregrounds the question of aesthetic form and politics with the narrator’s road trip from Munich to Rome. The road to Rome takes him through Northern Italy, which was, like Munich and Bavaria, a hotbed of fascism. Numerous public structures built for Mussolini’s fascist movement remain intact in this region. While the text references several fascist sites in Northern Italy, the Casa del Fascio in Como stands out. This public building, designed by Giuseppe Terragni and built between 1932–1936, perfectly embodies international modernist prin-

42 Neumeister, Köln, pp. 9–10. 43 Ibid., p. 212.

Under Construction: Andreas Neumeister’s Pop Modern Historiographies 

 71

ciples.⁴⁴ If it were not for the building’s name and the biography of its architect, who supported Mussolini, it might well pass for a Bauhaus building, or the type of architectural modernism and avant-garde urban design hailed as the embodiment of social progress. This is exactly the point that Könnte Köln sein wants to make, i. e. that the aesthetic of modernism can serve any political movement, as the narrative voice concedes: ‘Das Haus des Faschismus in Como als Inbegriff. Europäische Bauhausmoderne, weisses Symbol des italienischen Rationalismus. Ob es einem passt oder nicht: Die Futuristen des Landes als Faschisten dieses Landes’ [The House of Fascism in Como as the embodiment of European architectural Modernism, white symbol of Italian Rationalism. Whether we like it or not: The Futurists of the country as the Fascists of this country].⁴⁵ Neumeister’s exploration of modernism in architecture does not single out fascism but extends to socialism in its concrete, historical form in order to reinforce the point that aesthetic and political avant-gardes do not necessarily go hand in hand. Könnte Köln sein focuses on the ‘Seven Sisters’, i. e. the seven skyscrapers in Moscow commissioned by Stalin in the official Soviet architectural style called Socialist Classicism. Aside from their height, the ‘Seven Sisters’ look quite different from the clean, unadorned lines of the branch of architectural modernism known as Constructivism and dominant in the Soviet Union until Stalin came to power. In Socialist Classicism, plentiful ornamentation in the style of bygone eras, from Russian Gothic and Baroque to the pre-revolutionary style of the czarist Empire, adorn these mighty skyscrapers. The Soviet term Socialist Classicism highlights how this type of ornamentation appropriated the imperial past of Russian architecture for the glorification of the proletarian Soviet Republic. The narrator of Könnte Köln sein, however, refers disparagingly to this Socialist Classicism as ‘Zuckerbäckerarchitektur’ [Confectioner’s Architecture], a term that links its ornamentation to an overly decorated and sweet piece of pastry.⁴⁶ Whereas fascism co-opted the aesthetic avant-garde of international modernism, the political avant-garde of socialist modernism embraced a historicist architectural style harkening back to the oppressive, exploitative history of pre-revolutionary Russia. The rather dim picture of aesthetic avant-garde in history, which includes architectural modernism co-opted by fascism and suppressed by Stalinism, does not become brighter in Neumeister’s treatment of the post-war West Euro-

44 Peter Eisenman, Giuseppe Terragni: Transformations, Decompositions, Critiques (New York: Random House/Monacelli, 2003). 45 Neumeister, Köln , p. 17. 46 Ibid., p. 172.

72 

 Sabine von Dirke

pean avant-garde movements. One example suffices here to further elucidate Neumeister’s understanding of the complicated relationship of avant-garde art and political emancipation. Neumeister dwells in Könnte Köln sein on the group SPUR, founded in 1958 by a small number of artists. The SPUR group opposed abstract modernism, which was the canonized and thus dominant art form in the Bonn Republic at the time, for its lack of socio-political engagement. Viewing themselves as the successors to the historical avant-garde movements of the interwar years, the SPUR group strove for a socio-politically relevant art both in theory and practice. The choice of SPUR again adds a local flavour since it was founded in Munich while providing a transnational, historical dimension. SPUR was the German chapter of the Situationist International (SI) that originated in Paris under the leadership of Guy Debord.⁴⁷ The depiction of SPUR in Könnte Köln sein and of the larger Situationist International (SI) is unflattering. The text’s collage of historical moments and SI documents shows the members constantly bickering with each other over minor theoretical issues. Neumeister’s text thus makes clear that, though eloquent in theorizing the revolution and its architectural designs, SI and SPUR failed to put their ideas into practice. While SPUR left no physical traces in the city, Nazism still maintains a presence both in the city’s architecture and the ‘Volksmund’ discussed in the previous section. More importantly, Neumeister contrasts the SPUR group and SI with a historical event known as the ‘Schwabinger Krawalle’ [The Schwabing Brawls]. The latter began on a summer evening in 1962 when four young musicians continued to strum their acoustic guitars after 10:30pm in the Munich neighbourhood called Schwabing, despite a police order to stop. As the four musicians were taken to police headquarters for their misdemeanour, an uproar ensued which turned into a scrimmage targeting the police. More militant confrontations with the police continued over several evenings, with ever larger numbers of young Munich residents participating. Könnte Köln sein thus portrays a random group of everyday people creating successfully a situation that brought about a change in social life; in other words, those everyday people successfully practiced what SI and SPUR were only preaching. While initially an altercation about music, the Schwabinger Brawls developed into a ‘hartnäckige LebensstilRevolte’ [persistent life style revolt], as the narrator of Könnte Köln sein puts it,

47 See Ilonka Czerny, Die Gruppe SPUR 1957–1965. Ein Künstlerphänomen zwischen Münchner Kunstszene und internationalem Anspruch (Vienna: Lit., 2008). On both SPUR and Guy Debord’s Situationist International see Thomas Hecken, Gegenkultur und Avantgarde 1950–1970. Situationisten, Beatniks, 68er (Marburg: Francke, 2006).

Under Construction: Andreas Neumeister’s Pop Modern Historiographies 

 73

which ushered in the hedonistic, metropolitan style typical in Germany today.⁴⁸ Placing revolutionary aspirations and movements in politics and the arts side by side, and sketching a line from modernism to fascism and from the Munich ‘Räterepublik’ via Stalin to the SPUR group, Könnte Köln sein ultimately negates any necessary correlation between the aesthetic avant-garde and an emancipatory politics, a hope which still inspired the post-World War II avant-gardist movements, including pop art, literary pop and the student movement of the 1960s. Even if the text appears to put more faith in the subversive potential of actual practices, such as the ‘Schwabinger Krawalle’, than theory, the narrative voice does not denounce the need for theory and for the utopian vision it articulates. Könnte Köln sein assesses one initiative of SPUR in a positive light: the SPUR Tower, the architectural model of which represented a concrete and innovative vision of urban planning in the early 1960s when the foundations of the satellite cities were laid.⁴⁹ The colourful and organic spiral design of the SPUR Tower flouts rectangular lines as well as the concrete and glass facades that shaped the urban landscape in West Germany after 1945. The SPUR Tower’s design also aimed to undo the separation of living, work and cultural spaces equally typical for urban development in West Germany at the time. Neumeister’s Könnte Köln sein singles out one of Munich’s satellite cities called Hasenbergl as the epitome of the destructive nature of such urban renewal projects. In contrast, the SPUR Tower was designed to integrate all aspects of urban life and featured public spaces like a concert hall, library, movie theatre, art gallery and sculpture garden, as well as restaurants and bars.⁵⁰ In other words, this structure was a western vision of the Kulturpalast, the Palace of Culture, which the USSR erected in many Eastern European cities after 1945 as a central place and space for cultural production high and low. Yet no traces of such a Palace of Culture remain in united Germany. The SPUR Tower was never realized and East Berlin’s Kulturpalast, whose fate Könnte Köln sein recounts, was quickly slated for demolition after unification allegedly because of asbestos problems and ultimately razed in spite of much popular demand to re-purpose the building. Hence, a clear understanding of power constellations and the unpredictability of historical developments characterizes Neumeister’s engagement with the post-war aesthetic avant-garde. The complexity of Neumeister’s narratives renders a neat summary of his position on the aesthetic avant-garde difficult. The previous discussion has,

48 Neumeister, Köln, pp. 206, 201. 49 For a photo and detailed description of the SPUR Tower, see Gruppe SPUR, ed. by Jo-Anne Dirnie Danzker and Pia Dornacher (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2006), pp. 170–71. 50 Neumeister, Köln, p. 206.

74 

 Sabine von Dirke

however, demonstrated that pop literature cannot be dismissed as mere escapist, ahistorical fluff. If anything, the weight of history permeates Neumeister’s texts and he shoulders this burden in the tradition of the historical avant-garde, even as he tries to transcend this legacy. The apples of Neumeister’s oeuvre have fallen from the modernist tree, but Neumeister insists that they need to be harvested differently for two reasons. For one, pop’s objective has always been to break out of the hermetic nature of the high modernist avant-garde. In other words, it aims to challenge mass consumerist culture and populist historiographies precisely through consumerism’s own vernacular, be it products of consumer culture or the ‘Volksmund’s’ flawed oral histories, rather than the idioms of the cultural elite. Second, the contemporary avant-garde needs to integrate the new technologies that have altered and continue to alter modes of perception into its own aesthetic idiom. As Neumeister puts it: ‘Texten, die am Computer entstanden sind, kann man ruhig auch ansehen, dass sie am Computer entstanden sind. Erzählen gerne, aber bitte wenigstens ansatzweise so komplex wie die Welt da draussen auch ist’ [It is perfectly fine if a text shows that it was generated on a computer. Narration is absolutely fine, but, please, at least try to depict the world in a manner which approximates its complexity].⁵¹ In spite of his endorsement of literature as a valid mode of critical engagement with the world, Neumeister’s writing exhibits a clear understanding that literature, like art in general, participates in a cat and mouse game with late capitalism’s power to subjugate everything to its logic. The dedication of Könnte Köln sein to the architect and artist Gordon Matta-Clark suggests that the history of the aesthetic avant-garde in the twentieth century has made Neumeister aware of the limited durability of aesthetic innovation, on the one hand.⁵² On the other, it confirmed his belief that pop aesthetic practices can offer moments of resistance by working on modes of perception. Matta-Clark’s architectural cut-ups, i. e. his visual alterations of existing buildings by cutting spaces into their walls, slicing up their floor plans or splitting them literally in half, represents a moment of intervention in the physical environment, even if it did not leave any lasting physical traces. The buildings Matta-Clark altered were typically demolished for prestigious public projects but they at least temporarily granted new perspectives onto the existing environment. Neumeister’s collage-like texts, for which he

51 Gansel and Neumeister, Pop bleibt subversiv, p. 185. 52 See Stephen Walker, Gordon Matta-Clark. Art, Architecture and the Attack on Modernism (London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2009); Corinne Diserens, Gordon Matta-Clark (London: Phaidon Press, 2006) and Pamela Lee, Objects to be destroyed: the Work of Gordon Matta-Clark (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000).

Under Construction: Andreas Neumeister’s Pop Modern Historiographies 

 75

samples from the archive of both high and low culture as well as the past and the present, share this objective with Gordon Matta-Clark’s and Alexander Kluge’s oeuvre. They intervene and disrupt, however fleetingly, the glitzy surfaces which gloss over the multiplicity of histories and power dynamics on which they rest.

Section 2: Alternative Voices and Vantage Points

Hester Baer

The Pop-Nostalgia of Sven Regener and Leander Haußmann Pop-Nostalgia The twin categories of pop and nostalgia have informed much of German cultural production in the two decades since unification. The 1990s saw the rise of both Popliteratur [pop literature] and ‘Ostalgie’ [nostalgia for East Germany], widespread movements that exerted an enormous influence on literature, television, filmmaking and new media. Both categories entail notions of belonging that are configured through reference to a common set of signifiers – whether these are idyllic experiences of childhood, markers of provincial character, brand names and consumer products, fashion trends or the lyrics of a well-known song. Both pop and nostalgia can be seen as compensatory mechanisms that mediate identity, offering a sense of self, a feeling of plenitude and the possibility of escape in the face of difference, alienation and change. As Georg Seeßlen has written, ‘Pop culture is connected to a longing for paradoxical fulfilment: for the construction of the “good old days” and the acceleration of images and sensations’.¹ Small wonder, then, that pop and nostalgia characterised the mode of representation in millennial Germany at a moment defined by transformed conceptions of both geopolitical space and historical time. Seeßlen’s description of pop-nostalgia recalls Fredric Jameson’s well-known characterisation of postmodernism as ‘an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place’.² Jameson highlights the nostalgia text as a central form of postmodernism, and one that deploys pop strategies. These include the effacement of boundaries between high and low as well as pastiche (in this case of historical styles and genres), so that the nostalgia text presents a simulacrum that ‘endows present reality and the openness of present history with the spell and distance of a glossy mirage’.³ For Jameson, the aesthetic mode of the nostalgia text emerges as a symptom of life in

1 Georg Seeßlen, ‘Blood and Glamour’, trans. Neil Christian Pages, in Riefenstahl Screened: An Anthology of New Criticism, ed. by Neil Christian Pages, Mary Rhiel and Ingeborg Majer-O’Sickey (New York: Continuum, 2008), pp. 11–29 (p. 15). 2 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), p. ix. 3 Ibid., p. 21.

80 

 Hester Baer

global capitalism, helping to demonstrate ‘the enormity of a situation in which we seem increasingly incapable of fashioning representations of our own current experience’.⁴ Similarly, Thomas Ernst describes contemporary pop literature as a response to the rapidly changing dimensions of space and time in the age of globalization: In this changed world the dissolution of borders and the expansion of a hegemonic economic, political, and cultural system in the image of American culture appear to be advancing the process that has come to be termed globalization […]. Here pop literature has once again emerged as a key trend in contemporary German writing at a time of increased media competition and new economic and political relationships.⁵

Indeed, as Ernst notes, pop is uniquely poised to shed light on these changes because it emerges from the outside as a style that has never held a central place within dominant culture in Germany. Despite numerous explicit aesthetic and political connections, however, Popliteratur and ‘Ostalgie’ have often been analysed as separate enterprises, with the former seen largely as a publishing phenomenon linked to authors born in West Germany and the latter understood as a market-driven spectacle, defined by visual media and associated with the GDR past.⁶ However, looking past the east/west divide reveals many commonalities of form, content and style in recent German literature and film, which the trope of pop-nostalgia helps to illuminate.⁷ Operating in a pop idiom rife with self-referentiality, these works investigate everyday life in a largely solipsistic and affirmative vein. Emphasizing the primacy of experience and storytelling rather than larger moral, political or formal concerns, they foreground (auto)biography as it is shaped by style, consumer choices and the fetishization of products and brands. These ‘new archivists’ restage history in terms of personal memory and individual identity, always remembering the past (whether of the GDR or the pre-Wende Federal Republic) via a nostalgia

4 Ibid. 5 Thomas Ernst, ‘German Pop Literature and Cultural Globalisation’, in German Literature in the Age of Globalisation, ed. by Stuart Taberner (Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 2004), pp. 169–88 (p. 170). 6 See for example, Torsten Liesegang, ‘“New German Pop Literature”. Difference, Identity, and the Redefinition of Pop Literature after Postmodernism’, Seminar: a Journal of Germanic Studies, 40.3 (2004), 262–76. 7 In this essay I follow the convention of using capital letters to refer to the states and national identities of East and West Germany and lower case letters to refer to regional differences between eastern and western Germans in the post-unification Federal Republic.

The Pop-Nostalgia of Sven Regener and Leander Haußmann 

 81

that is deployed through the lens of postmodern consumer culture.⁸ To be sure, pop-nostalgic works betray many blind spots: they can be read as little more than catalogues of consumer goods; they may cater to the lowest common denominator by simply resuscitating familiar tropes, icons and lifestyles; and at their worst they can betray conservative values by seeking to restore ‘the good old days’ or even whitewash the past. Yet at their best, these often ambivalent works foreground responses to the changed world of post-unification Germany in the age of neoliberalism, using language or film form ‘not only to describe the world around us, but also to undermine or expand our perception of it’.⁹ Neoliberalism – the idea that the market should guide human needs and activities  – has dominated world political and economic discourse since the 1980s, creating a context in which consumer choices and corporate profits are enhanced while redistributive social provisions are dismantled. Despite strong trade unions and widespread support for social welfare policies in Germany, unification paved the way for increasing neoliberalization over the last two decades. As cultural phenomena characteristic of this period, Popliteratur and ‘Ostalgie’ both emerge from and respond to neoliberal discourses, for example in their common emphasis on consumerism; in their focus on self-fashioning; and in their common look back to a pre-Wende period that was characterized, in both the FRG and the GDR, by more stability in the labour market and the social safety net. Thus the shared context of neoliberalism helps to shed light on some commonalities among texts that appear to address disparate historical events. To emphasize similarities and continuities across post-unification German texts is not to minimize the marked differences that do stem from the discrete personal and historical contexts of eastern and western Germany. First and foremost, an asymmetrical and non-reciprocal relationship existed between the Federal Republic and the GDR, leading to the notion of the West as a ‘reference culture’, a notion that persisted in the post-unification period.¹⁰ Moreover, nostalgia may operate contextually, either to reinforce western hegemony or to insist

8 See Moritz Baßler, Der deutsche Pop-Roman: Die neuen Archivisten (Munich: Beck, 2002). On pop and nostalgia in recent German cultural productions, see also Andrew Plowman, ‘Westalgie? Nostalgia for the “Old” Federal Republic in Recent German Prose’, Seminar: a Journal of Germanic Studies, 40.3 (2004), 249–61. 9 Ernst, ‘German pop’, p. 170. 10 Social scientists have argued that one shared German identity prevailed throughout the period of partition, and that it was embodied by the Federal Republic rather than the GDR. Patricia Hogwood explains: ‘one identity persisted, effectively defined in terms of the shared history and cultural heritage of the Germans. This identity was upheld and further developed by the FRG and provided a “reference culture” for the GDR’. See Hogwood, ‘After the GDR. Reconstructing

82 

 Hester Baer

on a distinct eastern German identity and value system that has been degraded since unification. Nonetheless, even attempts to do justice to the production and reception contexts of pop-nostalgic texts often end up mired in reductive formulations. For example, analyses of the ‘Retro Republic’ have diagnosed the obsession with pop-nostalgia as deriving from different needs in the east versus the west.¹¹ According to some commentators, retro formations supposedly cater to an ongoing ‘Nachholbedarf’ [need to catch up] among easterners, while in the west, they satisfy the longing for an earlier period of ‘Wohlstand’ [affluence], lost forever in the era of Hartz IV social welfare reforms. Flipping the terms of this equation, other commentators make precisely the opposite argument, suggesting that pop-nostalgia has enabled westerners to understand the crucial distinction between ‘Alltags-DDR’ [everyday life in the GDR] and ‘SED-Diktatur’ [dictatorship of the SED, the Socialist Unity Party], while providing a forum to help easterners negotiate the disconnectedness and disjuncture of post-unification society. In either case, many critics have continued to conceptualize pop and nostalgia as deriving from different authorial intentions and as fulfilling different audience wishes, contingent on narrowly defined national identities anchored in the East versus West German past. Yet a central facet of pop ever since the pop-art movement beginning in the 1950s has been the emancipation of identity from any grounding in essence. As Ernst neatly summarizes it: ‘The search for an individual identity was replaced by the play with identities’.¹² This playful tradition within pop has clearly been more pronounced in the west than in the east: it includes, for example, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann’s texts from the 1960s; pop and subcultural experiments in music, art and literature emerging in the wake of 1968; and the so-called ‘Suhrkamp pop’ of Rainald Goetz and Andreas Neumeister in the 1980s. Yet at least since the early 1970s, forms of pop emerged in the GDR as well, including in the pivotal texts of Ulrich Plenzdorf, in the subcultural punk rock and beat poetry scene associated with Prenzlauer Berg beginning in the late 1970s, and in the transitional films made at DEFA in the 1980s. In all of these instances, pop forms are linked to criticism of social norms, expressed through a playful or rebellious experimentation with identities and subject positions. If a central component of pop is an ironic play with identity formations, critics have also pointed to the playful and ironic components of nostalgia, which simi-

Identity in Post-Communist Germany’, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, 16.4 (2000), 45–68 (p. 47). 11 See for example Christoph Amend, ‘Willkommen in der Retro-Republik’, Die Zeit, 9 September 2004, p. 63. 12 Thomas Ernst, Popliteratur (Hamburg: Rotbuch, 2001), p. 24.

The Pop-Nostalgia of Sven Regener and Leander Haußmann 

 83

larly foster a disruption of the conventional association of identity with essence, truth or tradition. For example, in her well-known book on nostalgia, Svetlana Boym has distinguished between ‘restorative’ and ‘reflective’ forms of nostalgia, the former advocating a ‘return to origins’ and the latter presenting ‘an ethical and creative challenge’. As Boym writes, ‘This typology of nostalgia allows us to distinguish between national memory that is based on a single plot of national identity, and social memory, which consists of collective frameworks that mark but do not define the individual memory’.¹³ Indeed, Boym argues that a central function of nostalgia is to serve as an intermediary between individual and collective memory. In this context, reflective nostalgia indicates an awareness of ‘the gap between identity and resemblance’ and insists on an ironic, fragmentary and distanced representation of the relationship between past, present and future.¹⁴ If, as Boym suggests, ‘Reflective nostalgia is a form of deep mourning that performs a labour of grief both through pondering pain and through play that points to the future’, then pop-nostalgia may be understood as a productive, hybrid mode that opens up a space of engagement with the transformations of time and space in contemporary Germany.¹⁵ In what follows, I will explore the pop-nostalgic play with identities and genres, and the unifying gestures that result, in the work of two authors who have served as emblems of Popliteratur and ‘Ostalgie’ respectively, Sven Regener and Leander Haußmann. As the case of Regener and Haußmann demonstrates, both pop and nostalgia serve as tropes to help navigate and comprehend differences between old and new worlds, differences which have as much to do with encroaching neoliberalism and the ‘new world order’ of contemporary Germany as with reunification itself. The pop-nostalgic texts of Regener and Haußmann emphasize local, peripheral experiences and histories ‘as a vantage point from which to critique the dominant social, cultural and economic paradigms imposed by West German norms or, more recently, globalized capitalism […]. In so doing a rejoinder to the threat of homogenisation is generated that is sometimes ironic, occasionally melancholic and always unique’.¹⁶

13 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. xviii. 14 Ibid., p. 50. 15 Ibid., p. 55, my emphasis. 16 Stuart Taberner, ‘Introduction’, in German Literature in the Age of Globalisation, ed. by Taberner (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005), pp. 1–24 (p. 13).

84 

 Hester Baer

Leander Haußmann and Sven Regener In 1999, Haußmann’s film Sonnenallee [Sun Alley] kicked off a wave of pop-nostalgic films about the GDR. Based on the screenplay Haußmann co-wrote with Thomas Brussig drawing on a novella by Brussig, Sonnenallee became the top-grossing domestic film of 1999 in Germany. While some commentators indicted Sonnenallee for presenting a ‘sunny’ (and therefore apolitical and unrealistic) version of the GDR, other critics defended the film on the grounds that its authors’ East German background and experience validate the film’s authenticity.¹⁷ Yet as Paul Cooke has persuasively argued, Sonnenallee in fact employs a highly sophisticated pastiche of generic codes, cultural and filmic styles, and explicit cinematic citations drawn equally from contemporary German cinema and both the East and the West German past, creating what Cooke terms a ‘productive hybridity’ that allows the film to appeal to a pan-German audience while self-consciously and ironically mediating between past and present.¹⁸ For example, Sonnenallee mixes references to popular music from the west and the east (including the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Omega, and the Puhdys); emphasizes consumer items including jeans and records from the west and stereo equipment and furniture from the east (notably, the ‘Mufuti’ or ‘Multifunktionstisch’); and includes citations of popular films of the past such as Franc Roddam’s Quadrophenia (UK, 1979) and Heiner Carow’s Die Legende von Paul und Paula [The Legend of Paul and Paula] (GDR, 1973), as well as references to contemporary nostalgia films such as Peter Timm’s Go Trabi Go (FRG, 1990) and Betty Thomas’s The Brady Bunch Movie (U.S., 1995). While Sonnenallee pays lip service to the cultural differences in the reception of pop in the East compared to the West – for example, by focusing on Misha’s efforts, in defiance of the state, to procure a copy of the Rolling Stones’ album Exile on Main Street on the black market – the film ultimately foregrounds the universal aspects of pop as a central facet of generational experience on both sides of the Wall. Set just across the Wall from East Berlin’s Sonnenallee in the West Berlin district of Kreuzberg, Regener’s bestselling novel Herr Lehmann [Berlin Blues]

17 For example, Anthony Enns writes that Sonnenallee ‘pleads for recognition from West Germans that life for young East Germans was just as valid. Haußmann’s personal background would seem to strengthen this argument. Since he was born in 1959 in the eastern city of Quedlinburg, the film also seems to be informed by his own firsthand experience as a teenager growing up in the GDR during the 1970s’. Enns, ‘The Politics of Ostalgie: Post-Socialist Nostalgia in Recent German film’, Screen, 48.4 (2007), 475–91 (p. 482). 18 Paul Cooke, Representing East Germany Since Unification. From Colonisation to Nostalgia (Oxford: Berg, 2005), pp. 111–19.

The Pop-Nostalgia of Sven Regener and Leander Haußmann 

 85

(2001) was among the pioneering pop-nostalgic works about the pre-1989 Federal Republic, sometimes referred to under the rubric of Westalgie. Along with Florian Illies’s memoir Generation Golf and Frank Goosen’s novel Liegen lernen [Learning to Lie], both of which were published in 2000, Herr Lehmann epitomizes an influential group of texts that emerged around the turn of the millennium depicting West German youth in the 1980s. Deploying a similarly ironic and humorous stance as Sonnenallee, as well as a focus on the way personal experiences and local proceedings intersect with larger geopolitical events in Berlin, Regener’s novel is as much a direct response to the work of Brussig and Haußmann as it is to Illies and Goosen. Haußmann and Regener had already worked together on a theatre production before the publication of Regener’s novel, and Haußmann had encouraged Regener’s writing project. The two cemented their shared pop-nostalgic vision by collaborating on the film adaptation of Herr Lehmann, written by Regener and directed by Haußmann, which was released in 2003. Since then, they have continued to engage in an east-west dialogue about the German past and present in a series of implicitly or explicitly collaborative pop-nostalgic works. Released just a year apart, Regener’s novel Neue Vahr Süd [New Vahr South] (2004) and Haußmann’s novel and film NVA [National Army of the People] (both 2005) are military comedies that satirize the role of Cold War-era military service in producing masculine national subjects in the Federal Republic and the GDR respectively.¹⁹ Subsequently, Regener and Haußmann collaborated on the film Robert Zimmermann wundert sich über die Liebe [Robert Zimmermann Is Tangled Up in Love] (2008), which Haußmann directed and for which Regener’s band Element of Crime wrote and performed the soundtrack. In 2009, Haußmann and Regener co-directed a stage adaptation of Regener’s novel Der kleine Bruder [The Little Brother] (2008) at the Ernst Busch Acting Academy in Berlin. More recently, Haußmann has made stage appearances on Element of Crime’s 2011  European tour, playing the harmonica along with the band’s title song for Robert Zimmermann and with the Bob Dylan song ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’, a song featured (in an uncredited cover by Element of Crime) at the end of NVA. In interviews, Regener and Haußmann, who are friends and neighbours in Berlin, have emphasized the strategic advantages of their collaborative work for capturing feeling and substance rather than pure surface style. For example, responding to questions about whether Haußmann’s GDR background had interfered with his ability to present an authentic view of 1980s West Berlin in Herr

19 Haußmann’s novel NVA (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2005), his only novel to date, achieved little public resonance in Germany.

86 

 Hester Baer

Lehmann, Regener has said, ‘We didn’t want a dusty museum piece or a nostalgic costume show like ‘The Awesome Eighties’! Authenticity is uninteresting. It’s like when people ask me: Did you really experience that? No, I didn’t experience any of it. Everyone who knows me realizes that. It’s all made up’.²⁰ As Regener and Haußmann both suggest, Herr Lehmann can be read as a complement to Sonnenallee, which ‘views the East German state through a western cultural lens, thereby constructing a “productive” image of east Germanness, which can embrace both cultural traditions’.²¹ Indeed, Regener and Haußmann routinely deploy strategies of pastiche and irony precisely in order to disrupt the possibility of authenticity and to problematize identity politics, invoking a playful form of reflective nostalgia that brings east and west, past and present into dialogue. Elaborating on their previous works, Regener’s Neue Vahr Süd and Haußmann’s NVA use similar formal and stylistic devices to ‘think the present historically’: through a pastiche of pop references, they portray gender and national identities that are now thoroughly lost; in so doing, they emphasize particular, local experiences. Both authors present a nostalgic vision of a local ‘Heimat’ [home] whose walls created both a comforting safety and a dreaded provincialism, and whose primary escape valve was pop culture. At the same time, when taken together, their works offer a collaborative vision of German history, which lays the retrospective groundwork for re-defining collective identities that resist both essentialization and homogenization in the post-unification present, as evidenced also by their appeal to a pan-German audience. In part through their invocation of a universalizing language of pop, Haußmann and Regener present a German past that is less walled off by historical divisions than it is united by a slacker mentality and a youthful attitude of anti-authoritarianism that permeates the east-west border. At the same time, however, Neue Vahr Süd and NVA are very much rooted in the post-unification present. In the first instance, the fall of the Wall (and, notably, not the experience of military service) constitutes the primary generational experience that forces Haußmann’s and Regener’s characters to embrace adulthood and become agents of their own destinies.²² More significantly, both

20 ‘Philosophie am Zapfhahn’, Stern, (25 Sept. 2003), n. p. 21 Cooke, Representing East Germany, p. 115. Haußmann has repeatedly insisted that his films are not nostalgic, and that his critics have confused nostalgia with artifice: ‘They are not nostalgic films! Even if I were to make films about the present, I would endow them with a certain artifice. That is my method’. See ‘Nostalgie, Ostalgie. So ein Quatsch!’, Sonntagszeitung, (26 Oct. 2003), n. p. 22 Mennel convincingly argues that Haußmann’s film version of Herr Lehmann relies on nostalgia for the aesthetics and politics of the 1980s, while ultimately discrediting the radicalism of this

The Pop-Nostalgia of Sven Regener and Leander Haußmann 

 87

authors’ works also reflect the significance of military themes for contemporary national discourse in an era that has seen extensive debates over German wartime suffering, the role of the contemporary German army in global military conflicts and the status of universal conscription. Indeed, it is no accident that both works were released on the heels of the controversial deployment of Bundeswehr combat troops to Afghanistan, beginning in 2002, at a moment when the role of militarism and military tradition in German culture was being contested once again. Thus Regener and Haußmann revisit the German military during the era of partition in order to reflect on the status of the ‘Allgemeine Wehrpflicht’ [universal conscription] in post-unification Germany.²³ A significant moment in the process of neoliberalization in Germany, the abolition of the draft and the creation of an all-volunteer army (which took place in 2011) has proven contentious. This is so not least because it creates an uneven structure in which joining the military often becomes a decision made out of economic necessity rather than a duty attached to citizenship. Building on the immense popularity of their precursors Herr Lehmann and Sonnenallee, Neue Vahr Süd and NVA follow a model of serialisation that derives from historical pop tropes in Germany. A crucial strategy in establishing an appeal to audiences, serialisation relies on previous audience familiarity with characters, situations and styles; it is, of course, a successful marketing strategy, but in the case of Neue Vahr Süd and NVA, it also allowed Regener and Haußmann the flexibility to rely on the success of the earlier texts while creating sequels that break new ground. Specifically, Neue Vahr Süd is more than twice as long as Herr Lehmann, clocking in at 632 pages, and NVA employs irony, satire and genre con-

period as immature in that it conflates Herr Lehmann with both Berlin and the nation, posing his coming-of-age with the fall of the Wall as a rejoinder to the past. Mennel rightly cautions that ‘we should be wary of returning to traditional notions of mature masculine subjectivity as the embodiment of the nation’. While I thoroughly agree, I suggest that Neue Vahr Süd and NVA complicate both the coming-of-age narrative presented in Regener and Haußmann’s earlier collaboration as well as the ideological gesture of that film toward legitimizing contemporary society. See Mennel, ‘Political Nostalgia and Local Memory: The Kreuzberg of the 1980s in Contemporary German Film’, Germanic Review, 82.1 (2007), 54–77. 23 As Ute Frevert points out, a debate over the draft has been ‘a feature of the reunited Germany from the early 1990s’, focusing on both ‘economic, security, and military strategy aspects’ and ‘political considerations addressing gender relations and violence, as well as notions of citizenship and national integration’. Frevert, A Nation in Barracks. Modern Germany, Military Conscription and Civil Society, trans. by Andrew Boreham with Daniel Brückenhaus (Oxford: Berg, 2004), p. 272. After extensive debate, universal conscription was in fact abolished in Germany in 2011. The formal draft ended on 1 July 2011, beginning a new era for the Bundeswehr as an all-volunteer, professional army.

88 

 Hester Baer

ventions in complex and at times ambiguous ways, elements that proved challenging to critics (though less so to readers and viewers). Moreover, in focusing on the military, both works expand the ground of the coming-of-age story, entering into explicitly political terrain that did not play a significant role in their precursor texts. Finally, both Neue Vahr Süd and NVA contend directly with critical views of the army, as well as with repressive historical events and institutions in the FRG and the GDR respectively, thereby problematizing any straightforwardly ‘restorative nostalgia’ for the defunct German states. In so doing, they move in some measure beyond the solipsistic, affirmative stance of the previous texts. Torsten Liesegang has argued that ‘history and utopia are absent in the new German pop literature in the nineties’, and Barbara Mennel similarly finds a ‘lack of utopia in contemporary Germany’ that is evident in the way films such as Herr Lehmann depict as immature the radical politics of the historical Left.²⁴ By contrast, Neue Vahr Süd and NVA employ pop-nostalgia neither to produce a ‘melancholic attachment and recuperation of the past now emptied of its political meaning’ nor to reify or legitimize the neoliberal status quo of post-unification Germany.²⁵ Instead, they depart from what Liesegang characterizes as ‘the intentional naivety of pop literature in its handling of form and traditions’, employing a targeted pastiche of earlier military genres as a unifying gesture and a means of appealing to a pan-German audience.²⁶

Neue Vahr Süd, NVA and the Military Comedy Like Herr Lehmann and Sonnenallee, Neue Vahr Süd and NVA combine references to pop culture, slapstick comedy and plotlines that highlight nostalgic comingof-age stories against the backdrop of the Cold War. Both texts also continue in their precursors’ project of reinventing genre conventions, producing hybrid re-significations of popular genres. Specifically, they draw on the entrenched German genre of the ‘Militärklamotte’ [military comedy] and reference a common inter-text in particular: the 08/15 trilogy, Hans Hellmut Kirst’s immensely popular antimilitaristic satire of the Nazi-era Wehrmacht, which was read widely in the Federal Republic and the GDR, and whose film adaptation became the number one box office hit of the 1950s in West Germany.

24 Liesegang, ‘New German Pop Literature’, p. 276; Mennel, ‘Political Nostalgia and Local Memory’, p. 54. 25 Mennel, ‘Political Nostalgia and Local Memory’, p. 73. 26 Liesegang, ‘New German Pop Literature’, p. 273.

The Pop-Nostalgia of Sven Regener and Leander Haußmann 

 89

Both Neue Vahr Süd and NVA look back on the history of the armed forces in the two German states, histories that are strongly implicated in those states’ construction of gender and national identities. In particular, as Ute Frevert has shown, conscription bore a significant relationship to notions of citizenship, equality and belonging throughout modern German history, including in the GDR and FRG: [C]onscription in Germany did more than simply block the development of a socially oriented civic spirit, it also fixed gender relations so they forcefully resisted the modernist drive to dynamic changes in the social, economic and cultural sectors […]. Even in the GDR conscription was a purely male affair, although the GDR pursued a far more rigorous policy of gender equality than in the FRG.²⁷

While both countries made claims to gender equality, their manifest notions of citizenship relied only on male service (and consequently promoted only male belonging). To be sure, this paradox constituted one central argument in the campaign to repeal universal conscription, though Germany’s new all-volunteer army is unlikely to resolve this gender disparity, and it also creates new possibilities for class disparity. The history of the Bundeswehr in the pre-Wende Federal Republic was characterized by the trope of the ‘Staatsbürger in Uniform’, the citizen-soldier who was to retain allegiance to the core civic values of democracy rather than to military authority and whose bland uniform underlined the importance of avoiding the inculcation of a tainted militarism. By contrast, the GDR promoted the eighteen months of compulsory military service in the Nationale Volksarmee [National Army of the People] as a primary instance of indoctrination into socialist masculinity for all East German men. Its Wehrmacht-style uniforms and military traditions resulted in a (western) perception of the NVA as contiguous not only with Prussian but also with National Socialist militarism, one reason for the immediate dismantling and abolishment of the East German army already in 1990. Throughout the history of German partition, military decisions on both sides of the intra-German border reacted to a ‘military “feedback loop” in which each [state] justified rearmament and the introduction of conscription as responses to the moves of the other as they respectively embedded themselves into NATO and the Warsaw Pact’.²⁸ The West German high command deliberately sought

27 Frevert, A Nation in Barracks, p. 279. 28 Andrew Plowman, ‘Defending the Border? Satirical Treatments of the Bundeswehr after the 1960s’, in Divided But Not Disconnected: German Experiences of the Cold War, ed. by Tobias Hochscherf, Christoph Laucht and Plowman (New York: Berghahn, 2010), pp. 134–47 (p. 134).

90 

 Hester Baer

to soften the image of the East German ‘enemy’ as part of the politics of détente beginning in the 1970s. Nonetheless, soldiers in the Bundeswehr and the NVA continued to regard each other as the greatest threats to their own national security, leading to a particularly virulent animosity, which the indoctrination campaigns of the NVA continued to explicitly promote.²⁹ As military historian Detlef Bald has written, ‘The NVA and the Bundeswehr were not brothers in uniform. That was the case from the very beginning. The antagonistic contrariness between them was a matter of principle’.³⁰ Regener and Haußmann inventively revise this idea of German-German military animosity in a number of ways. Most prominently, both texts point to the fact that a sense of belonging for men in the Federal Republic and the GDR was often defined less by participation in the common experience of compulsory military service than by a feeling of not fitting into the military, even among those men who did serve. This was the case both in an individual sense (i. e. resenting the loss of personal freedom that compulsory military service entailed) and in a larger, collective sense. Together, these texts unveil a common tradition of antimilitarism that made participation in military training an ambivalent and contradictory experience for men in both countries. Nonetheless, conscription required them to participate in an explicit dialogue about these questions, questions which some sectors of the population may currently treat with complacency – and which may be less subject to debate – in the case of an all-volunteer army.³¹ Neue Vahr Süd is the first of two prequels to Herr Lehmann.³² Set in 1980, it narrates the background story of Frank Lehmann’s West German origins in the city of Bremen, where he grew up in a postwar suburban housing estate called Neue Vahr Süd, which is characterized by drab Neubau blocks and provincial,

29 See Frevert, A Nation in Barracks, pp. 270–71. 30 Detlef Bald, ‘Militär im Nachkriegsdeutschland. Bundeswehr und Nationale Volksarmee’, in Die Nationale Volksarmee: Beiträge zu Selbstverständnis und Geschichte des deutschen Militärs von 1945–1990, ed. by Bald (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1992), pp. 115–24 (p. 115). 31 In the FRG, this dialogue took the form of the choice young men made between conscription or civilian service. In the GDR, it was not as easy to opt out of military service, and the state also punished men who filed as conscientious objectors by barring them from university study and from pursuing certain professions. Nonetheless, some men were allowed to join the ‘Baueinheiten’ [construction units] that accommodated objectors, and the various consequences of military conscription and objection certainly constituted a subject of dialogue among young men in the GDR as well. 32 Regener’s bestselling trilogy was structured on the model of the Star Wars series (which also plays a prominent role in Herr Lehmann), with the ultimate volume published first, followed by two ‘prequels’. The trilogy includes: Herr Lehmann (Berlin: Eichborn, 2001); Neue Vahr Süd (Frankfurt a. M.: Eichborn, 2004); and Der kleine Bruder (Frankfurt a. M.: Eichborn, 2008).

The Pop-Nostalgia of Sven Regener and Leander Haußmann 

 91

petit-bourgeois values. The novel begins on the day before Lehmann, who has ‘forgotten’ to file as a conscientious objector to compulsory military conscription, is set to report for service in the Bundeswehr. Following Lehmann through basic training and various attempts at getting out of the army, including a belated effort to file for retroactive status as a conscientious objector and a feigned suicide attempt, Neue Vahr Süd satirizes the military culture of the post-war Federal Republic, when actual deployment of army combat troops was precluded by the constitution. The novel also pokes fun at the liberal status quo of the post-1968 period with its detailed portrait of Lehmann’s milieu during weekends off from the Bundeswehr in the student-dominated counterculture of Bremen, with its crumbling leftist splinter groups, messy ‘Wohngemeinschaften’ [communal living arrangements], and faux-libertine sexual politics. Through the trope of the army uniform, Regener develops the central conflict in Frank Lehmann’s life: during weeks spent on base he is required to subordinate his individual personality to an authoritarian system, while on his weekends off base, he must develop his individual personality in order to assert himself amidst the chaotic social relations that dominate Bremen’s subcultures. For Lehmann, who experiences the contrast between civilian life in a democratic society and the authoritarian structure of the Bundeswehr as crass and humiliating, the attempt to navigate this conflict emerges as a search for belonging beyond the ‘constitutional patriotism’ that he recognizes as a bankrupt concept in the course of his military experience. Moving out of his parents’ apartment in the Neue Vahr Süd estate, Lehmann seeks a counterbalance to the subordination of the military by founding a communitarian WG in the city centre with several student friends, but the stopped-up toilets and mounds of dishes in the kitchen that soon result prevent Lehmann from calling it home, and Neue Vahr Süd continues to exert a strong centripetal pull on his life. After his attempts to flee the military amount to nothing, he completes basic training and, in one of the novel’s central jokes, is transferred to a base that he did not even know existed, on the grounds of the Neue Vahr Süd estate where he grew up. Thus, the Bundeswehr is literally transposed onto Frank Lehmann’s ‘Heimat’. The two irreconcilable halves of Lehmann’s life collide in the novel’s climactic scene, which reconstructs a notorious episode central to both Bremen’s local history and to the history of the Left in the Federal Republic at the dawn of the Kohl era. On May 6, 1980, for the first time in post-war history, the Bundeswehr held a public swearing-in ceremony outside of its barracks, which took place in Bremen’s Weser Stadium. Months of planning on the part of both the military and protest organizers culminated in a violent confrontation, with 260 injured and extensive property damage (particularly to numerous military vehicles that were set on fire) in the amount of DM 100 Million. Despite his best efforts to avoid

92 

 Hester Baer

political agency on either side, Frank Lehmann (whose propensity to find himself unwittingly in the midst of history was proven in Herr Lehmann by his proximity to the Wall on 9 November 1989, his thirtieth birthday) once again ends up at the centre of a momentous event. Exercising his democratic right to refuse to participate in his own army swearing-in ceremony, Lehmann seeks to extract himself from an uncomfortable role at centre stage in an event his friends will all be protesting against, only to find that his commanding officer orders him to don his uniform anyway and serve as a torchbearer at the event. As Lehmann discovers, he has no choice but to follow orders, and this episode thus emphasizes the absurdity of the Bundeswehr’s manifest ideology of the citizen-soldier. The confrontation that ensues pushes Frank to take his life in his own hands, as it were, and he stages another suicide attempt that results this time in his classification as ‘untauglich’ [unfit for military service] and his release from the Bundeswehr. The end of the novel finds Lehmann and one of his punk friends driving on the autobahn, leaving behind provincial West Germany and heading in the direction of West Berlin (a road trip through GDR territory that Lehmann was not allowed to make as long as he was serving in the army). Thus, despite the novel’s nostalgia, in the world of Neue Vahr Süd, the future lies squarely in Berlin, which represents a potential space of belonging for Lehmann and company, not least because of its unique status as an island where, before the fall of the Wall, male residents were legally discharged from their military service obligation. As Andrew Plowman has shown, Regener’s pop pastiche in Neue Vahr Süd involves a reworking of several key West German texts about the Bundeswehr, including Kirst’s 08/15 trilogy (1954/55), which I will discuss in more detail below, and Günter Wallraff’s Mein Tagebuch aus der Bundeswehr [My Diary of the Bundeswehr] (1963/64).³³ Lehmann’s attempts to belatedly achieve the status of a conscientious objector, as well as his ultimate discharge on psychiatric grounds, draw explicitly on Wallraff’s experiences in the Bundeswehr, as documented in his diary, which has been published in a variety of forms.³⁴ According to Plowman, however, there is a crucial ‘difference of tone’ between Wallraff’s text, an early work which set him on the course to write his notorious exposés of other West German government and corporate institutions, and that of Regener: ‘Regener’s novel suggests a shift in attitude towards the Bundeswehr on the part of younger writers and towards Wallraff’s critical stance, which is held up to ridicule […]. It

33 Plowman, ‘Defending the Border?’ 34 See Günter Wallraff, Mein Tagebuch aus der Bundeswehr (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1992), and Günter Wallraff, Befehlsverweigerung. Die Bundeswehr- und Betriebsreportagen (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1984).

The Pop-Nostalgia of Sven Regener and Leander Haußmann 

 93

also ridicules the entrenched ideological positions once taken up by writers in the Federal Republic’.³⁵ Plowman reads Neue Vahr Süd as a recuperation of the Bundeswehr, achieved through Regener’s affectionate tone towards Frank Lehmann’s experiences there, but also as a ‘self-conscious reflection’ on the triumph of a new, generationally distinct form of apolitical storytelling over ‘the moral engagement previously defining literature in East and West [Germany]’.³⁶ Both of these qualities of Regener’s novel seem to support Plowman’s conclusion that contemporary German literature has been largely drained of the critical voices that drove literary production in both the GDR and the FRG. However, far from simply subjecting Wallraff to ridicule, Regener’s text re-signifies it via pop strategies of remixing and pastiche. If contemporary pop literature reacts to the changed world of post-unification, globalizing Germany in the era of neoliberalism, then Regener’s novel samples from Wallraff’s text in order to comment on this changed world – a strategy, by the way, that is entirely in keeping with Wallraff’s postmodern deployment of performative identity in his own highly controversial work.³⁷ Regener’s pastiche inserts Wallraff’s biographical experiences into the local history of Bremen’s Weser Stadium rebellion to reconsider tacit assumptions regarding citizenship, masculinity and belonging with significant ramifications for contemporary debates about the Bundeswehr, universal conscription and German national and gender identity. Specifically, far from simply affirming military culture and ridiculing the Left, Neue Vahr Süd puts German soldiers and leftists into dialogue with each other through the pivotal figure of Frank Lehmann, who is, like Wallraff himself, a cipher able to elicit the kind of direct comments that usually resist articulation. One key example of this is the ‘pazifistisches Dilemma’ [pacifist dilemma] that forms a central theme of Neue Vahr Süd, based on a common question in hearings to establish conscientious objector status, including Wallraff’s own: if you were holding a gun in your hand, and Russian or North Korean soldiers were going to rape or kill your mother, would you prevent them from doing so by shoot-

35 Plowman, ‘“Staatsbürger in Uniform”? Looking Back at the Bundeswehr in Jochen Missfeldt’s Gespiegelter Himmel and Sven Regener’s Neue Vahr Süd’, Seminar, 43.2 (2007), 163–75 (pp. 173–74). 36 Ibid., p. 173. 37 One of postwar Germany’s most successful authors, Wallraff was well known for his unique approach to muckraking journalism, which involved donning various disguises to conduct undercover research. For his bestselling 1985 text Ganz unten (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1985), Wallraff posed as a Turkish guest worker to expose the working conditions for immigrant labourers in Germany, a move that proved highly controversial not least because of Wallraff’s performative deployment of stereotypes.

94 

 Hester Baer

ing? Apparently intended to test the commitment of candidates to nonviolence at all costs, the ‘pazifistisches Dilemma’ provides the occasion in Regener’s novel for lengthy passages of dialogue that test out different theories and conceptions of military conscription and service. In the chapter ‘Heiner und Horst’, for example, Lehmann reluctantly meets with Heiner, a member of the DFG/VK (Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft – Vereinigte Kriegsdienstgegner [German Peace Society  – United Opponents of Military Service]), whom his friends hope can help Frank develop strategies for successfully finessing his hearing. Heiner and Frank discuss their reasons for filing as conscientious objectors: ‘Naja, ich bin der Auffassung, daß die Bundeswehr nur ein Instrument der imperialistischen Aggression gegen die sozialistischen Länder ist’, sagte Heiner, und es klang ziemlich hölzern, fand Frank. ‘Aber das kann man bei der Verweigerung natürlich nicht sagen’, gab er zu. ‘Nein’, sagte Frank, ‘das geht wohl nicht. Meine Gründe sind ein bißchen anders. Ich will bloß nicht gezwungen werden, etwas zu tun, was ich nicht tun will. Und ich will von niemandem irgendwelche Befehle entgegennehmen. Was natürlich auch nichts ist, mit dem man bei der Verhandlung durchkommt’. ‘Das ist natürlich auch ein möglicher Grund’, sagte Heiner, ‘obwohl das theoretisch ein bißchen verkürzt ist, so mehr auf der individualistischen, anarchistischen Ebene. Im Grunde steckt ja mehr dahinter, politisch gesehen, bei der Bundeswehr’. [‘Well, I’m of the opinion that the Bundeswehr is only an instrument of imperialist aggression against the socialist countries’, said Heiner, and it sounded rather wooden, Frank thought. ‘But of course you can’t state that as grounds for conscientious objection’, he admitted. ‘No’, said Frank, ‘that probably wouldn’t work. My reasons are a little bit different. I just don’t want to be forced to do something that I don’t want to do. I don’t want to take orders from anybody. But of course that’s not going to get me through the hearing either’. ‘That’s obviously a valid reason too’, said Heiner, ‘although it’s a bit simplistic theoretically – more on the level of individualism and anarchy. After all, there’s more to the Bundeswehr than meets the eye, from a political standpoint.]³⁸

Plowman’s reading of Neue Vahr Süd derives from its place within a larger body of pop works that exhibit nostalgia for the Federal Republic, while simultaneously draining the cultural production of West Germany of its manifest political content. Yet Plowman overlooks Regener’s deployment of pop, which has specifically allowed ‘German-speaking pop writers to attack both the prevail-

38 Regener, Neue Vahr Süd, pp. 350–51.

The Pop-Nostalgia of Sven Regener and Leander Haußmann 

 95

ing culture and the existing alternative cultures at once’.³⁹ The specificity of the novel’s reflective pop-nostalgia develops not so much an affirmative account of the Bundeswehr as a comparative framework through which to regard contemporary debates about abolishing universal conscription at a moment when German military forces are being actively deployed in wars abroad. In the example above, both Heiner and Frank articulate standpoints on military aggression and authority that continue to be widely echoed today: concerns about the military’s imperialist missions abroad (these days in the Middle East rather than in the East Bloc) as well as concerns over the compatibility of military culture and civil liberties in a democratic state. At the same time, Heiner and Frank recognize that neither of their standpoints will suffice in a conscription hearing. Far from simply asserting nostalgia for a more ‘harmless’ era of military conscription, the comments of Heiner and Frank in this passage articulate a critique of both the Bundeswehr itself and the highly politicized process of declaring conscientious objector status in West Germany. Nick Hodgin has noted that NVA has also often been misread by critics as a by-product of the ‘Ostalgie’ movement which trivializes the East German Army, creating an affirmative view of the GDR past: ‘Had NVA been released some years earlier [before the ‘Ostalgie’ wave], critics might well have considered it as counter-discursive, a satire which boldly ridiculed the East German army, something that would have been unthinkable during the GDR’.⁴⁰ As its advertising motto ‘Von der Sonnenallee in die NVA!’ [From Sonnenallee into the NVA!] suggests, Haußmann’s NVA is a loosely defined sequel to his earlier film. While it follows a different set of characters as they report for compulsory military service in the East German army, NVA’s protagonists Henrik and Krüger share much in common with their compatriots Micha and Mario from Sonnenallee. More interested in love than politics, they resist the dehumanizing subordination of military service less on ideological grounds than because, in the words of Henrik, ‘Man kann sich an alles gewöhnen, ausser daran, dass die Liebe fehlt’ [You can get used to anything except a lack of love]. Stationed at the ‘Fidel-Castro-Kaserne’ where they stick out because of their nonconformity and failure either to wear their uniforms properly or to master the blank stare demanded of NVA soldiers, Henrik and Krüger are subjected to the chicanery of their commanding officers and the hazing of their fellow conscripts, elements that recall the war film genre. When Henrik’s girlfriend breaks up with him on the grounds that she cannot conduct a love

39 Ernst, ‘German pop’, p. 185. 40 Nick Hodgin, Screening the East. Heimat, Memory and Nostalgia in German Film since 1989 (New York: Berghahn, 2011), pp. 178–79.

96 

 Hester Baer

affair with someone she never sees in person, he sets out on a quest to find new love, which culminates in his affair with Marie, the daughter of his commanding officer. Meanwhile, Krüger is charged with insubordination and sent to the notorious Schwedt prison, an episode that foregrounds – in an otherwise comic film – the repressive and authoritarian elements of life in the GDR. When Krüger returns as a brainwashed automaton, Henrik does everything in his power to help recover the old Krüger, who finally emerges from this traumatized state when he begins a love affair. As the events of 1989 unfold outside the walls of the base, the political collapse of the GDR eventually leads to the breakdown of military structures as well, providing the deus ex machina that saves Henrik and company from serving a full eighteen months in the NVA. The film ends with a title card: ‘In memoriam, 1949–1989’. With this epitaph for the GDR, NVA ends on a seemingly nostalgic note that belies the tenor of the film as a whole. As with his other films, though, Haußmann engages in a number of formal strategies that subvert any wholly nostalgic vision of the past. Most obvious among these is the soundtrack, which is comprised of a pastiche of well-known western pop songs, some of them in Germanized versions recorded by Sven Regener’s band Element of Crime. As Claudia Gremler has noted of the music in Haußmann’s film Herr Lehmann, the ‘carefully produced non-diegetic soundtrack […] often acts as an ironic commentary’ on nostalgia via its use of anachronism, a quality that is mirrored by the soundtrack of NVA.⁴¹ Featuring a wide range of popular songs by artists like Muddy Waters, Marianne Faithful, Cat Stevens, Klaus Renft and the Polyphonic Spree  – none of which was current to the GDR in 1989  – the soundtrack redeploys well-known lyrics, endowing them with new meanings. For example, Element of Crime’s cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’, with which the film ends, re-signifies the song’s opening lyrics in the context of the events of 1989: ‘You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last / But whatever you wish to keep you better grab it fast / Yonder stands your orphan with his gun / Crying like a fire in the sun’. Well known as the last acoustic song Dylan performed before going electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, ‘Baby Blue’ is one of pop’s definitive songs about farewells; reflecting sorrow for a lost past, it also fosters new beginnings, undercutting any straightforward nostalgia with its final couplet, ‘Strike another match, go start anew / And it’s all over now, Baby Blue’.

41 Claudia Gremler, ‘“But Somehow it Was Only Television”: West German Narratives of the Fall of the Wall in Recent Novels and their Screen Adaptations’, in Processes of Transposition: German Literature and Film, ed. by Christiane Schönfeld and Hermann Rasche (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 269–91 (p. 286).

The Pop-Nostalgia of Sven Regener and Leander Haußmann 

 97

Gremler also points to Haußmann’s ‘subversive’ casting choices: in a strategy that he continues in NVA, he routinely casts well known west German actors such as Detlev Buck in the roles of ‘socialist figures of authority’: ‘This way he draws attention to the fact that the fixed ideas about East and West are losing their validity and reinforces their deconstruction’.⁴² Finally, Haußmann uses a number of western inter-texts, including both Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) and the West German classic 08/15 to frame NVA. Thus, he usefully deploys pop pastiche to complicate nostalgia for the past, to undercut rigid dichotomies of east and west, and to reflect on the place of the past in the present and future. If Haußmann’s GDR is largely defined, in ways that many critics have problematized, by pop rather than politics, in the case of NVA at least, pop is also used both to refocus images of the East German army and to restage GDR masculinity, deflating Western myths about both at a moment of increased attention to military masculinity in the post-unification German context. As Robert Moeller has pointed out, Hans Helmut Kirst’s 08/15, which was serialized in the mid-1950s on the eve of West Germany’s controversial reconstitution of a national army, ‘offered a critique not of the military but of militarism and provided a sober cautionary tale about how not to organize an army’, in the context of the newly created Bundeswehr. 08/15 directly posed the question of ‘how the military should be structured in a democratic society’, the same question posed by both Regener’s and Haußmann’s works at a moment when unified Germany’s military was undergoing an epochal transformation.⁴³ If these texts reflect an ‘affectionate’ nostalgia for the era of universal conscription, it is in order to offer a framework in which to consider the ramifications of abolishing the draft in a country increasingly marked by social stratification and inequality. Neither Regener’s nor Haußmann’s characters cherish military service, largely because they are individualists who would rather pursue girls than follow commands – as Lehmann says, ‘Ich will von niemandem irgendwelche Befehle entgegennehmen’ [I don’t want to take any orders from anyone] – yet without universal conscription, army service will be left to volunteers, many of whom will ‘choose’ the military because they lack other choices. But this is not to say that Regener and Haußmann offer an uncritical view of military life. Like 08/15, both Neue Vahr Süd and NVA follow new conscripts as they embark on basic training, where they outsmart officers and seek to protect

42 Ibid., p. 288. 43 Robert Moeller, ‘Victims in Uniform. 1950s Combat Movies’, in Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany, ed. by Bill Niven (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 43–61 (pp. 47–48).

98 

 Hester Baer

fellow recruits from the dehumanizing practices of military subordination. Similar to 08/15’s protagonist Gunner Hermann Asch, both Frank Lehmann and Henrik Heidler expose the paradoxes of military ideology, not least through the trope of the uniform. In Neue Vahr Süd, Lehmann’s inability to master the proper military dress codes on or off base is a running gag that exposes the ideal of the ‘Staatsbürger in Uniform’ as an absurd impossibility. When on base, Lehmann is repeatedly castigated for failing to comply with uniform codes: he cannot don his protective gear for ABC attacks in time, he appears in camouflage when he shouldn’t, and he shows up drunk in civilian clothes for ‘NATO-Alarm’ manoeuvres. When he wears his fatigues off base, he is caught by MPs who write him up for failing to have the proper certification to do so. Lehmann’s improper uniform etiquette also functions as a sign of his failure to embody military masculinity – as both his Bundeswehr comrades and his student friends remark, Lehmann ‘ist mehr so der Hippietyp’ [more of a hippie type] and hardly fits into the military culture. Like Lehmann, the protagonists of NVA also repeatedly fail to master their uniforms and are unable to don their protective gear quickly enough, a convention of the ‘Militärklamotte’ that the film resuscitates to comic effect. During a practice ‘Gefechtsalarm’ [combat alarm], Krüger rips the ventilator out of his mask so that he can breathe and see clearly, a deed that results in his punishment and eventual downfall. During the same manoeuvre, Henrik’s mask gets so fogged up that he falls off a cliff into the river below and, unconscious, floats downstream, where he is rescued by a group of women who take off his protective gear (which they refer to as a ‘Ganzkörperkondom’ [full body condom]) and resuscitate him. Far from emasculating him, the stripping off of Henrik’s uniform facilitates his love affair with Marie, who remarks on his naked body: ‘Ohne Uniform ist der ganz passabel’ [He looks quite good without a uniform]. As with Lehmann, Henrik’s failure to embody military masculinity is ultimately represented not as a crisis, but as precisely the quality that allows him to find love and belonging. In his reading of the 08/15 trilogy, Michael Kumpfmüller has argued that the uniform functions as a central antimilitaristic trope that allows Kirst to demonstrate the fundamental conflict between individual civilian and collective soldierly identity; by deploying the uniform as a kind of masquerade, Kirst demonstrates the ideological relationships of his various characters to the Nazi regime, deconstructs Nazi masculinity and sheds critical light on the remilitarisation of West German society in the Adenauer Era.⁴⁴ Similarly, the trope of the uniform is

44 Michael Kumpfmüller, ‘Ein Krieg für alle und keinen. Hans Hellmut Kirst: 08/15 (1954/55)’, in Von Böll bis Buchheim. Deutsche Kriegsprosa nach 1945, ed. by Hans Wagener (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), pp. 249–64 (pp. 257–8).

The Pop-Nostalgia of Sven Regener and Leander Haußmann 

 99

employed by both Regener and Haußmann to foreground the alienation of soldiers from military culture in both Germanys, while also nostalgically recalling an era in which the enemy was knowable and combat remained a highly unlikely prospect – in sharp contradistinction to today, when the unified, and now all-volunteer Bundeswehr is deployed in combat missions against increasingly unknowable and unpredictable enemies. Regener and Haußmann have been criticised repeatedly for their use of both pop and nostalgia: they are disparaged for offering up admittedly well-constructed but nonetheless frivolous ‘Unterhaltung’ [entertainment], for recycling tired clichés and for trivializing history in the process. Yet the pop-nostalgia of these authors is not wholly retrospective but also prospective, not restorative but rather reflective, to borrow Boym’s terms. According to Boym, ‘Restorative nostalgia does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition. Reflective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity’.⁴⁵ Far from codifying their nostalgic visions of the past as truth or tradition, Regener and Haußmann are instead concerned with reflecting on desire and longing. They do so in ways that are framed not by a retroactive wish for restoration of lost identities and structures of belonging, but rather with a prospective concern to navigate the ambivalences of a divided history and the contradictions of a common present.

45 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, p. xviii.

Claudia Breger

Pop-Cultural Camera Interventions: Kanak TV Kanak Sprak in (the) ‘Faserland’: The Genealogies of Pop The story of the new German pop literature has often been written as one that begins with Faserland (1995) by Christian Kracht. More specifically, Kracht’s early novel can be credited with having launched the ‘Kiepenheuer’ faction of new German pop literature (as Rainald Goetz, himself a Suhrkamp author, put it with reference to the Cologne-based publisher of Kracht, Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre and others).¹ This ‘Kiepenheuer’ faction is certainly the one which won the new German pop literature much of its broader appeal and cultural significance at the turn of the millennium, if simultaneously also widespread charges of having sold out. The new pop’s generational predecessors, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and Hubert Fichte, had developed avant-garde inflected, conceptually anti-hierarchical and democratizing forms. While such radical forms were further explored in the writings of their Suhrkamp heirs, critics have suggested that the more accessible (and in this sense differently ‘democratic’) aesthetics of the Kiepenheuer authors has generated not only more conventionally narrative, but also ‘depoliticized’ texts focused on sex and drugs rather than any kind of sustained political or historical investigation.² In fact, the Kiepenheuer texts are not exactly apolitical. As indicated by the title of Kracht’s early novel, a word play on the English ‘father-

1 Rainald Goetz, Abfall für alle. Roman eines Jahres (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2003), p. 647. On the significance of Kiepenheuer & Witsch already for 1960s pop see Carrie Smith-Prei, ‘Kölner Realismus Redux. The Legacy of 1960s Realism in Postunification Literature’, in Closing Borders, Bridging Gaps? Deutscher Pop an der Jahrtausendwende, special issue of Literatur für Leser, ed. by Anke Biendarra 31.2 (2008), 81–93 (with reference also to Kerstin Gleba and Eckhart Schumacher). 2 See for example Thomas Ernst, Popliteratur (Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 2001) as well as his ‘German Pop Literature and Cultural Globalization’, in German Literature in the Age of Globalization, ed. by Stuart Taberner (Birmingham: University of Birmingham, 2004), pp. 169–88 (pp. 177–78); Torsten Liesegang, ‘New German Pop Literature. Difference, Identity and the Redefinition of Pop Literature after Postmodernism’, Seminar, 40.3 (September 2004), 262–76. On page 170 of ‘German Pop Literature’, Ernst distinguishes ‘mainstream’ from underground pop, to which he attributes ‘rudiments’ of a ‘subversive’ form. Anke Biendarra’s (ironically Adornian) argument for popcultural aesthetic alterity as political resistance builds on the distinction between Suhrkamp and Kiepenheuer pop (See ‘Pop & Politik. Formen von Engagement in der zeitgenössischen Popliteratur’, in Closing Borders, Bridging Gaps? Deutscher Pop an der Jahrtausendwende, 125–141. In contrast, Smith-Prei (‘The Legacy of 1960s Realism’ in the same volume) defends the

102 

 Claudia Breger

land’, they variously explore the possibility of developing collective identities in post-unification society, though not from the angle of ‘the young generation’ as such, even if they often represented themselves this way. Instead they comprise a highly exclusive group within it: affluent (or at least credit-worthy), Western, educated white males.³ However, the story of the new German pop literature can also be told differently. Feridun Zaimoğlu’s Kanak Sprak was published in the same year as Kracht’s Faserland. If belatedly, Zaimoğlu was to become associated with the pop wave in the years following Kanak Sprak’s release, and he has been labelled its ‘enfant terrible’.⁴ While Zaimoğlu’s more recent works were then picked up by Kiepenheuer as well, Kanak Sprak was published by the leftist Hamburg Rotbuch Verlag. The title references the German hate speech term ‘Kanak(e)’ (for ‘foreigners from a Southern country’ or ‘brown-skinned people’), which, as Zaimoğlu claims in his preface, has been re-signified by the children of Turkish guest workers.⁵ As he elaborates, they use the term with ‘proud defiance’ for constructing an ethnic identity in response to immigrant experiences of social exclusion and ghettoization. It has become the marker of a new, albeit still ‘primarily negative’ self-confidence, which Zaimoğlu positions in analogy to the Black-consciousness movement in the United States.⁶ The first of Kanak Sprak’s monologues, all of which undertake provocative constructions of collective identity not from the mainstream, but from the margins of post-unification society, is entitled ‘Pop is a fatal orgy’. It presents the voice of a rapper who describes the ‘Egalität’ [egality] created by pop culture as an ‘illusion’ based on standardized ‘cheap’ dreams.⁷ In

Kiepenheuer pop itself by emphasizing elements of continuity vis-à-vis their 1960’s predecessors through a notion of realism as bodily materialism. 3 See Liesegang, ‘New German Pop Literature’. 4 Tom Cheesman, ‘Talking “Kanak”: Zaimoğlu contra Leitkultur’, New German Critique, 92 (2004), 82–99 (pp. 83–85). 5 In the early phase of postwar West German labour immigration, the notion often referred to Italian, Spanish and Greek ‘guest workers’. Indicative of the superimposition of general xenophobia with more specific racialization processes, however, it has since then become directed primarily at people of Turkish and Arab descent (Cheesman, ‘Talking “Kanak’’, p.  85; http:// de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanake). While these usages are much more prominent today than the notion’s reference to the largest ethnic group in New Caledonia, its link with German colonial history is indicative: in the early twentieth century, ‘Kanake’ was used for Pacific Islanders generally. See Fatima El Tayeb, European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postcolonial Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. 210 [footnote 20], with reference to Buschmann. 6 Feridun Zaimoğlu, Kanak Sprak. 24 Mißtöne vom Rande der Gesellschaft, 6th edn. (Hamburg: Rotbuch, 2004), pp. 9, 11, 17. 7 Ibid., 19–20.

Pop-Cultural Camera Interventions: Kanak TV 

 103

contrast, another monologue, whose author is identified as ‘Ali’ from ‘da crime posse’, a German hip-hop formation, asserts that ‘public enemy’ signalled the glimmering of ‘the epoch of true culture’.⁸ As an alternative to pop’s only presumably egalitarian agenda, Zaimoğlu’s Kanak Sprak thus presents hip-hop as a poetological model for an actually anti-hierarchical, minority-inclusive cultural production. Against this background, I underscore two key aspects of Zaimoğlu’s centrality for a supplementary genealogy of the new German pop, which would develop the latter’s scholarly as well as cultural contours beyond its hegemonic articulations. First, this supplementary genealogy foregrounds that the new pop literature, though popularized through the voices of more or less upper-class white males and established as a specifically German phenomenon in terms of marketing as well as some of its privileged themes, has, in fact, a thoroughly transnational history, one that also exceeds the oft-cited connections to popular Anglo-American ‘chick lit’ or Andy Warhol. While not generally explicitly a form of hip hop, the new pop overall drew significantly also on African diaspora-inspired forms like ‘spoken word’ and the poetry slam, which had only recently been imported to Germany.⁹ Secondly, these aspects of pop’s genealogy remind us that despite its broader success as a specifically literary phenomenon in the German context, pop develops not only a highly intermedial poetics, but has also found resonance in a much broader range of medial contexts. My contribution to this volume underlines both of these points by turning to Kanak TV (vol. 1), the short films collected under that label by the antiracist network Kanak Attak, which was founded in the late 1990s in response to the rise of Neo-Nazi violence and revitalized nationalism in post-unification Germany.¹⁰

8 Ibid., 27. 9 See Poetry! Slam! Texte der Pop-Fraktion, ed. by Andreas Neumeister and Marcel Hartges (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1996); Boris Preckwitz, ‘ready – steady: Notizen zum Poetry Slam’, Weimarer Beiträge, 49 (2003), 70–79. 10 The shorts are accessible on the web (http://www.kanak-attak.de/ka/kanaktv/volume1. html). Kanak TV (vol. 2) consists of the longer ‘Recolognize Cologne’, a co-production between Kanak Attak and the refugee rights group Karawane. As El Tayeb spells out, it does not overall reflect Kanak Attak’s specific aesthetics (European Others, p. 156). Although at least one of the Kanak TV (vol. 1) shorts also aired on local public access television (see ibid., 147), their distribution has not been primarily through TV, but early on also on video and in the context of the network’s multimedia events. In that sense, the media-specific label, in my interpretation, primarily indicates programmatic features: an embrace of the popular, documentary, topical (‘live’?) and explicitly political.

104 

 Claudia Breger

Kanak Sprak and Kanak Attak. Theatricalizing Politics While Kanak Attak’s name was inspired by Zaimoğlu’s literary hip-hop performances of Kanak identities, conceptual and political divergences quickly emerged as well. On their webpage, the network members introduce themselves as a ‘community of different people from diverse backgrounds who share a commitment to eradicate racism from German society’.¹¹ Whereas Zaimoğlu’s Kanak Sprak emphasizes the defiant formation of collective identity in response to ghettoization, Kanak Attak underlines that the network opposes ‘every single form of identity politics, as supported by ethnic absolutist thinking’.¹² In this spirit, the network’s title should not be read as an identity marker, but in primarily analytical ways, because they define their project as an attack on the ‘“Kanakization” of specific groups of people through racist ascriptions which deny people their social, legal, and political rights.’¹³ In line with Paul Gilroy’s roughly contemporaneous plea Against Race, Kanak Attak thus critically zooms in on the ongoing processes of racialization in contemporary society precisely with the goal of methodologically overcoming race.¹⁴ This programmatic turn away from, as they put it, society’s ethnic ‘niches’ finds its expression in an explicit commitment to combining hip-hop with pop as a model of cultural and political articulation.¹⁵ In the network’s multimedia productions  – including theater performance and theory as well as music and film – the resulting ‘hip-hop’ articulates itself in an aesthetics of ‘theatricalizing politics’ through ‘different practice(s) of storytelling’.¹⁶ This claim requires some

11 Kanak Attak (http://www.kanak-attak.de/ka/about.html). El Tayeb critiques this radically anti-essentialist approach for its neglect of key issues of cultural positionality. I agree only partially with this charge: while Kanak TV in fact does not do much in terms of generating anchor points for positive identifications, I argue that the shorts do (contrary to what El Tayeb asserts), in a sustained and successful way, ‘address’ the ‘violence’ of origin narratives that must be worked through ‘in order to be overcome’ (El Tayeb, European Others, p. 157). 12 Kanak Attak (http://www.kanak-attak.de/ka/about.html). 13 Ibid. 14 Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). 15 ‘Dieser Song gehört uns!’ Interview with Kanak Attak members Imran Ayata, Laura Mestre Vives and Vanessa Barth, by Uli Spenkoch and Serhat Karakayali, Diskus: Frankfurter StudentInnen Zeitschrift, 48.1 (1999). 16 ‘Die “theatralisierung des politischen”’, ‘eine andere praxis des geschichtenerzählens’ (Kanak Attak Aktuell. Dönerstress; http://www.kanak-attack.de/aktuell.html).

Pop-Cultural Camera Interventions: Kanak TV 

 105

brief backtracking. The aesthetics of the new German pop literature have been described as one of ‘performative’ narrative.¹⁷ As I have demonstrated elsewhere, this label remains rather unspecific in that the notion of performance has come to stand in for a range of diverging concepts over the past few decades.¹⁸ Most strikingly perhaps, theorists have, in conceptualizing the workings of performance, alternatively and sometimes even simultaneously foregrounded the ‘language’ of the ‘authentic’ as well as that of ‘theatre’s fakery’.¹⁹ In this way, they have defined the promise of performance both as that of ‘ground[ing] the “real”’ in a production of presence and as that of foregrounding the play of representation through gestures of bodily or textual theatricalization’.²⁰ Examining these two contrary conceptualizations and then specifying the techniques associated with each of them enables a more adequate analysis of the complex workings of performative techniques in literature or other media. To varying degrees and in different textual configurations, new German pop literature has drawn on techniques both of presence and theatricality. However, both the mainstream pop of the Kiepenheuer boys and sometimes the Suhrkamp neo-avant-gardists (like Goetz) have privileged the creation of presence effects over those of theatricality, as indicated by their ‘detailed, precise phenomenologies’ and their emphasis on a ‘recording’ of the ‘now’. At the same time, pop’s proverbial copying and sampling techniques can also produce effects of theatricalization, for example where they explicitly rearrange and thereby critically investigate discourse fragments as the sites of meaning production. Most prominently, this happens in the works of Thomas Meinecke, one of Goetz’s Suhrkamp colleagues. Zaimoğlu’s Kanak Sprak also presents significantly more theatricalized forms than mainstream pop, including his own later works (like, for example, Leinwand [Canvas/Screen] or German Amok).²¹ In Kanak Sprak, the poetological recourse to hip-hop as a form of highly theatrical, pose-based speech unfolds on all narrative levels. While the book’s individual monologues have the form of explicit self-dramatizations addressed to an audience, the author also ‘the-

17 See, most substantially, Eckhart Schumacher, Gerade Eben Jetzt. Schreibweisen der Gegenwart (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2003). 18 Claudia Breger, An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance. Transnational Theater, Literature, and Film in Contemporary Germany (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012). 19 Shannon Jackson, Professing Performance. Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 14. 20 Ibid., p. 37; see my An Aesthetics for a fuller development of these two clusters of performative narration. 21 Leinwand. Roman (Hamburg: Rotbuch, 2003); German Amok. Roman (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2004).

106 

 Claudia Breger

atricalizes’ his own act of representational intervention: his preface announces ‘translations’ or ‘free adaptations’ of ‘Kanak Sprak’ rather than a presumably immediate recording of the ‘ghetto’ voices he sets out to document.²² He thus ‘constructs’ ‘reality from his desk chair’.²³ Although this embrace of theatricality in the sense of active mediation does not prevent the author from making a claim to ‘authenticity’ (notably in quotation marks), Zaimoğlu’s preface counter-intuitively describes the authentic – or what hip-hop calls realness – through the criterion of a coherent and visible aesthetic form.²⁴ Kanak Sprak’s aesthetic thus folds presence into theatricality by defining realness, and with it the rapper’s authority, through the act of showing rather than the identity presented (14). As I have also detailed elsewhere, it is this particular theatricalization of presence which grounds the critical productivity of Zaimoğlu’s early work.²⁵ Namely, it allows for a defence of the text with respect to the thorny question of the re-signification of hate speech, which has marked much of Kanak Sprak’s reception. Without softening the offensively aggressive presence of its ‘Kanaksta’ voices, the volume’s theatricalized aesthetic forms simultaneously develop a complex cultural commentary by contextualizing the identities it constructs in the everyday racisms of German society.

The ‘Performative’ Documentaries of Kanak TV Kanak Attak, with their programmatically anti-essentialist approach, further develop this critical project of working through racist articulations in contemporary society. As I demonstrate in the remainder of this essay, the aesthetics of the Kanak TV shorts charts an even more intricate imbrication of theatricality and presence techniques, here in the medium of film. They do so through a multifaceted exploration of what has (again, with insufficient specificity) been called ‘performative documentary’ in film studies.²⁶ In my categories ‘performative

22 Kanak Sprak, p. 18. 23 Ibid., p. 17. 24 Kanak Sprak, p. 18. For a critique of the notion of realness see Leslie W. Lewis, ‘Naming the Problem Embedded in the Problem That Led to the Question “Who Shall Teach African American Literature,” or, Are We Ready to Discard the Concept of Authenticity Altogether?’, in White Scholars/African American Texts, ed. by Lisa A. Long (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), pp. 53–67. 25 See chapter three of An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance. 26 See Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 138.

Pop-Cultural Camera Interventions: Kanak TV 

 107

documentary’ is characterized by a thoroughly theatricalized aesthetics, which forfeits longstanding documentary traditions of realism, although not all connection to the real of the documented world, and the forceful impact of evoking its presence. In the North American context, the turn of the twenty-first century trend towards such ‘performative’ or ‘self-consciously arty and expressive modes of documentary filmmaking’ has been most notoriously associated with the work of Michael Moore, whose practice of combining playful entrances of the director as performer with partisan intervention has triggered much controversy.²⁷ In analytic terms, the theatricalizing aesthetics of performative documentary appear, on a first level, simply as a poetological translation of postmodern epistemology. Late twentieth-century critiques of filmic realism underscore that documentary, too, is necessarily ‘fictive’, if not ‘fictional’, in that it ‘constitutes’ its objects, even if the referent is ‘a piece of the world plucked from its everyday context’ in documentary, whereas in fiction ‘people and objects placed before the camera yield to the demands of a creative vision’.²⁸ Taken to its logical conclusion, this argument replaces the fiction-documentary opposition itself with distinctions by degree. If ‘plucking’ – and reconfiguring the plucked objects – amount to constituting qua communicative intent and aesthetic framing, and if we acknowledge that fiction never entirely escapes all mimetic relations to the world, documentary and fiction film win their respective identities not as essentially distinct phenomena, but as different generic organizations of a principally shared ‘creative treatment of actuality’.²⁹ To be sure, critics of postmodern epistemology, in this context cognitive film scholars specifically, have insisted that we nonetheless take seriously the boundaries established by indexing film as either fiction or documentary. In their view, the latter treatments of actuality ought to be evaluated based on criteria of objectivity in the sense of how they adhere to inter-subjectively developed standards ‘of reasoning and evidence gathering’.³⁰ Along with Moore and other practitioners of performative documentary, however, Kanak TV is more interested in exploring precisely the grey zone between these categories, or perhaps more accurately the interplay of the factual and the fictive on the overlapping terrains of ethnography and activism. If documentaries in general tend to be ‘organized around an

27 The quote is from Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary. A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 163. 28 Michael Renov, ‘Introduction. The Truth About Non-Fiction’, in Theorizing Documentary, ed. by Michael Renov (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 1–11 (pp. 2, 7; highlighted in original). 29 John Grierson, quoted in Bruzzi, New Documentary, p. 5. 30 Noël Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 231.

108 

 Claudia Breger

argument’, Kanak TV’s hip-hop aesthetics of theatricality flaunts this rhetorical status and partisan nature rather than claiming any neutrality for their ‘plucking’ activities.³¹ They also explicitly forgo the obedience to protocol that makes such outspokenly political work acceptable to the cognitive critics.³² As one of the group members states it programmatically: ‘Kanak TV does not treat topics, but rather uses them’.³³ Importantly, though, this dismissal of objectivity should not be equated with a full-fledged bracketing of referential claims. In the tradition of the political avant-gardes of the twentieth century, Kanak TV instead employs their interventionist pop camera as ‘a catalyst to inspire and to reveal’ what they insist is ‘true and authentic behavior’ in their German interlocutors.³⁴ In other words, they employ a non-realist form with the goal of uncovering perhaps not the real of, but something real about contemporary German society. In doing so, Kanak TV does draw also on the very presence techniques that characterize mainstream pop, but, as we will see, they do so to quite different effect within the frame of their theatricalized politics. The three short films collected in the first volume of Kanak TV explore different practices of thus creatively arranging and making visible ‘pieces of the world’. As I will show, these practices include forms of relatively straightforward didactic intervention, which in film studies has been associated especially with the theatricalizing force of voice over, but also with other overt commentary techniques, including inter-titles and montage.³⁵ At the same time, Kanak TV also explores much more open-ended forms, which use a theatricalized narrative to frame the unsettling presence of societal racisms.

31 The quote is from Keith Beattie, Documentary Screens: Nonfiction Film and Television (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 17. 32 Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image, p. 235. 33 Militiadis Oulios, ‘Was guckst du? Kanak TV. Anleitung für einen medialen Antirassismus’, in Konkret konkrass, 2002, by Kanak Attak (http://www.kanak-attak.de/ka/archiv /ffm/txt/gucks. htmp). 34 The quotes are from Beattie, Documentary Screens, p. 22. 35 See for example Sarah Kozloff, Invisible Storytellers. Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).

Pop-Cultural Camera Interventions: Kanak TV 

 109

Zooming in on the Culture of Exclusion: ‘The Fairytale of Integration’ Closest to the didactic pole is the programmatic short ‘Das Märchen von der Integration’ [The Fairytale of Integration]. As one of Kanak Attak’s theoretical papers argues, ‘integration’ functions as the ‘currently central topos for the implementation of racist subordination in Germany’.³⁶ The paper targets the political rhetoric which blames ongoing marginalization processes – for example socio-geographical ghettoization, high unemployment rates in immigrant communities and statistically poor educational success – on cultural difference. Instead, Kanak Attak underscores the legacy of exclusion in a country whose governing politicians were only beginning to acknowledge its status as a country of immigration at the time of Kanak Attak’s formation. After September 11, the use of the integration topos increasingly coalesced around a discourse specifically of religious otherness, namely as ‘the active refusal of many in the Muslim community to integrate’.³⁷ In line with such arguments, the controversial ‘Zuwanderungsgesetz’ [immigration law], in effect since January 2005, contains an extra chapter on the ‘advancement of integration’ by means of integration courses combining language proficiency development with an introduction to Germany’s legal order, culture and history.³⁸ Although these classes are rhetorically presented in terms of every immigrant’s ‘entitlement’, the law also specifies that they can be imposed on ‘foreigners’ dependent on public support or deemed to be ‘specifically in need of integration’ by the immigration authority.³⁹

36 ‘[D]erzeit zentrale[r] Begriff zur Durchsetzung rassistischer Subordination in Deutschland’ (Kanak Attak [Massimo Perinelli], Strategia Kanak – Recht auf Rechte global, Kanak Attak: aktuell, http://www.kanak-attak.de/ka/aktuell/wissen.html). 37 Peter Schneider, ‘The New Berlin Wall’, The New York Times Magazine, December 4, 2005, pp. 66–71 (p. 71). Authored by a well-known German author associated with the 1968 student revolt, this particular essay, which was published in The New York Times, indicates the broad acceptance of such integration discourses in liberal and intellectual circles, as well as its presence in the transnational War on Terror. 38 ‘Förderung der Integration’ (Gesetz zur Steuerung und Begrenzung der Zuwanderung und zur Regelung des Aufenthalts und der Integration von Unionsbürgern und Ausländern [Zuwanderungsgesetz. Vom 30. Juli 2004], in Bundesgesetzblatt, 2004 Teil 1 Nr. 41, 5. August 2004 (http://217.160.60.235/BGBL/bgbl1f/bgbl104s1950.pdf, Chapter 3). While this law eventually officially acknowledged the country’s status as a country of immigration, it remains extremely restrictive in its concrete immigration policies. 39 ‘[I]n besonderer Weise integrationsbedürftig’ (‘Gesetz zur Steuerung’ § 44a).

110 

 Claudia Breger

Filmed during the debate on the immigration law, ‘Das Märchen von der Integration’ addresses these controversial provisions by creating a generic bricolage of fictional and documentary forms. Partially serious ‘documentary drama’ in that it references ‘factual or possible situations’ through its fictionalized storyline, the film simultaneously draws on the openly satirical forms of the mockumentary.⁴⁰ In this generic borderland, the political argument is mostly advanced through the construction of plot and the film’s theatrical mise-en-scène, including the playful foregrounding of props and body parts through close-ups and skewed angles. The short’s very first shot, for instance, shows a frontal close-up of the sleeping protagonist’s naked feet. In film studies, such comic spectacle – the visual foregrounding of some object of desire or ridicule for spectatorial enjoyment – has been the focus of longstanding debates about the performative subversion of narrative authority.⁴¹ Attesting to the fact that spectacle interacts with narrative in a variety of ways, and not necessarily to subversive effect,⁴² comic theatricality in ‘The Fairytale of Integration’ overall operates in the service of the film’s political message; however, the laughter provoked by the grotesque introductory framing of the protagonist’s body is not exhausted by this didactic dimension. The spectator follows the journey of a young woman who sets out to comply with an order she receives on an apparently normal morning in a federal government-issued mail envelope. During the film’s opening sequence, the camera playfully suggests the protagonist’s Turkish-German background through some stereotype sampling. By this I mean their foregrounding as stereotypes, reminiscent of the theatrical restaging of identity discourses for example in Thomas Meinecke’s Tomboy (1998). In close-up, we see both her alarm clock – a kitschy, Turkish object issuing ‘Oriental’ wake-up sounds  – and her breakfast fare, the quintessentially German Nutella chocolate spread. She then reads the letter aloud. Short of resorting to flamboyant forms of extra-diegetic commentary like inter-titles, this not-quite realist device more or less directly acknowledges the film audience. It also allows the viewer to notice that the protagonist is a native speaker of German, perhaps one of Germany’s third generation immigrants who are still officially foreigners due to the country’s tradition of ius sanguinis. The letter asks her to supply evidence of being properly ‘integrated’ by completing

40 The quote is from Beattie, Documentary Screens, p. 148 (with John Caughie). 41 See for example Tom Gunning, ‘Crazy Machines in the Garden of Forking Paths: Mischief Gags and the Origins of American Film Comedy’, in Classical Hollywood Comedy, ed. by Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 87–105, as well as Donald Crafton, ‘Pie and Chase. Gag, Spectacle and Narrative in Slapstick Comedy’, in Ibid., pp. 106–19. 42 See for example Geoff King, Spectacular Narratives. Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000).

Pop-Cultural Camera Interventions: Kanak TV 

 111

simple tasks like participating in a ‘deutsche gesellige Veranstaltung’ [German social event] and eating a ‘German meal’. The protagonist’s performance in these different situations is to be evaluated and certified by German citizens. As she now sets out to get the form filled in, none of these passport-certified Germans seems to be in any way puzzled by either the nature of the exercise or the role of authority s/he is assigned in it. In this way, the film dramatizes the naturalized status of an asymmetrical thought structure in which the proponents of hegemonic culture assert their authority by making the particularity of (what they define as) German tradition into a general norm  – or Leitkultur  – valid for everybody living on German soil.⁴³ Overall friendly and willing to help, our protagonist’s German interlocutors simply sign the paper as asked. In a further twist of the integration ideology, inequality is perpetuated also by foreclosing the demanded assimilation. The trope of integration turns into an ‘Integrationslüge’ [integration lie] by virtue of the majority’s resistance against inclusion, which demands the ‘foreigner’s’ continued visibility as an eternal other.⁴⁴ Even while willing to sign off on the protagonist’s integration performance, her majority German evaluators articulate surprise that she speaks German so well or assert her quintessential non-belonging by asking when she will go ‘back’. At the ‘German social event’, our protagonist successfully demonstrates her integrative adeptness by telling racist jokes. After completing all the exercises, the subject of integration is fed up. Struggling to digest the last item on the bureaucrats’ agenda, the German beef she just ate, she decides in a scene theatricalized through fast motion to use the meticulously completed integration certificate as toilet paper, which is missing in the exemplary German restaurant restroom. For the first time, the protagonist speaks Turkish; subtitles translate her words for the film’s non-Turkish audiences. As the camera focuses on the integration certificate being flushed away in a swirl of water, the film concludes by explicating its message with the two-part inter-title: ‘Integrier mich – am Arsch’ [roughly: Integration – I don’t give a shit]. Since the storyline itself develops that conclusion quite clearly, the expository, openly didactic title seems to primarily serve the theatrical purpose of loudly, defiantly underscoring the film’s status as an act of political intervention.

43 This, as Deniz Göktürk argues, ‘nebulous’ concept of a ‘guiding’ mainstream culture (‘Leitkultur’) to which all immigrants were supposed to adapt was coined by Friedrich Merz, the general secretary of the CDU, in 2000, and controversially discussed in the following years. See ‘Strangers in Disguise: Role-Play beyond Identity Politics in Anarchic Film Comedy’, New German Critique, 92 (2004), 100–122, (p. 111). See ‘Strategia Kanak’. 44 Ibid.

112 

 Claudia Breger

With its dimension of comic release, the film’s final gesture also indicates how its theatricality exceeds the very political message it is designed to put across. In some respects, the film’s point seems to be less its didactic narrative than the project for which the episodic frame story provides an excuse: in following the young woman’s quest, the film puts dominant German culture on display.⁴⁵ Hilariously, this culture is satirized as a mix of homoerotic soccer ritual and alcoholism. During her German grocery shopping exercise, the protagonist denies herself coffee, buying several bottles of liquor instead. Indulging in the realm of gross physical humour, the camera captures the spectacle of stacked sausage jars entitled ‘Deutschländer’. More disturbingly, the camera also focuses on the representatives of German culture performing their position of privilege vis-à-vis those marginalized by their demands. In close-up we observe their friendly faces as they make their racist comments. This close-up of the theatrically foregrounded spectacle of majority Germans is what most distinctly characterizes the Kanak TV productions in general. Introduced as a response to dominant media’s fixation on the immigrant ‘other’, specifically the figure of the headscarf-wearing woman, this technique reverses subject-object positions in the hegemonic economy of the gaze: ‘We don’t allow the gaze to be directed at us. We direct the gaze’.⁴⁶ From this perspective of reverse ethnography, dominant German culture loses its apparently self-evident position of authority, turning instead into the object of critical dissection. Within the fictionalized frame of ‘Das Märchen von der Integration’, it remains unclear in which ways the protagonist’s encounters are staged, or where exactly the actuality of the spectacle of Germanness can be located. That is, we do not know whether the film team met the majority Germans in chance encounters or whether they are actors collaborating on a project. Using a distinction developed by Carroll, it remains unclear whether they portray racist German culture physically (by standing in for themselves) or rather nominally (standing in for the fictive character of the more or less stereotypical majority German).⁴⁷ In the first case (of physical portrayal), the film’s reference to the real world would extend to fully configured situations, i. e. it would document encounters as they happened. Otherwise, it operates only on the level of reference to the individual tropes and topoi creatively rearranged through filmic sampling, meaning that its fictional remix would merely document actually existing argumentative patterns

45 See Beattie, Documentary Display. Re-viewing Non-Fiction Film and Video (London: Wallflower Press, 2008). 46 ‘Wir lassen den Blick nicht auf uns richten. Wir richten den Blick’ (Oulios, ‘Was guckst du?’). 47 Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image, pp. 46–47.

Pop-Cultural Camera Interventions: Kanak TV 

 113

and stereotypes. The other two films collected in the first volume of Kanak TV, entitled ‘Philharmonie Köln – 40 Jahre Einwanderung’ [Philharmonic Orchestra Cologne – 40 Years of Immigration] and ‘Weißes Ghetto’ [White Ghetto], resolve that ambiguity by foregoing a fictional frame. Instead, both of them capture actual interview interactions between the film team and various, as they satirically put it, ‘bio-German’ interlocutors, i. e. Germans who qualify for that label based on the criteria of descent which dominated twentieth-century German citizenship legislation.

The Native German in Discursive Distress in ‘Philharmonic Orchestra Cologne’ No less theatricalized than ‘Das Märchen von der Immigration’, ‘Philharmonie Köln’ and ‘Weißes Ghetto’ draw attention to the process of representation specifically by making the camera, microphone and film team noticeably present. Occasionally captured in the picture themselves, the interviewers repeatedly wink at the camera, and their questions structure the interviews, along with the camera operator’s radically discontinuous, disorienting and sometimes openly polemical moves. More clearly than in the fictionalized ‘Das Märchen von der Integration’, however, the theatricality of Kanak TV’s two interview-centred films does not translate into a bracketing of referentiality. Even while the theatricalized form highlights the process of representation as a power game,⁴⁸ Kanak TV’s playful act of asserting representational authority over their majority German interviewees serves to capture an actuality which is unambiguously that of the filmed situation, rather than merely nominally referencing (stereo)typical behaviours. In recording the responses of accidental interlocutors to the interviewers’ provocative and sometimes manipulative questions, Kanak TV uncovers prevailing culturalist attitudes and racisms which might have remained hidden in typical interview situations. In ‘Philharmonie Köln  – 40  Jahre Einwanderung’, Kanak TV attends a Cologne gala event celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Turkish labour immigration to Germany. As indicated by the interview questions as well as the film’s montage of shots, the crew suspects that the ostensibly multicultural ceremony actually celebrates bio-German hegemony, since mostly non-immigrant dignitar-

48 As Oulios puts it, ‘Kanak TV hat sich verliebt in die Autorität von Kamera und Mikrofon’ (‘Was guckst du?’).

114 

 Claudia Breger

ies slurp champagne served by staff members with immigrant backgrounds in the space of German high culture, the philharmonic orchestra hall. With their provocatively self-labelling Kanak TV T-shirts, the film team disruptively enters this space of national celebration. They ask bio-Germans what one of the interviewees describes as ‘merkwürdige’ [curious] questions, like ‘do you want to go back’ (home), and whether gender discrimination is an integral part of German culture, evident in media reports on famous German singers beating up their wives. They also ask the gala guests to read a passage from the so-called New Testament, which commands women to submit to their husbands. Teasingly, the film team underscores these native informant encounters with visual gestures of mock ethnography. After a close-up has highlighted the popular small green German New Testament edition used, one of the interviewers compares its colour to that of the police car waiting outside. By investigating culture through methodological procedures without the seal of inter-subjectively established scholarly legitimation, the film brackets some of its direct reference claims – for example, about colour-based connections between Bible editions and police cars – while simultaneously establishing indirect ones. As ‘Philharmonie Köln’ alerts its audiences to the absurdity of the staged ethnographic project, the film nonetheless critically asserts the latter’s significance as a displaced representation of hegemonic disciplinary discourse. Namely, the film analyses anti-Islamic discourse without ever explicitly bringing up the topic. 91% of Germans responding to a 2006 survey associated the discrimination of women with the keyword ‘Islam’.⁴⁹ In response to Kanak TV’s ‘curious’ reversals of these charges, the German interviewees devise defence strategies, ranging from simple aggression vis-à-vis the camera to relativizing moves, insisting that the Koran contains the same sentence. They thus highlight the unfair generalizations and the lack of historical perspective guiding the questions in a twist on both classical ethnographic documentary, in which interviewees are othered as the objects of analysis, and traditional expert documentary which places interviewees in a position of analytic authority. Kanak TV’s interviewees thus function as objects and agents of analysis simultaneously. With little control over their discourse, they nonetheless perform the work of indirectly unravelling the tropes they themselves employ to de-authorize others. Since there is no voice over and the speech of the interviewers is mostly confined to their provocative questions, it is up to the film spectator to translate the ‘bio-Germans’’ defensive analysis into an explicit critique of hegemonic German discourses. That ‘Philharmonie Köln’, unlike ‘Das Märchen von der Integra-

49 Eberhard Seidel, ‘Gesundes Volksempfinden 2006’, die tageszeitung, 7 October 2006, p. 12.

Pop-Cultural Camera Interventions: Kanak TV 

 115

tion’, thus foregoes direct commentary does not make it less didactic in every respect. Probably scripted by the film team, the short is certainly carefully edited in a manner that underscores its critical points. The average audience member attending a Kanak TV screening in some alternative venue or watching the short on their webpage will also be sufficiently familiar with the debates at stake to smoothly decipher the message intended by the Kanak TV team. More fully than in the anti-fairy tale about integration, however, the film’s narrative itself is developed through the rather undignified spectacle of the native Germans in discursive distress. Posing as an international film crew, Kanak TV asks most of their questions in English, and this device of distantiation overtly undermines the German interviewees, most of whom do not speak the language comfortably. Subtitles translate their grammatically tortured responses, which are full of idiosyncratic, sometimes telling vocabulary (‘I am teacher and leader [i. e. principal] from a primary school’) into standard German.⁵⁰ Linguistically incompetent in a transnational framework, the film’s bio-German interviewees also tend to look utterly perplexed for at least a moment before they come up with their defensive answers to the team’s questions. Insistently capturing these physiognomies of cognitive failure and emotional distress, the film’s mode of narration is not restricted to discourse analysis, but insists also on the affect evoked by spectacle. Namely, the film team seems to enjoy the staged revenge for a tradition of ethnographic spectacle which visibly exposes the (non-Western) other, based on the racist assumption that ‘[w]ith primitive man, gesture precedes speech’.⁵¹

The Faces of Racism. ‘White Ghetto’ Even more insistently, but with a somewhat different emphasis, this latter aspect is underlined in the last short included in the first volume of Kanak TV. As indicated by its title, ‘Weißes Ghetto’, the project of reverse ethnography explicitly focuses on racialization in this film. Through this means, the short presents a sophisticated analysis, which, on one level, constitutes a filmic contribution to the discourse of critical whiteness studies. Intriguingly, it does so at a moment before this discourse began to gain broader academic visibility in the German

50 To be sure, the film crew’s English is not exactly perfect, either, which adds to the film’s overall humorous effect. Nonetheless, the editing ensures that the interviewers preserve their dignity, i. e. by giving them a chance to reword as needed. 51 Regnault, quoted from Beattre, Documentary Screens, p. 44.

116 

 Claudia Breger

context.⁵² As a form of non-verbal commentary, two fast montage sequences at the beginning and the end of the film frame the interviews by evoking the network’s theoretical approach to racialization. Thus, the opening sequence visibly assembles and disassembles images by blending in vertically sliced stills part-bypart. In this manner the stills presented remind viewers that the whiteness at stake is ultimately not a matter of culture or colour but of power and privilege, which is articulated in signs of wealth – the neighbourhood’s expensive cars, fashion shop windows and supermarket meat counters.⁵³ At the same time, ‘Weißes Ghetto’ does more than merely analyse discourse through visual means. Like the Cologne gala short, the film focuses on the spectacle of the German interviewee without authority. ‘Weißes Ghetto’, however, shifts the emphasis from aggressively playful exposure to a more serious mode of what I describe as ‘phenomenological presencing’, or a close focus on the affective experience of interviewees, which invites a corresponding, if not necessarily similar emotional response from the audience. ‘Weißes Ghetto’ thus produces a thoroughly discomforting experience for its spectator. More fully than in ‘Philharmonie Köln’, the sterner, less flamboyant exposure chillingly investigates the interplay of discourse and affect in racism. The recurring interview pattern is that the film team confronts various inhabitants of the Cologne quarter Lindenthal with the provocative notion that their respectable neighbourhood constitutes a ‘white ghetto’, preserved by the majority’s relatively successful attempt to keep ethnic minorities out of its attractive living space. The answers they get range from denial to joyful affirmation. While some of the interviewees are offended by explicit words like ghetto, most of them agree that they like their community not only despite, but because of its status as a white enclave. In documenting their responses, the camera presents an encyclopaedia of racist gestures: the conspiratorial smile with which an elderly man, apparently unaware of the sarcasm underlying the interviewer’s question, acknowledges the strategy of ‘keeping foreigners out’, the policeman’s pose of rational argumentation as he explains the lack of immigrants in the neighbourhood with what he describes as its relatively orderly nature, and the aggressive

52 See Mythen, Masken und Subjekte: Kritische Weißseinsforschung in Deutschland, ed. by Maureen Maisha Eggers and others (Münster: Unrast, 2005). 53 Shifting its strategy for a moment, the short’s closing montage mimics racist discourse by metonymically embodying the ‘white ghetto’ in the stereotypical signifier of the blond hair which its inhabitants seem to share. But it does so only in order to then remind the film audience of the fictive status of ethnic homogeneity by highlighting, in the street cleaner’s black hair as well as the Döner Kebab booth on the corner, that even the ideologically closed society of the ‘white ghetto’ is dependent on the in/visible labour force of its subjugated minorities.

Pop-Cultural Camera Interventions: Kanak TV 

 117

assertion of authority performed by the eloquent inhabitant who insists that (bio-) Germans have no responsibility for integration in their own country. In analytic terms, the short thus investigates how whiteness, only precariously embodied in the Western tradition, resides not ‘in a set of stereotypes so much as in narrative structural positions, rhetorical tropes and habits of perception’.⁵⁴ Stubbornly refusing to question her own position, a young woman refutes the interviewers’ charge by declaring herself well integrated because of her previous experiences of living together with ‘foreigners’. With a friendly smile, she then suggests that the film team ask ‘eine andere Altersklasse und eine tiefere Bildungsklasse’ [a different age group and a lower educational class]. For the film audience, or at least the white audience member writing here, being confronted with how ‘Weißes Ghetto’ represents these performances of self-understood privilege was initially an extremely disturbing experience. Making me choke on my own laughter, provoked by the remaining playful elements of mise-en-scène and editing, the film presented a forceful reminder of the ghastly socio-symbolic as well as socio-affective presence of everyday racism. While shocked by the overt aggression of some ghetto inhabitants, I needed to investigate my own distance from (or similarities with?) the likeable young man who initially accepts the question about majority German responsibility for integration as legitimate, but later responds with a determined ‘of course not’ when asked whether he would trade apartments with someone living in Cologne’s immigrant neighbourhood Kalk. As he puts it, the latter is ‘not really my neighbourhood’. ‘Weißes Ghetto’ offers even less narrative resolution for the spectacle it maps out than the immigration gala short, although it pretends to do so with a concluding gesture of theatricality. In front of the camera, two team members summarize that we have seen and heard ‘terrible, terrible things’ in this ‘sozialer Brennpunkt’ [problem district]. With its exaggerated pathos, the summary mocks hegemonic poses of sensationalist TV reporting about immigrant and other poor neighbourhoods. As an act of bitter satire, however, the concluding commentary neither provides a cognitively acceptable analysis of the presented spectacle, nor does it serve to re-establish the viewer’s affective comfort by implying an existing moral audience community. Rather, the film’s official act of theatricalized closure merely underscores the inadequacy of the featured response: its arrogant act of othering duplicates the shocking ‘ghetto realities’ of contemporary German majority culture. Denying its spectators closure, however, the film provokes affective responses which may serve the project of overcoming the paradigm of race by

54 Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 12.

118 

 Claudia Breger

working through racism in ultimately more effective ways than quick superficial insights.

Conclusion The hip-hop aesthetics of Kanak TV, which I have examined in this chapter as a multifaceted interlacing of theatricalizing and presencing techniques in the form of performative documentary, thus provokes both laughter and shock. Or, in the categories through which pop has often been evaluated, it produces both fun and serious political affect. Arguably, this aesthetics bears a historical stamp insofar as its critical ‘negativity’ – that is, the films’ failure to provide positive identification anchors, in particular for their mainstream viewers – has become harder to swallow for average audiences more than a decade into the twenty-first century. I have been reminded of that shift in audience sensitivities when integrating the shorts into my undergraduate classroom over the last few years, where they have increasingly provoked critique for being aggressive and disrespectful. Of course, these charges might also just constitute defence strategies against the very discomfort that Kanak TV aims to produce in its white audiences, and in that sense indicate the films’ continued success. But if my recent students have not had anomalous responses, this young and often overall quite self-reflexive American middle-class population does in fact find it harder and harder to relate to the postmodernist gestures of theatricalizing distantiation employed in the Kanak TV shorts. Perhaps these techniques of staging gaps both between words or visual objects and their referents, and between the affective responses of screen actors or non-actors and those of the audience have been declared dead once-too-often in the emerging twenty-first century culture of good feelings. This turn has manifested itself in a large-scale critical return to the categories of recognition and empathy, often in the name of shared human identity.⁵⁵ To avoid misunderstandings, I agree that rethinking possibilities for positive identifications with other humans both on and off screen, which had been neglected for too long by post/

55 I discuss these twenty-first century turns in more detail elsewhere, with respect to empathy and universalism in the aforementioned book, and in terms of themes of affirmation first in ‘Christian Universalism? Racism and Collective Identity in 21st-Century Immigration Discourses’, in Chloe. Beihefte zum Daphnis, ed. by Barbara Becker-Cantarino (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012). For a differentiated assessment of the turn to good feelings see Sara Ahmed, ‘Happy Objects’, in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. by Melissa Greg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 29–51.

Pop-Cultural Camera Interventions: Kanak TV 

 119

modernist aesthetics, is in many ways a very promising trajectory for contemporary thought. If, however, we do not simultaneously cultivate our undergraduates’ and our own ability to work through the bad feelings stirred by provocative works like Kanak TV’s hip-hop, we lose the chance to productively engage with those uncomfortable elements of the real world that the films evoke so forcefully, precisely through their often indirect techniques of representation. As a critical supplement to the emerging twenty-first century culture of affirmation, they deserve a prominent and semi-permanent place in the cultural archive.

Section 3: Pop and Gender

Molly Knight

Bodily Harm: Pop Masculinity in Benjamin Lebert’s Crazy and Der Vogel ist ein Rabe On the back cover of the paperback edition of Benjamin Lebert’s bestselling novel Crazy (1999), a semi-autobiographical coming of age story about a disabled teenaged boy at boarding school, a close-up of the young author’s face appears beside the following quote, positioned as if it were the picture’s caption: ‘Das war alles ein wenig viel für mich heute: Anstatt zu schlafen, eine Feuerleiter hinaufzuklettern, zu saufen, was das Zeug hält, mal eben ein bisschen zu vögeln und nebenbei erwachsen zu werden. Das reicht für eine Nacht. Da würde jeder kotzen, glaube ich’ [That was all a little much for me today: instead of sleeping, to climb a fire escape, get wasted, even shag a little and grow up in the process. That’s enough for one night. After that everyone would puke, I think].¹ Certainly, this quotation evokes the essence of 1990s German pop literature: the young man experiencing a rocky coming of age is familiar from Christian Kracht’s novel Faserland which heralded the ‘new wave’ of pop in 1995. Indeed, Lebert has a certain worldview in common with Kracht, but the stakes of masculine development in his work are even higher, considering the violent turn the process takes in his second novel, Der Vogel ist ein Rabe [The Bird is a Raven] (2005). A quick analysis of this cover reveals the distinctive process of masculine identity formation which takes place in the course of Lebert’s work. The quote describes the climactic events of a forbidden excursion to the girls’ dormitory. The narrator, who shares his author’s name and left-side partial paralysis, performs a series of daunting and formative feats: he climbs a fire escape, drinks to excess and has sex with a girl for the first time. When he vomits, it is not just the alcohol, but every one of these attempts to master his own body that have overwhelmed him. And each feat also signifies a metaphorical passage on the way to manhood, a destination for which both Benjamin and his body are not yet prepared. Thus, Lebert constructs a world in which gaining control over an uncooperative body is the essence of becoming a man and the penetration of a female body its initiation rite. This construction breeds misogyny and reinforces a Theweleitian model of a rigid masculinity under constant feminine threat, from without and from within.

1 Benjamin Lebert, Crazy (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1999).

124 

 Molly Knight

Crazy When Benjamin Lebert’s debut novel Crazy came out in 1999, the author’s young age (just sixteen) and exploration of the contemporary youth experience earned him copious media attention and turned him into a sort of poster-child for pop’s resurgence in Germany. Indeed, Lebert’s authorial persona dominates discussions of his work, inviting comparison with his contemporary, Christian Kracht. However, though the two bestselling authors share an editor – Kerstin Gleba of Kiepenheuer & Witsch – and have both been the subject of heated debate in the feuilletons, the two operate according to very different models. Lebert, nearly twenty years Kracht’s junior, has both suffered and profited from his tender age and sheepish, rather awkward manner, which his disability only intensified. Some critics have dismissed Crazy as over-hyped and unremarkable  – Florian Illies famously bashed the media attention awarded to Lebert in an article called ‘Das Kind – Wie ein Schriftsteller gemacht wird’ [The Child – How an Author Is Made] in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung – and others have gone so far as to suggest that Lebert’s father, a well-known journalist, may have helped him write the novel.² Yet other critics, among them Elke Heidenreich, stepped in to defend Lebert against this backlash. In fact, one gets the sense that some of the journalists who write about him are actually protective to the point of pitying him. They note his ‘sweet face’ and ‘small polite voice’³, marvel at his unaffected directness⁴ and criticize the ‘theatre’ of publicity which engulfed him after Crazy’s release as if he were a passive victim of it (and of Gleba, as Martin Wolf insinuates).⁵ One cannot help but wonder if Lebert’s disability, combined with his young age, has partially informed this rather patronizing defence of Lebert himself – far more so than of his book. The fact that Lebert’s protagonist carries his name clearly intensifies the drive to compassion, as one feels one knows Lebert through the monologues of his character. It is perhaps telling that Lebert sees his decision to name the character after himself as a ‘terrible mistake […]. The feelings are all true […]. But basically, it’s not true’.⁶ Thus, while Kracht grapples with the negative ‘Schnösel’ [snob] image which links him with his nameless narrator in Faserland, Lebert has

2 Florian Illies, ‘Das Kind – Wie ein Schriftsteller gemacht wird’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 43 (20 February 1999), p. 41; Dinitia Smith, ‘A Hot Novelist in Germany (Oh, He’s 18)’, The New York Times (1 May 2000), p. E8. 3 Smith, ‘A Hot Novelist in Germany’. 4 Elke Heidenreich, ‘Ein Autogramm von Gott’, Der Spiegel 7 (1999), p. 199. 5 Martin Wolf, ‘Kiepenheuer, Witsch & weg? ’, Der Spiegel 15 (1999), p. 276. 6 Smith, ‘A Hot Novelist in Germany’.

Bodily Harm: Pop Masculinity in Benjamin Lebert’s Crazy and Der Vogel ist ein Rabe 

 125

the opposite problem: he receives the sympathy intended for his protagonist from readers who have identified with the fictional Benni. Clearly, Lebert and the slick, enigmatic Kracht represent very different youthful worlds, but Nataly Bleuel underscores the difference more pointedly, praising Lebert’s attitude ‘because it has nothing in common with the terrorism of taste of Benjamin’s hyped predecessors at the same publishing house: Christian Kracht and Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre’. She claims that when Kerstin Gleba debuted Lebert at the 1998 Frankfurter Buchmesse, Kracht looked the young author up and down ‘from his peroxide-blond head to his left foot’ and, noting Lebert’s Velcro-closure sneakers, supposedly said: ‘for an author you have the wrong shoes on’.⁷ Of course, Lebert is unable to tie his own shoes due to his partial paralysis, and the implication is that Kracht’s comment also refers to Lebert’s lack of physical grace – a low blow indeed. It is clear from Bleuel’s tone, as she refers to Lebert by his first name and characterizes Kracht and von Stuckrad-Barre as ‘Geschmacksterroristen’ [terrorists of taste], where her bias lies, but in this anecdote we see that Lebert and Kracht do indeed have something in common: both have cultivated a public authorial persona which informs an understanding of their protagonists. We as readers see Lebert in Benni, just as we see Kracht in his nameless narrator, and what we know about the author necessarily impacts our understanding of the text. This conflation of author and narrator is a hallmark of the pop novel, from Kracht to von Stuckrad-Barre and Philipp Jessen.⁸ In Lebert’s case, this intrusion of the authorial persona contributes to a sympathetic view of Benni and his struggles. The boys of Crazy, like many of Lebert’s characters in his subsequent work, represent a cross-section of adolescent male outsider culture that bands together to self-hate and self-aggrandize, its members ultimately forming bonds of friendship that help them find confidence and transcend their lonely lot in life. There is Janosch, a poor student like Benni, who has a knack for getting into trouble; Fat Felix, whose obesity stems from an emotional eating disorder; Thin Felix, who

7 Nataly Bleuel, ‘Gib den Alten Zucker’, Spiegel Online (25 February 1999), (http://www.spiegel. de/kultur/literatur/0,1518,18645,00.html). 8 Jessen, whose Einarmig unter Blinden [One-Armed Among the Blind] owes much to Stuckrad-Barre’s Soloalbum [Solo Album], even includes a tongue-in-cheek disclaimer before his novel begins: ‘Alle in diesem Buch verwandten Namen und geschilderten Ereignisse – ausgenommen des öffentlichen Lebens  – sind frei erfunden. Jegliche Übereinstimmungen mit tatsächlichen Personen und Ereignissen sind rein zufällig. Wirklich’ [All names mentioned and events represented in this book – except those from public life – are invented. All similarities to actual people and events are purely coincidental. Really]. Philipp Jessen, Einarmig unter Blinden (Munich: Knaur, 2003), p. 7.

126 

 Molly Knight

seems to fade into the background, a slight but angry boy from a broken home; Troy, much older than the others and nearly engulfed by a silent rage brought on by a bed-wetting problem and his brother’s rumoured terminal illness; and Florian, called ‘Mädchen’ [girl], who is the youngest of the boys and has been orphaned. Though he may have the most obvious disability, Benni fits in so well with this rag-tag group because they are all ultimately disabled, whether physically or emotionally, and they are all ultimately angry about it. This spectrum of disabilities and Benni’s in particular allows the reader to excuse potentially troubling behaviour. While the other boys are unable to navigate through life effectively due to relatively minor and potentially transient physical and emotional setbacks, Benni suffers from a permanent physical impairment which limits his control over himself and his surroundings. He cannot tie a shoe or slice a dinner roll; he is persecuted in math class by a merciless teacher even though part of his trouble is a simple lack of motor skills, i. e. an inability to hold a protractor or use a compass successfully. This literal incarnation of outsider status forms the essence of Benni’s appeal as a coming-of-age story protagonist. What we all feel as adolescents – namely, out of control of our own bodies and circumstances, painfully far away from the achievement of our goals – is written onto Benni’s disabled body, turning him into a strong figure of identification. This lack of physical control echoes in Troy’s bedwetting, Fat Felix’s uncooperative paunch that pushes his pants down and his anxious need for candy at all times, and even Florian’s diminutive, girlish stature. The physical mark both creates and indicates the boys’ status as wounded outsiders. As evidenced by Florian’s nickname, ‘Mädchen’, the mark is also an emasculating, potentially feminizing force that threatens the development of a masculine persona. Janosch, the ringleader of the group, does not bear a physical mark. Instead, he is the group’s philosopher king, initiating all adventures and telling the others how to live well. Benni in particular looks up to the sharp-tongued, independent Janosch, and does his best to heed Janosch’s constant command to ‘scheiss dir nicht in die Hosen’ [don’t shit your pants]. Throughout the novel, Janosch and the other boys place great emphasis on bodily control, as during Benni’s painful trip up the fire escape. When physical control is lacking, it is often described in terms of insidious fluids, urine and tears in particular. Strong and silent, Troy eventually breaks down in front of Benni, shaking and sobbing as he describes his bedwetting problem with a representative metaphor: ‘Das Leben ist ein…’ Er stockt. Zittert. Sein Oberkörper wiegt sich hin und her. Die Fliege verläßt sein Gesicht. Sucht einen ruhigeren Ort. Den Stuhl. Den Tisch. Sie krabbelt weiter. ‘Ist ein..?’ wiederhole ich. ‘Ist ein großes Ins-Bett-Pissen, ’ bricht es schließlich aus ihm hervor. Er weint. Dicke Tränen kullern über sein Gesicht. Die Augen schwellen an. Er schluchzt.

Bodily Harm: Pop Masculinity in Benjamin Lebert’s Crazy and Der Vogel ist ein Rabe 

 127

[‘Life is a…’ he trembles. His upper body sways back and forth. The fly leaves his face. Looks for a more peaceful place. The chair. The table. It crawls onward. ‘Is a?’ I repeat. ‘Is a great pissing-in-bed’, finally bursts forth from him. He cries. Thick tears stream down his face. His eyes swell up. He sobs.]⁹

Internal turmoil becomes a literal ‘ins-Bett-pissen’, forcing itself outside the body in a torrent of tears, urine, vomit, blood, etc. This messy corporeal reality seems to conflict with the glossy superficiality commonly associated with pop literature by both its critics and its supporters. However, the two elements in fact go hand in hand. Indeed, the uncontrollable body plays a major role in many other pop texts, perhaps most notably in Christian Kracht’s Faserland.¹⁰ And as in the works of Kracht and von Stuckrad-Barre, Lebert’s characters cling to relics of popular culture as a sort of armour to protect and conceal their tumultuous, uncontrollable bodies from the outside world. Benni’s pop is just less au courant and expensive than that of Faserland’s narrator. Whereas Kracht’s protagonist hides behind a Barbour jacket and a Ralph Lauren button-down shirt, Benni arms himself with his father’s Pink Floyd T-shirt. All are symbols of belonging to a particular clique, short-hand for the wearer’s place in the world. And all deflect from the chaos within, which defies categorization and civilizing forces.

Male Fantasies In his 1977 study of interwar German masculinity, Männerphantasien [Male Fantasies], Klaus Theweleit describes his subjects’ desperate need to confine and conceal their chaotic emotions by erecting hard, rigid exteriors to protect them from a tidal wave of fear and desire. In this construction, threats to the rigid masculine self are often described as floods, uncontrollable and destructive. These floods can come from within or without, and the sexual woman unleashes the greatest external flood, as the sex act weakens the man’s defences and breaks

9 Lebert, Crazy, p. 90. 10 Christian Kracht, Faserland (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1995). For a discussion of corporeality and abjection in Christian Kracht’s first two novels, see Richard Langston, ‘Escape from Germany. Disappearing Bodies and Postmodern Space in Christian Kracht’s Prose’, German Quarterly, 79.1 (Winter 2006), 50–70.

128 

 Molly Knight

down his borders. Thus, Theweleit’s man at once desires and fears the feminine force.¹¹ Interestingly, this metaphorical pattern finds voice in Lebert’s fiction some eighty years later. That these boys lose control makes them less than men; one has the impression that Benni and his friends strive for Theweleit’s hardened carapace model, impenetrable and designed to keep emotional excess inside. In fact, Theweleit’s model lends itself surprisingly well to many pop texts with young male protagonists in which the body and the abject play a major role. Once again, Christian Kracht’s Faserland offers a fruitful comparison. Kracht’s protagonist fights to maintain control over his uncooperative body, which collapses, vomits and eliminates at critical moments throughout the text. He fights back tears and chain-smokes with trembling hands in an attempt to keep his flood of fear and longing inside, neglecting his bodily needs in the process. In this way, Theweleit’s conception of the ‘soldier male’s’ exoskeleton reveals a depth beneath the surface-obsessed, stylized youth culture we assume constitutes the focus of pop. In Crazy, as in Faserland, the young narrator’s seemingly straightforward narrative presents a struggle to separate oneself from the chaos of the contemporary world as well as to wall up the chaos of feeling within. The boys of Crazy are shamed by their own lack of control and eager to prove themselves ‘crazy’, and perhaps the most important aspect of this process of distinction is a successful interaction with a girl. We tend to think of adolescent boys as sex-obsessed, but perhaps this obsession is in fact more mental than physical or emotional. In The Male Body, Susan Bordo writes, ‘To be a body with a sex is fine for girls – in fact, it’s what we’re supposed to be. But men are not supposed to be guided by the rhythms of bodily cycles, susceptible to hormonal tides. They are not supposed to be slaves to sexual moods and needs, to physical and emotional dependency […]. They’re not supposed to think with their penises!’¹² Not surprisingly, Benni, Janosch and company certainly do seem to think with their penises for much of the novel, since each of their adventures has a sexual aspect. They converse about their prospects for sex, which do appear grim, and about the necessity of ‘nailing’. And yet the tone of these scenes steers very clear of Bordo’s ‘hormonal tides’ and ‘physical and emotional dependency’ on sex. Benni puts it this way: ‘Früher hingen in unseren Zimmern Superhelden. Nun hängen in unseren Zimmern Supertitten’ [Before, super heroes hung in our rooms. Now

11 Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies. Volume 1. Women Floods Bodies History, trans. by Stephen Conway (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 12 Susan Bordo, The Male Body (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1999), p. 19.

Bodily Harm: Pop Masculinity in Benjamin Lebert’s Crazy and Der Vogel ist ein Rabe 

 129

super tits hang in our rooms].¹³ As he and Janosch flip through a Playboy, they do not discuss the pleasure in or need for sex, but rather the necessity of it, as if it were a rite of passage, like growing a beard or being able to bench press a certain weight. Fat Felix tries to fight Janosch because Janosch reminds him that he has never had sex in the same breath that he calls him fat. The insults are one and the same because they both target Felix’s deficiencies in the process of developing an independent masculine image. Thus, sex for the boys really is not just about lust, nor even a particular interest in the girls themselves; rather, sex becomes a badge of honour, a necessary obstacle to the achievement of selfhood. Not surprisingly, then, Lebert’s characterization of women remains at best ambiguous and at worst profoundly negative in a way that goes well beyond a young boy’s apprehensions about growing up and learning to interact with girls on both social and sexual levels. Women and girls appear both all-consuming and repellent and threaten Benni at every turn. The two female ‘leads’ in the novel are Malen and Marie, a pair of boarding school students, at once opposite and rather interchangeable: even their names sound similar. Malen becomes the heart’s desire of first Janosch, then Benjamin, though neither can ever really touch her. The text whitewashes her into an intangible icon fit only for wistful longing, and warning signs accompany any attempt to come close to her. As she sits with Janosch at a party in her dorm room, sporting turquoise nails and a set of white silk lingerie improbable for a sixteen-year-old girl, Benjamin notices that she seems to glow, comparing her blue eyes to a ‘Laserkanone. Man wird sofort gefangen’ [laser cannon. You’re caught immediately].¹⁴ Benjamin sees her as tempting, but cold, and capable of penetrating him to the core if he comes too close. Malen’s spectral coolness and elevated status recall Theweleit’s description of ‘white’ women in soldier memoirs. Men may safely desire these ‘pure’ women, and this supposed purity allows men to cast them as inhumanly as possible such that their delicacy and disinterest threaten to turn them into a kind of abstract force or promise of utopian happiness. Of course, actual whiteness suggests various characteristics associated with death, artifice and inhumanity: coldness (like snow), bloodlessness, stone (especially the marble statue), sexual disinterest (frigidity, purity) and sexual unattainability. In fact, this unattainability remains key. A white woman who becomes sexually attainable (as Malen seems to in her lingerie, with her frank stare) embodies but a sexualized, scary, ‘red’ woman of the flood in disguise. Such a woman presents a rather familiar

13 Lebert, Crazy, p. 45. 14 Lebert, Crazy, p. 71.

130 

 Molly Knight

duality, a version of the Madonna/whore dichotomy so pervasive in the western literary canon.¹⁵ Actual sexual contact occurs with another, previously unknown girl  – the newcomer Marie – who aggressively takes Benjamin’s virginity. Everything about this girl speaks of danger and intimidation: her eyes are ‘poison green’, her lips ‘voluminous’ and ‘blood red’ over remarkably white teeth. Benjamin notices her dark hair, her large breasts despite an overall thinness, the ‘coal black’ of her robe-like nightshirt and underwear.¹⁶ In this description, Marie appears dangerous, even vampire-like. Indeed, the love-bite on her neck and the way she crushes a beer can in one red-nailed hand indicate that her bad-girl image is more than skin deep. Because of his disability and shyness (and perhaps his fundamental disinterest), it is Marie who must approach Benjamin in the lavatory, that classic site of elimination, dirtiness and vulnerability. She must remove both their clothes, put a condom on him and climb on top of him. Benjamin sits in a chair, a passive victim, overwhelmed and shaken by the experience. Lebert’s imagery is telling: Benjamin sees in her shaved pubic hair a dark window, accentuating the threatening hole which will swallow him up, and in the sensation of sex he feels a ‘storm’ of seething and mysterious emotions. The flood has come for him, and he must ride it out, half-unwilling, glad only to have proven himself a ‘man’ (long before he can truly be called one, at the tender age of sixteen) by penetrating a woman. Afterwards, Benjamin is beset by a fit of aggression: ‘warum zum Kuckuck werde ich so aggressiv? Ich habe doch gerade ein Mädchen genagelt, verdammt’ [why the devil am I getting so aggressive? I just nailed a girl, after all, dammit].¹⁷ He urinates all over the wall and floor of the girls’ bathroom, then vomits profusely  – another moment of fluid release, like Troy’s later crying spell, that signals catastrophic change. But it is simultaneously an act of aggression directed against Marie and the other girls.¹⁸ On the one hand this act may suggest stereotypical drunken behaviour. Yet the bitter glee Benni feels at the thought of Malen or a female teacher finding his used condom in the freshly ‘marked’ bathroom stall further demonstrates that ‘nailing’, as he puts it, has not really fulfilled Benjamin’s desires because they are intertwined

15 Theweleit, Male Fantasies, pp. 226–44. 16 Lebert, Crazy, p. 69. 17 Lebert, Crazy, pp. 83–84. 18 As Camille Paglia explains, ‘Male urination is a form of commentary […] often aggressive, as in the defacement of public monuments by Sixties rock stars. To piss on is to criticize’. Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae. Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 21.

Bodily Harm: Pop Masculinity in Benjamin Lebert’s Crazy and Der Vogel ist ein Rabe 

 131

with his anger. Only hurting a girl (by upsetting her or getting her in trouble) will satisfy him. Apparently he sees himself as Marie’s victim and not her lover. The sex act grants Benjamin access to a certain club among his male peers, or more accurately elevates his status in the group; thus, the female figure, no matter how threatening she may seem, functions in actuality as a mere instrument, a medium through which men (or boys) interact with each other. In Between Men (1985) Eve Sedgwick describes the role of a woman in a love triangle as a conduit for male relationships.¹⁹ In Benni’s case, the woman’s presence actually helps negotiate an exchange between the child narrator and his imminent (masculine) adulthood. Of course, the Bildungsroman, or any coming-of-age story, will nearly always have such an initiation process involving an encounter with the opposite sex, the cultural assumption being that one’s own mature identity cannot be formed if it is not partially defined by sexual experience. Tellingly, Benjamin thinks first of Janosch, then his father while copulating with Marie. In a way, Janosch is even more present than the girl in the sex act, since his advice and opinions on the subject run through Benjamin’s head the entire time. As the episode draws to a close, Benjamin himself seems to grasp that the point of ‘nailing’ Marie was for his own development and otherwise turned his stomach. Indeed, Kiepenheuer & Witsch seized this very passage, quoted above, for the back cover of their paperback edition. In her analysis, Sedgwick presents sex with a woman as the necessary risk a man must take, a journey into the abyss, in the course of the odyssey towards the club of manhood.²⁰ Benni’s narrative traces the same trajectory.

Der Vogel ist ein Rabe Lebert’s second novel, Der Vogel ist ein Rabe [The Bird is a Raven], similarly follows a group of young men on the verge of falling apart, both physically and mentally. The nascent aggression toward women and focus on male friendship and isolation in Crazy have progressed into full-blown violence and despair. Vogel is structured with a framing tale in which two young men, this time in their late teens and early twenties, ride the overnight train from Munich to Berlin. Paul, the narrator, listens to Henry’s extended monologue about the events which have

19 Eve K. Sedgwick, Between Men. English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 20 See Sedgwick, Between Men, pp. 28–48.

132 

 Molly Knight

led to his boarding the train for an unknown Berlin. Paul keeps his own story to himself until he is arrested upon exiting the train at Zoologischer Garten. Both men’s lives have been destroyed by a violent outburst, brought on by the frustrated love for a cruel woman. Whereas in Crazy Benjamin’s dealings with unreliable women lead him to close himself off in an even harder shell, in Vogel Paul’s obsession and subsequent disillusionment with a high-end prostitute ultimately drive him to kill her. As in Crazy, women embody the greatest desire, challenge and enemy to the two protagonists in Vogel. Both Henry and Paul suffer from rejection at the hands of idealized women, which makes them feel profoundly outcast from society. Paul introduces this idealization/disillusionment process by describing, with bitterness, the apparently widespread perception that the women of Berlin are incomparable: Die Luft [in Berlin] ist keine Luft. Sie enthält Goldstaub […]. Und die Mädchen! Sie sind unfassbar! [...]. Man merkt, dass sie schon tierisch viel Goldstaub eingeatmet haben. Aber das alles stimmte nicht wirklich. Ich meine, die Mädchen […] waren tatsächlich unfassbar. Jedoch atmeten sie keinen Goldstaub. [The air [in Berlin] isn’t air. It contains gold dust […]. And the girls! They’re untouchable! [...]. You see that they’ve already inhaled an awful lot of gold dust. But that wasn’t really true. I mean, the girls […] really were untouchable. In any case they didn’t breathe gold dust.]²¹

Henry likewise directly identifies his greatest problem as girls and describes the painful experience of watching them at a school dance like a voyeur, excluded from enjoying their perfection: ‘Und die Mädchen sahen alle so toll aus. Als ob sie leuchten würden. Und ihr Geruch war, als wären sie kurz bevor sie auf den Ball kamen, in einem anderen Universum, in einer anderen Welt […] ich stand immer da und war dem allem so fern’ [And the girls all looked so great. As if they were glowing. And their scent was as if just before they came to the dance they’d been in another universe, another world (…) I always stood there and was so far from them all].²² His response to this otherworldly unattainability is hatred; all at once the celestial creatures become base ones, ridiculous, promiscuous and cruel. Außerdem wurde ich zornig auf die Mädchen. Ich sah sie vor mir, tanzend und blöd kichernd, während die Armen ihrer verdammten Tanzpartner sie umschlingen und Brüste quetschen. Ich dachte, die Mädchen sind gar nicht die wunderbaren Geschöpfe, so wie ich

21 Benjamin Lebert, Der Vogel ist ein Rabe (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2003), p. 9. 22 Lebert, Vogel, p. 17.

Bodily Harm: Pop Masculinity in Benjamin Lebert’s Crazy and Der Vogel ist ein Rabe 

 133

sie mir vorstellte, so zart und feinfühlig und weich und verletzlich. Um die man sich immer gut kümmern muss und alles. Die Mädchen sind Bastarde. Die genau wissen, was sie einem antun. [Aside from this I was angry at the girls. I saw them before me, dancing and giggling like idiots, while the arms of their dance partners circled them and mashed their breasts. I thought, girls are not at all the wonderful creatures I had imagined, so tender and sensitive and soft and vulnerable. That you have to always take good care of and everything. Girls are bastards. Who know exactly what they’re doing to you.]²³

The rhetoric of anger hits a fever pitch when Henry confides in Paul that he longs for girls more than anything else in the world, and yet ‘dass ich sie gleichzeitig auf die brutalste Weise umbringen möchte. Alle’ [that I would simultaneously like to kill them in the most brutal way. All of them]. This statement will prove ironic when we discover that Paul has done exactly this to a woman who rejected him.²⁴ Paul’s story intensifies Henry’s, providing an exaggerated version of the same tragedy in which a man glorifies a woman, only to discover, as she rejects him, that she is but flesh and blood and cannot redeem him from his isolation and fear. For Paul, this glorification followed by disillusionment happens as he professes his love to Mandy, the prostitute of whom he had previously said, ‘Wenn ich mit ihr zusammen bin, wird die Dunkelheit nie wieder bedrohlich sein. Und ich wollte sie auf der Stelle ficken. So ficken, bis es nichts mehr zu ficken gab’ [When I am with her, the darkness will never be threatening again. And I wanted to fuck her on the spot. Fuck her until there was nothing more to fuck].²⁵ Already he reveals his dangerous confusion of redemptive love, sex and violence: ‘fucking’ to the point of oblivion is his immediate response to a feeling of excessive attachment and the possibility of redemption. The theme continues in his proclamation to Mandy: Du bist das Leuchtendste, das mir je in meinem Leben begegnet ist. Und obwohl mich so tiefe Nacht umgibt, bringst du mich in dem Moment, in dem du auftrittst, ebenfalls zum Leuchten. Und das ist nicht nur jetzt so. Das wird immer so sein. Wir gehören zusammen. Ich werde alles für dich tun […] und es wird keine Nacht mehr geben. Nie mehr. [You are the most luminous thing that I have ever encountered in my life. And although deep night surrounds me, in the moment you appear you make me glow, too. And that isn’t just so now. That will always be so. We belong together. I will do everything for you (…) and there will be no more night anymore. Never.]²⁶

23 Ibid., p. 18. 24 Ibid., p. 70 25 Ibid., p. 122. 26 Ibid., p. 133.

134 

 Molly Knight

Mandy’s response is ‘entgeistert’ [dumbfounded]; she scoffs, complains that she ‘frier[t sich] den Arsch ab, und du redest so einen Mist’ [is freezing her ass off and you’re spouting this bullshit].²⁷ Then she rejects him, enacting the soldier male’s greatest fear by telling him that a woman in her position could find a much better suitor, someone with money and fame rather than a young student like Paul. The only way to remove the evidence of this disillusionment and survive the damage to the exoskeleton is to reduce the woman to less than flesh and blood, i. e. to kill her. As Theweleit puts it: It’s as if two male compulsions were tearing at the women with equal strength. One is trying to push them away, to keep them at arm’s length (defence); the other wants to penetrate them, to have them very near. Both compulsions seem to find satisfaction in the act of killing, where the man pushes the woman far away (takes her life), and gets very close to her (penetrates her with a bullet, stab wound, club, etc.) […]. Once she has lost all that and is reduced to a pulp, a shapeless, bloody mass, the man can breathe a sigh of relief.²⁸

Paul returns to the bordello and asks to speak with Mandy one more time. She takes him upstairs to a bedroom, crosses her legs and utters an exasperated final word: ‘Und?’ [Well?]. Paul strangles her and leaves, fortifying himself with a glass of champagne on the way out. No longer can Mandy pass judgment and threaten his masculine identity. Small and birdlike (the ‘Vogel’ of the title), Henry suffers from a disability of sorts which seems to affect him only in the proximity of women: when nervous, he sweats profusely, has nosebleeds and suffers from excessive diarrhoea. This condition underlines Henry’s role as a sexual outsider, a victim of the women who cause his symptoms and are disgusted by them. It also serves as a vivid embodiment of the filthy flood in the text. At one point, Henry even imagines a great flood of his own excrement and blood: Manchmal […] hatte ich das Gefühl, alles, was ich in der letzten Zeit bei meinen Durchfällen rausgeschissen hatte, sämtliches Blut, das ich durchs Nasenbluten in letzter Zeit verloren hatte, hätte sich irgendwo gesammelt und würde nun in einer riesigen Welle über mich und alle Leute im Buchladen schwappen. [Sometimes (…) I had the feeling that everything I had shat out during my recent episodes of diarrhoea, all the blood that I had recently lost through nosebleeds, had collected somewhere and would now wash over me and all the people in the bookstore.]²⁹

27 Ibid., p. 133–34. 28 Theweleit, Male Fantasies, p. 196. 29 Lebert, Vogel, p. 45.

Bodily Harm: Pop Masculinity in Benjamin Lebert’s Crazy and Der Vogel ist ein Rabe 

 135

As in Crazy, the men of Vogel struggle to maintain control over their bodies. Paul, though apparently more pulled together than Henry, feels nauseous and dizzy as he boards the train. When they first meet, Henry notices a brown spot in Paul’s right eye. We learn that the spot has been there for just a few days, having appeared around the time Paul strangled the prostitute, Mandy. In this small way, Paul, too, bears the physical marks of his pain. When Henry asks about Berlin, Paul replies: ‘Berlin... beisst einem buchstäblich Körperteile ab […]. Irgendwann werden sie ganz gefressen’ [Berlin (…) literally bites off one’s body parts (…). At some point they’re all eaten up].³⁰ Though his body may not rebel against him in visible ways, Paul nevertheless views the world from the perspective of someone who is not whole. Though both of Henry’s friends, Christine and Jens, have been diagnosed with eating disorders – she with anorexia, he with a form of emotionally-linked morbid obesity  – Henry’s narrative handles their conditions in very different ways. Jens’s excessive weight becomes an external symbol of his outsider status, his alienation from natural human interactions like sex and his lack of physical control. His weight provides the reason behind his emotional instability and his final psychotic break; more importantly, it is ostensibly because he is fat that Christine does not love him, indeed that he is despairingly lonely. In this way, Jens is actually compared more overtly to Henry in the text than to Christine. Sander Gilman provides a thought-provoking discussion of male obesity in Fat Boys. He notes that ‘the fat male body generates multiple meanings’ and can either evoke femininity and weakness or the opposite, ‘patriarchal gigantism’.³¹ Similarly, fat men can be ‘characterized as hypersexual as well as asexual’.³² Jens embodies this dualism, being at once powerful and fragile, masculine and effeminate, sex-obsessed and asexual in his unwilling celibacy. In a way, these contradictions represent all the male figures discussed here, as they can all be understood as both victims and perpetrators, feminized and hyper-masculine. And just as Lebert’s own disability provoked an overly sympathetic response from his reviewers, the reader faces a similar call to pity – and thus to identify with – the disabled male character. Whereas Jens and Henry elicit pity for their physical disorders, Christine’s illness reduces her to a sexualized cliché. Both young men are drawn to Christine for her emaciated body and emotionally lifeless quality. Her resemblance to a dead and wasted body, the fact that she exists just barely, taking up as little

30 Ibid., p. 21. 31 Sander Gilman, Fat Boys. A Slim Book (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), p. 6. 32 Gilman, Fat Boys, p. x.

136 

 Molly Knight

space as possible in both form and personality, seems to make her even more appealing and untouchable. Indeed, her illness functions only to accentuate her slightness. Henry never views her as actually sick or depicts anorexia as anything more than an expression of her fragile beauty. He notes that Christine’s illness went unnoticed at first, that she was just one of the many pretty, slender girls. When Henry and Jens notice her throughout the text, it is for her beauty, not her extreme thinness. Even further, Christine seems to have no serious problems with food, which is ever-present in the novel. In one passage, she and Jens have a debate over which is better: food or sex. Christine, of course, argues for sex, while Jens takes the side of food. When Henry confesses his love to her in the form of a note written on a napkin, the two eat pizza in his bedroom. No mention is made of Christine’s illness. As in Crazy, the desired and then disappointing women of Vogel represent modern-day incarnations of the soldier males’ ‘white woman’. Henry’s unrequited love for Christine resembles the painful crush experienced by Benjamin, only in more intense form. Christine functions as a quintessential Ice Princess, a white woman in objectified extreme. Henry obsesses over her surreal perfection and fragility, as well as her silence and stillness: Sie war sehr blass, redete wenig, hatte einen abwesenden Gesichtsausdruck. Der gehörte, wie ich später erfuhr, zu ihrer Krankheit. Sie hatte dieses Gekichere nicht, was ich bei Mädchen nicht ausstehen konnte, sie sass immer nur in einem Sessel mit nackten Füssen oder lag auf dem Sofa mit nackten Füssen. Ihre Füsse waren winzig. Sie sahen nicht aus wie Füsse, mit denen man rumläuft […] Christines Körper war makellos. [She was very pale, spoke little, had an absent facial expression. This was part of her illness, as I learned later. She didn’t have this giggle anymore that I couldn’t stand in girls, she just sat in an armchair with bare feet or lay on the sofa with bare feet. Her feet were tiny. They didn’t look like feet you walk around with (…) Christine’s body was flawless.]³³

Later he elaborates on her ‘merkwürdige Abwesenheit […] als würde sie alles ständig wie durch einen Schleier wahrnehmen […]. Es hätte ihr wahrscheinlich keine Schwierigkeiten gemacht, verschleiert zu gehen. Das hätte zu ihr gepasst’ [peculiar absentness (…) as if she were always perceiving everything through a veil (…). It probably wouldn’t have given her trouble to walk around veiled].³⁴ Essentially, the idealized Christine suggests a corpse bride, limp and lifeless in an imaginary death shroud, devoid of all free will or agency, a beautiful doll down to

33 Lebert,Vogel, pp. 19–20. 34 Ibid., pp. 60–61.

Bodily Harm: Pop Masculinity in Benjamin Lebert’s Crazy and Der Vogel ist ein Rabe 

 137

her tiny, functionless feet. Here we see the pop obsession with surface stripped of its playful and performative potential: Christine embodies the two-dimensional image of the idealized woman and in the process does violence to her physical form. This kind of insistent idealization of Christine constitutes, after all, its own form of aggression; no wonder that she rejects the advances of the two boys who seem concerned only with her ethereal perfection. And like all the women in the novel, Christine proves herself unworthy of the white fantasy projected upon her. Throughout the text, Henry mentions various aspects of Christine’s character that hint at her imminent betrayal of her admirers. He sees her as arrogant and vain, mentioning the hours she spends in front of her makeup mirror and the highheeled shoes she totters in. She has an active sex life and seems to relish telling Henry and Jens all about it: Sie berührte die eine Seite ihres Gesichtes mit der flachen Hand, als wolle sie sich fühlend der Schönheit ihres Gesichts vergewissern […] Sie genoss es sichtlich, wenn sie an einem bestimmten Punkt ihrer Erzählung bemerkte, dass uns praktisch der Speichel aus den Mündern tropfte. [She touched one side of her face with her flat hand, as if she wanted by feeling to ensure the beauty of her face (…) She visibly enjoyed it when she noticed at a certain point in her story that the drool was practically dripping from our mouths.]³⁵

This tease proves dangerous for Christine, who ultimately suffers an attack at the hands of a jealous Jens. Bruised and dishevelled from the beating, she denies Henry access to her apartment, and a male voice, presumably a boyfriend, tells him to go away. Consequently, Christine finally loses her ethereal shine and becomes the siren from which Henry must flee for his life. The white woman must not be touched, certainly not by anyone but her distant lover; once sullied, she must be reduced to a bloody pulp, a non-entity. Jens does his best to turn her insides out, as Theweleit describes, by bruising her body and also by gathering her used toiletry items from his apartment into a box, which ends up left in the stairwell of her apartment, exposed for all to see: comb, underwear, used washcloth, all evidence of her secret, repulsive humanity. The white woman who becomes the seductress risks punishment at the hands of her ‘victims’. Similarly, the prostitute Mandy appears like a vision to Paul, innocent and pure and perfect, until he returns to find her with another client; already at this point she begins to sully the whiteness of her image in his mind. As she rebuffs

35 Ibid., pp. 57–58.

138 

 Molly Knight

his advances in the street outside the brothel, the snow falls down around them, reflecting the psychological aspect of the white woman, a coldness of heart. The only remedy for this betrayal, as we have seen, is death. After the murder, the dead Mandy fulfills Paul’s fantasy again: ‘Ihr wunderschönes Gesicht […] war weiß. Und ihre Augen waren auch ganz weiß. Und ich habe sie liegen gelassen’ [Her beautiful face (…) was white. And her eyes were all white, too. And I left her lying there].³⁶ Paul is not haunted by his act of murder, but that he abandoned his beloved, now perfectly still and ‘white’ at last. Here we may fully understand Theweleit’s observation that ‘idealization, or “devivification,” is another form of killing’; in this case, it leads to a very real death.³⁷ As Theweleit has described above, the objectified woman’s literally disappearing presence in the text becomes the medium through which the boys solidify their (albeit warped) manhood – by fighting over and against her. As in Theweleit and in Crazy, the feminine threat comes not just from the rejection and judgment of a woman, but from her very body and the possibility of self-dissolution in the throes of sexual intercourse. This threat is all the more insidious because it also articulates a deep desire. As in Crazy, the two sex scenes in Vogel remain ambivalent at best. When Henry finally manages to sleep with Christine during a sleepover at Jens’s parents’ house, Jens snores in the same room, a constant reminder of his presence in the love triangle. Of course, he wakes up and discovers them in the act just as Henry climaxes, forever ruining the longed-for moment. The scene begins with Henry’s tension as he tries to sleep only a few feet from Christine’s half-naked body, a feeling that Henry describes as fear: ‘Da war ein Schrei in mir, der aber nicht rauskam. Das Aufheulen irgendeines widerlichen Geschöpfes, das in meinem Körper kauerte: ich selbst. Und ich hatte Angst’ [There was a scream within me that did not come out. The howling of some repulsive creature that cowered in my body: myself. And I was afraid].³⁸ What he fears is within him, a primal and repellent creature. Indeed, aggression and resentment quickly overtake him as he stares at Christine: ‘War ich auch zu jung, um sie zu vergewaltigen? Ich war kurz davor, sie zu packen, herumzureissen, ihr bescheuertes, wunderbares Loch in Position zu bringen und sie dann zu ficken. Egal, ob sie es wollte oder nicht’ [Was I also too young to rape her? I was just about to grab her, throw her around, bring her terrible, wonderful hole into position and then to fuck her. Whether she wanted to or not].³⁹

36 Ibid., p. 117. 37 Theweleit, Male Fantasies, p. 140. 38 Lebert,Vogel, p. 82. 39 Ibid., p. 84.

Bodily Harm: Pop Masculinity in Benjamin Lebert’s Crazy and Der Vogel ist ein Rabe 

 139

When she accepts his advances and Henry enters her, his reaction resembles Benjamin’s in Crazy: Ich zitterte. Es war, als müsste ich mich enthäuten […]. Und ich dachte, ich müsste augenblicklich Teil dieses Brodelnden werden. Mich selbst sofort auflösen […]. Langsam glitt ich in sie. Und dann endete sie. Und wir fingen an. [I trembled. It was as if I had to crawl out of my own skin (…) and then I thought I had to become a part of this feeling right this minute. Dissolve myself immediately (…). Slowly I slid into her. And then she ended. And we began.]⁴⁰

Henry feels an impulse to dissolve, to crawl out of his own skin and open his borders in a moment of total connection to a human being. But even in the moment, it is Christine who ends and becomes part of the ‘we’. And when the act is over, interrupted and spoiled by Jens, the only feeling left is disgust, from the stickiness of Henry’s underwear to the guilt brought on by Jens’s flight from the room. Later in the novel, Paul thinks back on his moment of connection with Mandy in a swimming pool, which he remembers in similar terms. Like Henry, he feels himself dissolving – ‘Mir wurde schwindelig. Ich wollte unbedingt selbst zum Wasser werden’ [I became dizzy. I wanted to become water myself]  – and like Henry his semen does not hit its mark, this time floating in the pool.⁴¹ Paul imagines the reaction of the next customer upon seeing it. Like Benni, Paul and Henry emerge from their sexual experiences, to speak with Camille Paglia, as somewhat less than when they entered.⁴² The quest for self-dissolution with the perfect woman has proven fruitless.

Conclusion This moment constitutes a major crisis in the novel, but I would argue that in the end, it is not the only one. As in Crazy, the relationships of true importance in Vogel are not between men and women, but between men. Male friendship – its potential and its difficulty – is ultimately the central theme of both of Lebert’s novels discussed here. To extend the comparison with Männerphantasien, one could view Henry and Paul, as well as Henry and Jens, as war buddies: they have

40 Ibid., pp. 86–87. 41 Ibid., p. 125. 42 Paglia, Sexual Personae, p. 13.

140 

 Molly Knight

faced a common adversary and been scarred by a common trauma. This bond, as volatile as it can be, is by far the more powerful connection in the texts compared to the limp characterizations of female characters and emotionless sexual misfires that result with them. Within Henry’s narrative, Jens serves as his soul mate; they are, as Henry puts it, ‘Leidensgenossen’ [comrades in suffering].⁴³ Both suffer from physical problems that have driven them to the edges of society, and both are painfully obsessed with a beautiful ideal of a normal life embodied by Christine. In this way, theirs is the true love of Henry’s story, and the death of their friendship the true loss, brought on as it was by Christine’s promiscuity. Henry complains that the group only functions as a trio in Jens’ mind, meaning that Jens and Henry do not spend much time together without Christine there to bind them. But this fact could also be seen from another angle: Christine’s actual function in the text is to bring the two young men together, to bring out their loneliness and insecurity and ignite their passions within the context of a socially acceptable, normal interaction: the love triangle. This use of the woman as a vessel of male-to-male communication a la Eve Sedgwick is familiar from Crazy, though here the structure becomes doubled for Paul and Henry’s friendship functions within the same confines. Henry pours his heart out to Paul ostensibly over a girl, though clearly his problems with Jens actually cause his suffering. Paul understands because he has had a similar problem with a girl, though he has had no one to share with up to this point. Perhaps this absence of male confidants focuses his rage on Mandy, allowing it to spiral out of control. As he is led away by police at the Berlin train station, Paul turns back to Henry and says, ‘ich bin eben kein Erzähler wie du’ [I’m not a storyteller like you].⁴⁴ On one level, this comment provides a sly meta-fictional moment, since of course Paul is our narrator, and builds on a previous comment by Henry, who tells Paul he would like to be the protagonist of a novel so that a host of readers would feel for him. Paul, of course, has performed this trick, since we remain unaware of his crime until the final pages of the novel. We assume him to be sane and see Henry’s adventure as the exaggerated version of his own troubled life until the tables are turned and Paul is revealed as the more disturbed of the two. But on another level, Paul’s final comment references Henry’s advantage over Paul: he talks about his feelings, manages to confide in two men and to make two friends. Paul cannot reach out; the confession we finally read comes from his internal monologue. Though from the very beginning, we know that Paul searches for a confidant. When he first meets Henry on the train, he thinks to himself, ‘Liegt

43 Lebert, Vogel, p. 46. 44 Ibid.

Bodily Harm: Pop Masculinity in Benjamin Lebert’s Crazy and Der Vogel ist ein Rabe 

 141

es an dem monotonen Dam-Dam der Räder, dass diese merkwürdige Stimmung aufkommt? Eine anonyme Vertraulichkeit. So, als träfen sich zwei unbekannte Wanderer an einem Fluss. Sie setzten sich gemeinsam hin. Sie kennen sich nicht. Alles, was sie miteinander verbindet, ist der Fluss’ [Is it because of the monotonous dam-dam sound of the wheels that this peculiar mood arises? An anonymous trust. As if two unknown wanderers met on a riverbank. They sit down together. They do not know each other. All that connects them to each other is the river].⁴⁵ The river that binds the two travellers is of course the destructive flood of female sex, their anonymity a barrier only surmountable at the treacherous banks of the dark water. In Vogel, the lone, wounded figure first introduced in Crazy continues to search for human connections, this time not just over the body of a woman, but over her bruised and dead body. In both Crazy and Vogel, damaged male protagonists use pop’s trademark attention to superficial body ideals as a means to control internal chaos. A look through the lens of Theweleit’s Männerphantasien reveals the sinister implications of the armoured pop body for the masculine identity, its interference in male friendships and its essential destruction of the female body. This continuation of an undeniably fascist mode of identity formation in a body of literature calls into question pop’s purported project, to ‘cross the border, close the gap’, and ultimately suggests that contemporary literature continues to employ a destructive network of gendered symbolism that should long since have been abandoned.⁴⁶

45 Ibid., p. 13. 46 Leslie Fiedler, Cross the Border – Close the Gap (New York: Stein & Day, 1972).

Emily Spiers

‘There’s No Lobby for Girls in Pop’: Writing the Performative Popfeminist Subject Since the early 1990s, questions pertaining to German literature’s political role and entertainment value have been hotly debated. The literary scholar Thomas Anz argues that at the time young writers were reacting to the perceived dominance of the 1968 generation, who had previously radicalized ‘the demands that literature become more socially effective even to the point of renouncing art’.¹ Calls for a ‘Neue Lesbarkeit’ [new readability] marked the equally radical attempt to liberate literature – as an aesthetically autonomous art form – from all social demands.² German Popliteratur features as part of the landscape of post-reunification ‘Neue Lesbarkeit’, but this latter term does not capture the full significance of pop, a designation which has been fiercely contested since its introduction to the German literary context in the 1960s.³ The notion of ‘popular’ suggested by its prefix fails to define the term satisfactorily and pop’s heterogeneous formal nature precludes the dominance of one single style.⁴ Heinrich Kaulen contends that pop literature’s most clear-cut characteristic is its focus on the everyday life of adolescents and young adults, as well as the pop culture that shapes them, narrated from the protagonists’ perspective.⁵ Importantly, Kerstin Gleba and Eckhard Schumacher understand the ‘reality’ of these everyday lives, rendered in a mimetic neo-realistic style, as medialized; pop authors eschew any notion of authenticity residing beyond media and performance (‘Inszenierung’).⁶ Gleba and Schumacher argue that pop should be defined by its very resistance to defi-

1 Thomas Anz, ‘Generationenkonstrukte: Zu ihrer Konjunktur nach 1989’, in Konkurrenzen, Konflikte, Kontinuitäten: Generationenfragen in der Literatur seit 1990, ed. by Andrea Geier and Jan Süselbeck (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2009), pp. 16–29 (p. 25). 2 Ibid. 3 See Tom Holert and Mark Terkessidis, Mainstream der Minderheiten. Pop in der Kontrollgesellschaft (Berlin: ID-Verlag, 1996), cited in Thomas Ernst, Popliteratur (Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 2001), p.  58; many volumes on pop literature trace the origins of German pop back to post-1968 beat and underground movements, mentioning authors like Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Hubert Fichte and Peter Handke. 4 Heinrich Kaulen, ‘Popliteratur als Generationsphänomen. Jugendliche Lebenswelten im Spiegel der Popliteratur der 1990er Jahre’, in Geier and Süselbeck, pp. 138–41. 5 Kaulen, ‘Popliteratur als Generationsphänomen’, pp. 142–43. 6 Kerstin Gleba and Eckhard Schumacher, ‘Vorwort’, in Pop seit 1964, ed. by Kerstin Gleba and Eckhard Schumacher (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2007), pp. 11–14 (pp. 11–12).

144 

 Emily Spiers

nition, for it is to be understood, above all, as ‘a strategy, a pose, an attitude’.⁷ For them, as for Kaulen and pop theorist Moritz Baßler, pop literature’s strategy is to operate with an ‘Ästhetik der Ambivalenz’ [aesthetic of ambivalence] drawing on material from the pop-cultural archive in order to play with the procedures of signification.⁸ This view dovetails with Jörgen Schäfer’s contention that pop literature is conceptually situated exactly at the juncture of indifference located between social criticism and affirmation.⁹ Yet readings of pop literature which stress its scepticism towards authenticity, its attitude or political ambivalence fail to do justice to the overtly political dimension inherent in recent pop writing by women. As Margaret McCarthy argues: [I]f one considers the kinds of gendered variations that often fall outside of official histories […], it becomes clear that some writers clearly do have larger aims in mind when they tamper with signifying processes: they seek to expose or even blunt the effects of traditional social divisions.¹⁰

Indeed when Kerstin Grether’s pop novel, Zuckerbabys [Sugar Babies], was published in 2004, it was welcomed by critics for its unflinching portrayal of young women’s complex desires within a discourse dominated by male perspectives.¹¹ The journalist Elke Buhr claims Zuckerbabys compensates for the numerous portrayals of young men’s troubled lives constituting the bulk of post-reunification pop-literary productions.¹² She celebrates Grether’s provision of a subjective voice to a demographic of young women who otherwise feature as the objects of mass

7 Ibid. 8 Kaulen, ‘Popliteratur als Generationsphänomen’, p. 141. 9 Jörgen Schäfer, cited in Thomas Ernst, Popliteratur, p. 7. 10 Margaret McCarthy, ‘Feminism and Generational Conflicts in Alexa Hennig von Lange’s Relax, Elke Naters’s Lügen, and Charlotte Roche’s Feuchtgebiete’, Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature, 35.1 (2011), 56–73 (pp. 56–57). 11 Elke Buhr, ‘Weil ich ein Mädchen bin’. Buhr employs the word ‘Mädchen’ [girls] here and not ‘young women’. The term has been used increasingly in popular discourse by and about young women up to the age of thirty or more (see the titles of the popfeminist texts discussed later). The word becomes a rhetorical marker employed, not unproblematically, to distinguish these young women from ‘Frauen’ and to evade that word’s connotations, in particular the connection with the ‘Frauenbewegung’ [Women’s Movement] or the second-wave. 12 Recent examples of scholarly engagement with pop literature do much to confirm  – and reproduce – the gender-based exclusions operating within pop to which Buhr alludes. See for example Moritz Baßler, Der deutsche Pop-Roman. Die neuen Archivisten (Munich: Beck, 2002). Baßler’s is not the only pop volume to feature almost exclusively men.

‘There’s No Lobby for Girls in Pop’: Writing the Performative Popfeminist Subject 

 145

popular culture. The author Thomas Meinecke has observed that a woman who writes ‘is in fact already pop; that’s the problem. By writing, she puts herself out there as the object of representation’.¹³ Here Meinecke alludes to gendered critical practices which neglect the text under discussion in favour of an assessment of the author herself, her gender and personal appearance.¹⁴ But his comment also reflects a wider cultural prejudice concerning women’s ready compliance with mass cultural imperatives, as well as attributing a lack of ironic detachment from the status quo to women pop authors. Most importantly, however, his comment gestures towards the processes that ensue when the female pop writer, upon taking up the pen, assumes the position of subject, as well as object, of mass culture. Given the gender dynamics at play when women assume authority, pop writing by women always manifests a political dimension. For this reason, reading Zuckerbabys and Charlotte Roche’s Feuchtgebiete [Wetlands] (2008) in relation to recent developments in German feminism provides greater insight than employing a theoretical framework which discounts the political in pop. Since the mid-2000s a number of essayistic and literary pop texts have been published by young women in German and Anglo-American contexts which purport to reconfigure feminism for a new generation. The proliferation of such volumes in Germany is particularly remarkable: Sonja Eismann’s edited collection of essays Hot Topic. Popfeminismus Heute [Hot Topic. Popfeminism Today] (2007), Mirja Stöcker’s edited volume Das F-Wort. Feminismus ist sexy [The F-word. Feminism is Sexy] (2007), Susanne Klingner, Meredith Haaf and Barbara Streidl’s Wir Alpha-Mädchen. Warum Feminismus das Leben schöner macht [We Alpha Girls. Why Feminism Makes Life More Beautiful] (2008) and Elisabeth Raether and Jana Hensel’s Neue deutsche Mädchen [New German Girls] (2008). While its pop credentials are questionable, Thea Dorn’s Die neue F-Klasse. Wie die Zukunft von Frauen gemacht wird [The New F-Class. How the Future is Made by Women] (2006) is also an important feature of the new German feminist landscape. These authors, journalists and freelance writers have often been involved in the development of online feminist blogs, networks and zines. Their offline texts, in particular, have elicited widespread public debate concerning the continued relevance of feminist thinking for young women in the first decade of the new millennium and beyond, a period already accustomed to defining itself in postfeminist terms. While not all of the authors self-identify as ‘popfeminist’, their

13 Thomas Meinecke in conversation with Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre, Eckhard Schumacher and Kerstin Gleba, ‘Protokoll eines Gesprächs’, in Gleba and Schumacher, Pop seit 1964, pp. 365– 99 (p. 366). 14 Gleba, ‘Protokoll eines Gesprächs’, p. 365.

146 

 Emily Spiers

texts share a mode of engagement and self-presentation, as well as thematic concerns, which potentially fit beneath the umbrella term ‘pop’. The only writer to apply the word popfeminism directly to her own work, Sonja Eismann’s attitude towards pop is celebratory yet nevertheless critical. She seeks to challenge the misogynist tendencies which thrive in pop-cultural discourse and to bring feminism to a completely different audience.¹⁵ However, she argues that feminism must not be compromised in order to make it palatable to pop. Instead, feminism should permeate pop culture in order to transform it.¹⁶ Eismann contends that German feminism’s current encounter with pop culture enables German women to catch-up with Anglo-American feminism of the 1990s, dubbed the thirdwave.¹⁷ These German texts thus transcend their domestic context by engaging with the global channels of popular culture and wider Western feminist discourse. Yet global discourses generate important local differences as they move across cultural contexts at various temporal rates. German popfeminism, for example, becomes inscribed with specific characteristics as a result of its particular socioeconomic and cultural context, a context informed since the mid-1990s by the on-going demography debate, widespread public confrontation with notions of national identity arising from the Wende, globalization, the rise of neoliberalism and immigration.¹⁸ German popfeminists combine colloquial, often sexualized language peppered with Anglicisms. This language functions to justify their arguments in terms of their relevance for women between fifteen and thirty-five years old, who have been socialized in a popular culture saturated by this language. Their packaging is brightly designed, often featuring stylized images of the female form; these images function as a visual clue to the texts’ often playful approach towards contemporary body politics, where the vicissitudes of consumer fashion play a pivotal role in self-fashioning and identity performance. Performance functions as a key concept in popfeminism, attesting to the influence of Anglo-American third-wave feminism – and Judith Butler, in particu-

15 Sonja Eismann, ‘Einleitung’, in Hot Topic. Popfeminismus heute, ed. by Sonja Eismann (Mainz: Ventil, 2007), pp. 9–12 (p. 10). Eismann uses the term ‘RezipientInnen’ [audience] with its orthographical emphasis on the feminine plural. This strategy highlights her willingness to express continuity with earlier feminist generations even on a linguistic level. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., pp. 10–11. Eismann mentions the U.S. third-wave feminist publications Bitch and Bust in particular. 18 For a comprehensive discussion of these culturally-specific factors, see Hester Baer, ‘German Feminism in the Age of Neoliberalism. Jana Hensel and Elisabeth Raether’s Neue deutsche Mädchen’, German Studies Review, 35.2 (May 2012), 355–74 (p. 364).

‘There’s No Lobby for Girls in Pop’: Writing the Performative Popfeminist Subject 

 147

lar – on recent German feminism. Yet popfeminism emerges from a configuration of overlapping and, at times, antagonistic theoretical and cultural influences: not only third-wave feminism, gender theory and pop culture, but also postfeminism, neoliberalism and second-wave feminism. Popfeminists profit, for example, from Butler’s notion of parodic performance developed in Gender Trouble (1990) which emerges as a potentially subversive tool for denaturalizing normative identity categories. In this important work, Butler refers to the way in which transvestism, or drag, parodies the concept of an ‘original’, that is, ‘natural’, sex and gender: ‘[i]n imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as its contingency’.¹⁹ The scholar Katja Kauer sees popfeminism’s understanding of performativity dovetailing both with Butler’s concept of parody and the pop aesthetic, i. e. the notion of a ‘natural’ female identity is displaced through ‘sampling, in other words, playing with various classic conceptions of femininity that have been sustained through music, television and consumer products’.²⁰ This ironic sampling of feminine models from the pop cultural archive connotes one popfeminist strategy for reclaiming agency in the face of mass culture’s objectification of women. However, recourse to parody is potentially problematic due to the way parodic critique or subversion may be absorbed and disarmed by postfeminism. The sense that feminism may now be taken for granted enables the deployment of supposedly parodic performances of conservative gendered identity, which deny their normative function even as they enact it. Postfeminism, rather like ‘postmodernism’ or ‘pop’, functions as an umbrella term employed variously along intersecting and often contradictory ideological axes. Generally, however, postfeminism ‘encompasses a set of assumptions, widely disseminated within popular media forms, having to do with the “pastness” of feminism, whether that supposed pastness is merely noted, mourned, or celebrated’.²¹ Angela McRobbie argues that aspects of popular culture are insidiously effective with regard to the process of undermining feminist achievements while concurrently giving the impression that their intentions are good and their engagement well-informed.²²

19 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 3rd edn. (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 187. 20 Katja Kauer, Popfeminismus! Fragezeichen! Eine Einführung (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2009), p. 94. 21 Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, ‘Introduction: Feminist Politics and Postfeminist Culture’, in Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture, ed. by Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra (London: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 1–25 (p. 1). 22 Angela McRobbie, ‘Postfeminism and Popular Culture’, in Tasker and Negra, pp.  27–39 (p. 27).

148 

 Emily Spiers

On the one hand, feminist values have been assimilated across a variety of institutions, demonstrating them to be politically correct and socially progressive.²³ On the other, McRobbie identifies multiple sites within popular culture where the inconspicuous process of undermining feminism becomes evident.²⁴ Referring to media representations of women adopting sexually objectifying roles seemingly out of choice, she argues that these forms of communication take ‘feminism into account by showing it to be a thing of the past, by provocatively “enacting sexism” while at the same time playing with those debates in film theory about women as the object of the gaze and even with female desire’.²⁵ What McRobbie finds problematic is that the young female viewer, who is ‘educated in irony and visually literate’, is not angered by such mobilizations of sexism. In fact, she ‘appreciates its layers of meaning; she “gets the joke”’.²⁶ McRobbie also stresses the importance of viewing this process in the context of Western women’s participation as active consumers of media and the products media promotes combined with the growing belief that feminism does not generate female achievement but that ‘female individualism’ does.²⁷ The advertisements McRobbie describes suggest a return to a traditional paradigm for male viewers, while, for women, ‘what is proposed is a movement beyond feminism to a more comfortable zone where women are now free to choose for themselves’.²⁸ Indeed, scholar Imelda Whelehan argues that: [A]t the beginning of the new millennium, feminists have been positioned as the cultural oppressors of ‘normal’ women against which a younger generation of ‘new’ feminists offers as antidote a marked individualistic kind of ‘radicalism’. This radicalism pretends the power of self-definition is all about being ‘in control’ and ‘making choices’, regardless, it seems, of who controls the ‘choices’ available. Being ‘in control’ became one of the catchwords of the nineties in the parlance of women’s magazines, but control always seemed to be about the right to consume and display oneself to best effect.²⁹

23 Ibid., p. 30. 24 Ibid., p. 32. 25 Ibid. Here, McRobbie is referring to the pivotal work of Laura Mulvey and the concept of the ‘male gaze’, developed in Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989). 26 McRobbie, ‘Postfeminism and Popular Culture’, p. 33. 27 Ibid., p. 32. 28 Ibid., p. 33. 29 Imelda Whelehan, Overloaded. Popular Culture and the Future of Feminism (London: Women’s Press, 2000), pp. 3–4.

‘There’s No Lobby for Girls in Pop’: Writing the Performative Popfeminist Subject 

 149

As Whelehan implies, the rise of postfeminism as a concept coincided with what has been called ‘the moment of definitive self-critique in feminist theory’ when new groups of feminist thinkers began challenging the representational claims of second-wave feminism.³⁰ Popfeminists continue this critique of the second-wave by acknowledging identity’s plurality and declaring any possible notion of a fixed female or feminist identity obsolete.³¹ In her contribution to the collection of essays gathered under the title Das F-Wort. Feminismus ist sexy, Jenny Warnecke locates the origins of twenty-first-century feminist thinking in Butler’s account of the incoherent, multifaceted subject. She contends that Butler’s work provides a more efficacious model for conceptualizing identity and feminist critique than second-wave universalism (the tendency to reduce all women to a single category, ‘woman’): Judith Butler disrupted this ‘us’ sensibility by questioning the subject category “woman” and then dismantling it in philosophical terms. In its place, she recommended a politics of alliances and networks. Initiatives emerge from a mutual problem and not from a putative gender identity.³²

In this excerpt, Warnecke oversimplifies Butler’s thinking. Rather than dismantling the category of ‘woman’, Butler argues that the subject is always already constituted and that one of the discursively produced convergences of identity is gender. Reluctant even to mention the word ‘subject’ in relation to current feminist thinking, Warnecke replaces it with the impersonal plural ‘initiatives’, removing any human agent from the sentence’s grammatical structure. Popfeminist texts often claim to see no value in the strategic deployment of the feminist ‘we’, often attributing that shift to Butlerian thinking. Yet Butler in fact repeatedly acknowledges the strategic value of the feminist ‘we/us’, even whilst stressing its ‘phantasmatic’ nature.³³ On this point, the authors of Wir Alpha-Mädchen and Neue deutsche Mädchen promulgate vigorous antagonism towards German second-wave feminism, dubbed ‘Altfeminismus’ [old-feminism], and its figurehead Alice Schwarzer. In highly personal terms, they reject her allegedly universalizing rhetoric, contending that she remains ignorant of important generational differences.³⁴ Importantly, however, popfeminist rhetoric often undercuts the authors’

30 McRobbie, ‘Postfeminism and Popular Culture’, p. 29. 31 Kauer, Popfeminismus!, p. 94. 32 Jenny Warnecke, ‘‟Das ist mir zu extrem!” Eine Generationen-Studie’, in Das F-Wort. Feminismus ist sexy, ed. by Mirja Stöcker (Königstein/Taunus: Ulrike Helmer, 2007), pp. 23–40 (p. 36). 33 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 194. 34 Meredith Haaf, Susanne Klingner and Barbara Streidl, Wir Alpha-Mädchen. Warum Feminismus das Leben schöner macht (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 2008), p. 15 and pp. 194–96; Jana

150 

 Emily Spiers

explicit intentions and makes the very representational claims they seek to critique (Wir Alpha-Mädchen, for example), simultaneously eliding important differences between women in terms of class, ethnicity, age and physical ability.³⁵ Their written interventions often draw on the language of second-wave feminist discourse and their conviction that women must both create and safeguard their own opportunities when it comes to their appearance, sexuality, careers, reproduction and child care gestures to a belief that feminist identity and solidarity can indeed be invoked to some extent.³⁶ In contrast, Sonja Eismann and Kerstin Grether demonstrate explicit willingness to build bridges between the second-wave and contemporary forms of feminism. Eismann states that ‘ultimately, the private is still political’, a comment which echoes one of the main tenets of second-wave feminism.³⁷ The sentiment itself also resonates with Kerstin Grether’s strategy in Zuckerbabys when she links her protagonist’s eating disorder with relentless exposure to media images of thin women. Yet popfeminists like Charlotte Roche and the alpha girls prize individual sexual self-expression and highlight the importance of a woman’s right to choose how she modifies her body, values some popfeminists perceive as lacking in second-wave feminism. As a result, these popfeminists unwittingly reproduce postfeminist media portrayals configuring (second-wave) feminists as ‘ugly, anti-fun, anti-men, lacking a sense of irony and unsexy’ in their attempts to rehabilitate feminism in the popular imagination.³⁸ Few popfeminists acknowledge that popular culture’s prohibitively negative attitude towards second-wave feminism, which they themselves reinforce, is part of the same paradigm which exerts pressure upon young women to buy products which allow them to look or act according to prescribed conceptions of contemporary sexualized femininity. Their often unreflecting sex-positivism, permissive body politics and untroubled affirmation of consumerism thus often function to re-inscribe the very cultural pressures they themselves critique. Indeed, with the exception of Dorn’s Die neue F-Klasse, which focuses predominantly on participants’ professional achievements, the issue of

Hensel and Elisabeth Raether, Neue deutsche Mädchen (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt , 2008), pp. 14–15 and pp. 21–26. 35 For an excellent discussion of German popfeminism’s paradoxical relationship with the rhetoric of the second-wave, as well as some popfeminist texts’ unreflecting elitism, see Christina Scharff, Repudiating Feminism. Young Women in a Neoliberal World (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). 36 Katja Kauer argues that Neue deutsche Mädchen signals a return to a reflective, autobiographical narrative style which echoes the written interventions of many second-wave writers. See Kauer, Popfeminismus!, p. 94. 37 Eismann, Hot Topic, p. 12. 38 Haaf, Klingner and Streidl, Wir Alpha-Mädchen, p. 13.

‘There’s No Lobby for Girls in Pop’: Writing the Performative Popfeminist Subject 

 151

body politics tends to dominate the texts.³⁹ This echoes Whelehan’s observation that new feminist notions of agency and self-definition appear entangled in the question of how women display themselves. This issue foregrounds, consciously or not, mainstream mass-media culture’s preoccupation with and objectification of the (sexualized) female form and how these undergird late-capitalist consumer culture. The potential implications of this focus on the female body, including eating disorders, self-harm and extreme body modification, become the focus of the novels I discuss. Keen to disassociate themselves from the perceived proscriptions of second-wave feminism, Wir Alpha-Mädchen, Neue deutsche Mädchen and Die neue F-Klasse appeal to younger women readers by celebrating individualism and underscoring women’s autonomy. These volumes, in particular, subscribe to a particularly egregious form of neoliberal individualism, in which an entrepreneurial spirit undergirded by ultimate freedom of (consumer) choice in all areas of life displaces collective and coalitional politics.⁴⁰ In her introduction, Thea Dorn asks: ‘Why not admit that this book doesn’t prioritize women’s solidarity at all costs? Rather, it’s about a certain class of women who belong there solely because of what they have achieved and experienced individually, not because of any privileged background’.⁴¹ By focusing on the professional lives of interviewees, however, Dorn’s text does at least gesture critically towards inequalities in the wider social field. The ‘Alpha’ and ‛Neue deutsche Mädchen’ initially engage critically with the neoliberal-individualist climate that has produced ‘an army of lone female fighters’.⁴² Raether even broaches the matter of the social conditions that women face, arguing that they are not any less prevalent just because some women are in a position to rise above them.⁴³ However, they undermine their own critique by perpetually returning to an individualistic logic that dictates that ‘in the end, though, every woman has to decide for herself’.⁴⁴ In this way, these texts under-

39 Dorn interviews a selection of women from various professional fields, from media personality and writer Charlotte Roche to politician and author Silvia Koch-Mehrin, who published Schwestern. Streitschrift für einen neuen Feminismus (2007), to the humanitarian worker Vera Bohle and professional climber Ines Papert. 40 See Baer’s discussion of the relationship between the socioeconomic context and German popfeminism in ‘German Feminism in the Age of Neoliberalism’, pp. 358–61. 41 Thea Dorn, ‘Was bisher geschah …’, in Thea Dorn, Die neue F-Klasse. Wie die Zukunft von Frauen gemacht wird (Munich: Piper, 2006), pp. 9–39 (p. 37). 42 See Haaf, Klingner and Streidl, Wir Alpha-Mädchen, pp. 19, 197. 43 Raether, in Hensel and Raether, pp. 72–73. 44 Haaf, Klingner and Streidl, Wir Alpha-Mädchen, p. 45.

152 

 Emily Spiers

estimate the impact of socioeconomic and commercial forces on their brand of feminism. Most troubling, however, is the new alpha girls’ failure to explicitly confront their own privileged position (they are thirty-something, white, middle class, able bodied and heterosexual), leading them to disregard important differences between women in terms of class, age, ethnicity, sexuality and physical ability and how those forces impinge upon agency. With this background in mind, I now turn to a discussion of two contemporary pop novels, Kerstin Grether’s Zuckerbabys and Charlotte Roche’s Feuchtgebiete. These novels engage with themes present in the popfeminist volumes, including the question of asserting selfhood against a spectrum of available yet insufficient contemporary female identities, as well as the role of the corporeal in identity performance. Grether and Roche endeavour to write the popfeminist subject in all its complexity and ambiguity, their novels functioning on a representational level as a testing ground for some of the assertions made by other popfeminists. By this I mean that they present the reader with young female protagonists who seek to locate a sense of identity and agency despite social pressures. But the novels, which are both first-person narratives, also introduce the question of individual psychology into the complex nexus of socio-cultural, familial and corporeal factors impinging upon selfhood, an aspect which highlights the tension between feminist critique and narratives of neoliberal individualism and freedom of choice. Their thematic focus on eating disorders and other self-destructive behaviours critically probes the possibility of female agency in the face of mass cultural imperatives and asks after the efficacy of performance as a strategy for re-signifying gender in popular culture.⁴⁵

‘Mein Zentrum’ [My Centre]. Charlotte Roche’s Feuchtgebiete Both Charlotte Roche and Kerstin Grether worked for many years in pop media before writing their first novels. Roche gained notoriety as a long-standing presenter on the German music channel Viva and Grether worked for many years as a journalist for Spex, Intro and frieze. Roche’s internationally successful début

45 Hester Baer also draws on the Butlerian notion of re-signification in her discussion of German popfeminism, contending that despite their shortcomings popfeminist texts warrant serious consideration for their attempts to ‘re-signify feminism’ for the Berlin Generation. See Baer, ‘German Feminism in the Age of Neoliberalism’.

‘There’s No Lobby for Girls in Pop’: Writing the Performative Popfeminist Subject 

 153

Feuchtgebiete (2008) was both praised and criticized by reviewers for its subversive take on personal-hygiene and beauty practices directed at women. The novel depicts the experiences and inner-thoughts of 18-year-old Helen Memel during her stay on a proctology ward. An infected anal wound, incurred when trying to shave around her haemorrhoids, instigates her admission to hospital. Narrated in a humorous, first-person confessional mode, the novel allows access to Helen’s consciousness, her memories, desires and insecurities. Flashbacks focus in graphic detail on her past sexual exploits, drug and alcohol excesses and transgressions of socially-sanctioned hygiene norms. Katja Kauer argues for Feuchtgebiete’s pop-literary status despite the fact that it features a fabricated plot written by an adult who is undertaking a popfeminist provocation through the naïve voice of an eighteen year old.⁴⁶ Kauer argues that Roche’s novel is pop-literary, however, because her portrayal occurs without any moralizing or critical subtext.⁴⁷ Roche certainly depicts Helen’s hygiene habits and sexual proclivities non-judgementally, but the novel’s wider critical dimension should not be ignored. The journalist Jenni Zylka, for example, called the novel a ‘mucus-porn against hygiene fanaticism’.⁴⁸ Scholar Carrie Smith-Prei contends that Feuchtgebiete, indeed German popfeminism in general, ‘positively embraces the negatively coded female body, whether raunchy, pornographic, sick, injured, or otherwise unruly’.⁴⁹ In an interview with the British press in 2009, the author herself contends that: The feminist angle to the book is this: I think women, now, have to have this clean, sexy, presentation side to their body. At any time, you must be available for sex, and you can just strip naked and look super. That’s a high pressure, and the joke in this book is saying, ‘Women shit, too, you know’.⁵⁰

Thus, Helen subverts conventional notions of feminine beauty standards, ‘testing’ new lovers by forcing them to physically negotiate her haemorrhoids, which she

46 Kauer, Popfeminismus!, p. 123. 47 Ibid. 48 Jenni Zylka, ‘Schleimporno gegen Hygienezwang’, Die Tageszeitung, 28 February 2008 (http://www.taz.de/!13560/). 49 Carrie Smith-Prei, ‘‟Knaller Sex für alle”: Popfeminist Body Politics in Lady Bitch Ray, Charlotte Roche, and Sarah Kuttner’, Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature, 35.1 (2011), 18–39 (p. 18). 50 Charlotte Roche, in Ed Caesar, ‘Charlotte Roche is an Unlikely Shock Artist’, Timesonline, 1 February 2009 (http://www.edcaesar.co.uk/article.php?article_id=9).

154 

 Emily Spiers

linguistically redefines as her ‘Blumenkohl’ [cauliflower].⁵¹ In one parodic rendition of femininity, Helen dabs her own vaginal secretions behind her ears like perfume.⁵² Importantly, then, Helen does not reject all forms of body modification per se – she revels in her mascara-encrusted eyelashes and daubs her vagina in make-up. Instead, Roche de-naturalizes normative beauty practices by depicting exaggerated or non-standard manifestations of them. Yet Roche demonstrates how Helen remains susceptible to the pressures, like shaving, that the author seeks to criticize. Thus, in Helen, Roche creates a paradoxical character allegedly intended to represent her ‘brave, freed alter-ego’, but who simultaneously reacts to social pressure.⁵³ According to Nina Power, Helen ‘promises a certain kind of liberation’.⁵⁴ Her qualification gestures towards the tensions inherent in Roche’s novel. Helen at first appears to be a self-assured agent, capable of revelling in playful body performances at will. She narrates acts of sexual self-objectification humorously and non-judgmentally. For example, in the passage where Helen recalls her ex-partner Mattes stretching her labia, securing it with eyelash curlers and taking a photograph, Helen’s complicity and the pleasure with which she observes Mattes clap his hands joyfully undercut any straightforward interpretation of the act as sexual victimization. On the other hand, the scene resonates with the images and language of violent pornography. Helen’s ‘Feuchtgebiete’ function synecdochically, replacing Helen, the person, with a ‘Loch’ [hole];⁵⁵ and her comparison of the act to the scene in A Clockwork Orange (in which the Ludovico Technique is performed upon Alex) evokes images of torture. Whether intentional or not, this scene performs a critique of neoliberal and self-fashioning narratives: to return to Butler, Helen’s belief in her role as self-fashioning agent furthers the notion that her identity performances are manufactured internally, from a sovereign subjective core, and not externally as part of the wider sexist structures which undergird what Butler calls the ‘regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality’.⁵⁶ For Butler, performance is the external fabrication, through acts, gestures or desires, of an appearance of internal ‘essence or iden-

51 Charlotte Roche, Feuchtgebiete (Berlin: Ullstein, 2009), p. 9. 52 Roche, Feuchtgebiete, pp. 19–20. 53 Charlotte Roche, in Nina Power, ‘The Dirty Girl. Nina Power Interviews Charlotte Roche’, Salon, 4 April 2009 (http://www.salon.com/2009/04/04/charlotte_roche/). 54 Nina Power, ‘The Dirty Girl’. 55 Roche, Feuchtgebiete, p. 67. 56 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 186.

‘There’s No Lobby for Girls in Pop’: Writing the Performative Popfeminist Subject 

 155

tity’; for her, performance is engendered by social contingency and is precisely not autonomous, as neoliberal self-fashioning narratives imply.⁵⁷ In an interview with Thea Dorn, however, Roche foregrounds the playful, performative aspect of sex: Every cool woman can experiment with sexual subordination […]. Some sex acts cause feminists to shriek ‘humiliating!’ immediately, whereas a woman who is confident in her sexuality doesn’t feel humiliated by them at all. It’s only those people who aren’t cool enough to see sex as a playground who need vanilla sex.⁵⁸

Roche’s insistent repetition of the keyword ‘cool’ is troubling. The term resonates tantalizingly with counter-cultural promise despite its co-option by mainstream, commercially-driven forces which regulate identity by means of hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion. These dual resonances thus elide the vital question of who sets the criteria for ‘cool’. In Feuchtgebiete, pressure inheres in understanding female sexual objectification to be ‘cool’: readers educated in postfeminist irony can congratulate themselves on avoiding the ‘Sexfeindlichkeit’ [anti-sex stance]⁵⁹ allegedly promulgated by second-wave feminists, while tradition is simultaneously restored for misogynist readers. Helen functions as a cipher for this playful new feminist subject who is cool enough, in McRobbie’s terms, to ‘get the joke’.⁶⁰ Significant, too, is Roche’s repetition of the word ‘spielen’ [play] in conjunction with transgressive sex. This playful, permissive stance is shared by the authors of Wir Alpha-Mädchen, who contend that ‘women may do whatever they like doing’, adding that contemporary feminism stands for sexual self-determination.⁶¹ Second-wave feminism viewed the concept of sexual pleasure inhering in politically incorrect, that is, masochistic practices as representative of patriarchal structures undergirding women’s subjugation, whereas Roche distinguishes between the social realm and that of private fantasy. Thus, neither Roche nor the alpha girls question how one’s choice of sexual activity might be predetermined by the regulating forces of normative heterosexuality. Butler views the disconnection of performance from contingency to be a malignant and normative tool: ‘[i]f the “cause” of desire, gesture, and act can be localized within the “self” of the actor, then the political regulations and disciplinary practices which produce that

57 Ibid. 58 Charlotte Roche, in Dorn, pp. 137–52 (p. 142). 59 Haaf, Klingner and Streidl, Wir Alpha-Mädchen, p. 66. 60 McRobbie, ‘Postfeminism and Popular Culture’, p. 33. 61 Haaf, Klingner and Streidl, Wir Alpha-Mädchen, p. 66.

156 

 Emily Spiers

ostensibly coherent identity are effectively displaced from view’.⁶² Here, Butler argues that the subject’s belief in the autonomy of its identity performances is vital for both the perpetuation and the invisibility of the public and social discourses which regulate identity. However, Roche clearly seeks to find the moment at which performances could signify differently through Helen’s parodic renditions of femininity and sexuality.⁶³ Some resonate with postfeminist re-enactments of sexism, but others, such as Helen’s habit of using vaginal secretions as perfume, escape this alignment due to their explicitly opposing misogynist narratives, in this case that female genitalia and bodily effluvia constitute objects of disgust. But the question remains whether highly individual performances such as Helen’s in fact alter anything for women in the wider social field.⁶⁴ Roche has argued for the self-empowering potential of female sexuality. She claims, for example, that sexually explicit performances by female pop artists connote a clear demonstration of power.⁶⁵ Thus, Helen’s rejection of passivity and the epicurean pleasure with which she consumes her body’s secretions like a gourmet might be construed as an expression of self-empowerment, or ‘self-guided sexual potency’.⁶⁶ After all, her body imbues her with a clear sense of identity: in moments of uncertainty, she touches her genitals, which she calls her ‘Zentrum’ [centre].⁶⁷ Her strategy of devising special names for parts of her body demonstrates, too, the drive to gain agency through linguistic control of her body. However, her language also betrays a sense of compulsion, an almost pathological desire to police the borders of her body: ‘Helen überlässt nix dem Zufall’ [Helen leaves nothing to chance].⁶⁸ This desire arises from a fundamental mistrust of her environment and other people. Helen does not like to rely on others, claiming that ‘[s]elber machen klappt am besten. Mir selbst ist am meisten zu trauen’ [d.i.y. always works best. I trust myself most of all].⁶⁹ Her decision to keep the television switched off in her hospital room highlights her mistrust of external media influence and her desire for autonomy, but the novel suggests that Helen

62 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 186. 63 Margaret McCarthy argues just this, in McCarthy, ‘Feminism and Generational Conflicts’. 64 In her discussion of Relax, McCarthy also questions whether performance advances integrated selfhood and gender equality or whether it merely articulates individual needs and ‘strategic theatrics’. See McCarthy, ‘Feminism and Generational Conflicts’, pp. 66, 71. 65 Roche, in Dorn, Die neue F-Klasse, p. 141. 66 Roche, Feuchtgebiete, p. 51; Smith-Prei, ‘‟Knaller Sex für alle”’, p. 30. 67 Roche, Feuchtgebiete, p. 36. 68 Ibid., p. 51. 69 Ibid., p. 188.

‘There’s No Lobby for Girls in Pop’: Writing the Performative Popfeminist Subject 

 157

cannot escape outside influence, either from her family or peers, or advertising slogans (which she is able to cite), or from the religious artefacts (a bible and a cross) that furnish her hospital room. Helen nevertheless construes her corporeal performances to be emanating from an internal core, thus imbuing them with an autonomy that is, according to Butler, illusory. Her belief that she selects her performances at will, indeed her continuing insistence on corporeal autonomy, displaces from view the external forces which compel her behaviour. Helen’s confidence in her corporeal autonomy belies a certain fatalistic mistrust which extends to her individual psychology. She believes that she, like her mother and grandmother before her, will suddenly experience a severe and debilitating deterioration of mental health.⁷⁰ This leads Helen to break what she perceives to be a congenital cycle of female madness by being sterilized soon after her eighteenth birthday. This generational legacy mocks any sense of control that Helen attempts to assert and, because it passes down the maternal line, suggests that for women there is no escape from predetermination. The issue of determination invests Helen’s subversive acts of body play with new weight: they become the acts of an individual desperate to assert control over an unpredictable body in order to create the illusion of coherent identity and a sense of agency. Indeed, Helen’s body becomes the site of a struggle for self-determination in the face of familial influence. Her transgressive behaviour often constitutes a response to her mother’s actions and opinions in order to establish, as Kauer argues in her reading of the novel, ‘a different female identity’.⁷¹ Helen’s refusal to wash her face for fear of ruining her mascara (which she never removes) can be connected with a childhood event when her mother allegedly cut off her eyelashes while she was asleep. Roche also links Frau Memel’s pedantry regarding Helen’s genital hygiene as a child (her brother’s was ignored) to Helen’s predilection for wiping public toilet seats with her vagina. As Carrie Smith-Prei notes, the mother’s suicide attempt, veiled in family secrecy since Helen was a child, contributes to the feeling that Helen’s sexual investigations might be traumatically induced. Smith-Prei contends, furthermore, that they ‘also connote power or mastery of that trauma in self-guided and controlled eroticism’.⁷² However, the pathological extremes of Helen’s corporeal performances make it difficult to imbue them with as much ‘power or mastery’. Nina Power confronts Roche with the argument that Feuchtgebiete cannot be read as a feminist novel because ‘Helen isn’t totally strong …; she’s not fully mentally

70 Ibid., p. 215. 71 Kauer, Popfeminismus!, p. 123. 72 Smith-Prei, ‘“Knaller Sex für alle”’, p. 30.

158 

 Emily Spiers

sound’.⁷³ Roche’s response is worth reproducing in full as it highlights the fundamental tension underlying her novel: The problem with political ideas like feminism is that you are not allowed sometimes to say the truth. In Germany we have lots of older, very famous feminists. And it is not allowed for me as a young feminist to say that women are masochistic. I am and all my female friends are. We stand in front of the mirror, we are naked, and we feel ugly as fuck. We see everything as wrong. We try and fight our body to become prettier and work on it. It’s not at all free and self-confident. I don’t want it to be like that, but I see that it is.⁷⁴

Roche’s comments suggest that individual psychology connotes an arena unsuited to regulation by progressively political forces, that, indeed, feminism remains unable to penetrate this realm.⁷⁵ In Feuchtgebiete, transgressive sexuality constitutes an extension of this private sphere, equally resistant to correction along social lines because it reflects private pleasure and not social conditioning. On the one hand, the novel creates in Helen an ideal representative of contemporary popfeminist selfhood, ‘free and self-confident’. Social factors and cultural taboos influence Helen to an extent, but she takes pleasure performing her identity in ways which overtly subvert social norms, celebrating her body and sexuality as a site of agency. However, as Butler suggests, performance per se does not automatically result in subversion and Helen’s performances often re-inscribe postfeminist mobilizations of sexism or reveal the dysfunctional workings of a traumatized psyche. In this way, Helen’s mental instability constitutes a greater determining factor than the social and cultural influences she mockingly subverts and destabilizes the representation of autonomous popfeminist performances. Ultimately, Helen remains trapped in a binary model which, as Butler argues, conceptualizes free-will and determinism as the only two options for identity.⁷⁶ The strains of neoliberalism in Roche’s form of popfeminism emanate from her emphasis on individual choice and pleasure, which provide the impetus for action. However, in Helen these generate an extreme individuality which merely reflects Helen’s own psychological needs as opposed to a desire to change the social field in progressive ways. Roche’s popfeminist individualism represents an alternative to a

73 Nina Power, ‘The Dirty Girl’. 74 Roche, in Power, ‘The Dirty Girl’. 75 Here I draw upon Margaret McCarthy’s reading of Feuchtgebiete on this point. She suggests that ‘[s]econd-wave forms of feminism would do well to understand women’s choices in psychological terms that often resist change, no matter how revolutionary the battle cry’, in McCarthy, ‘Feminism and Generational Conflicts’, p. 64. 76 See Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 201.

‘There’s No Lobby for Girls in Pop’: Writing the Performative Popfeminist Subject 

 159

collective feminist politics which does not take account of individual psychology/fantasy but it also undermines Roche’s critique of the wider social pressures placed upon women.

‘Wir sind die Musen des Neoliberalismus’ [We are the Muses of Neoliberalism]. Kerstin Grether’s Zuckerbabys In Zuckerbabys, polemical passages from Grether’s journalistic articles find expression through her characters, who function as mouthpieces for as well as objects of her critique of gender inequalities in what the twenty-three-year-old central protagonist Sonja calls ‘die Scheißgesellschaft der Männer’ [this shitty men’s society].⁷⁷ Zuckerbabys constitutes the product of Grether’s professional engagement, spanning over a decade, with pop culture and, as such, reflects the debates around pop which were circulating from the 1990s through to the mid2000s. One of these involves pop’s close ties with consumerism. Grether targets the cultural obsession, sustained by commercial forces in the media and music industries, with what she calls holy commodities.⁷⁸ She critiques the negative impact on women’s psychological and physical health through exposure to media images of corporeal perfection.⁷⁹ Grether levies criticism through Sonja’s laconic tone, yet with ambivalence, due in part to her championing of the very medium which produces the focus of her criticism. The reviewer Tobias Rapp contends that Grether is unconditionally loyal to the notion of pop she mobilizes on behalf of her protagonist and Grether herself admits to being addicted to pop.⁸⁰ Her novel suggests, on the one hand, that pop can create and sustain bohemian utopias; but she is also critical of the gender-based exclusions traversing pop-cultural channels and pop’s symbiotic relationship with neoliberal consumerist culture.⁸¹ Grether’s strategy dovetails with Sonja Eismann’s,

77 Kerstin Grether, Zuckerbabys (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2006), p. 120. 78 Ibid., p. 31. 79 Ibid., p. 68. 80 Kerstin Grether, Zungenkuss: Du nennst es Kosmetik, ich nenn es Rock ‘n’ Roll. Musikgeschichten 1990 bis heute (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2007), p. 9. 81 Ibid., p. 9; Grether, Zuckerbabys, p. 21.

160 

 Emily Spiers

as she undertakes what the scholar Linda Hutcheon calls a ‘challenge from within’.⁸² Zuckerbabys depicts a constellation of young female characters attempting to realize this bohemian lifestyle in twenty-first century Hamburg. Sonja is the protagonist in crisis around whom these variously ironized models of modern female life rotate, presenting her with versions of womanhood she alternately aspires to and rejects during her descent into and recovery from anorexia. Grether constructs aesthetically that which she claims to have experienced personally: ‘a process of mimetic experimentation with a selection of role models’.⁸³ Flashbacks to her unstable childhood intimate an absent father and an antagonistic relationship with her mother, a constellation familiar from Feuchtgebiete.⁸⁴ Images of female perfection surround Sonja in her job as a media designer. The women Sonja associates with in her non-professional life become three-dimensional versions of these: the model Melissa Melloda, described as ‘ein bisschen magersüchtig’ [a little bit anorexic] and the elite group of musicians’ girlfriends she meets, whose studied indifference stems from their subsisting on crisp bread.⁸⁵ The pop-journalist Allita, who is ten years older than Sonja, acts as a cipher for a form of second-wave feminism which Sonja initially rejects, calling her a ‘feministisches Monster’ [feminist monster].⁸⁶ Kicky, Micky and Ricky, members of the band Museabuse, represent positively-coded models of popfeminism. Their characterization draws noticeably on Grether’s journalism on the American Riot Grrrl movement of the late 1990s: they emphasize, for example, the importance of female creative spaces and criticize the music industry’s exclusion of female artists who do not correspond to the commercial image of pop divas.⁸⁷ These themes echo many of those broached in Sonja Eismann’s Hot Topic.⁸⁸ Sonja, who maintains the first-person narrative voice throughout her sections of the novel, resents these musicians’ ability to maintain ‘Luxuskörper’ [luxury

82 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism. History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), xiii. 83 Grether, Zungenkuss, p. 10. 84 Grether, Zuckerbabys, p. 102. 85 Ibid., p. 224. 86 Ibid., p. 174. 87 Grether, Zungenkuss, pp. 48–49. 88 See Bettina Mooshammer and Eva Trimmel, ‘Ladyfest can save your life! Ladyspace als Strategie feministischer Raumproduktion’; Clara Völker, ‘Platten statt Schminke auflegen: HipHop und Feminismus’, in Eismann, Hot Topic!, pp. 184–89 and pp. 254–63.

‘There’s No Lobby for Girls in Pop’: Writing the Performative Popfeminist Subject 

 161

bodies] and still have the energy to be creative and to have fun, a combination Sonja feels only men can attain.⁸⁹ By allowing all three musicians a first-person narrative strand, however, Grether grants access to their own insecurities. In fact, this connotes her general strategy: through Sonja’s eyes, the reader makes assumptions about the characters she imitates or resents; by providing them with a voice, Grether problematizes any ideal mode of being and underscores the unreliability of Sonja’s perceptions of other characters. Initially, then, Sonja desires nothing more than to fit in, to comply with the social narrative which demands that young women seek: ‘Liebe und Nachtleben, Freundschaft und Shopping, Diät und Kunst’ [love and night-life, friendship and shopping, diets and culture].⁹⁰ Justifying her eating disorder to herself, Sonja argues that all the ‘cool’ women are anorexic, a reminder of the pernicious forces inherent in the pressure to be cool.⁹¹ Pressure inheres, too, in the form of Sonja’s dream of becoming a ‘wild’, creative girl: a pop singer.⁹² These conflicting forces precipitate Sonja’s fantasies of a ‘selige Kindheit’ [blessed childhood], which she associates with freedom from all existential concerns.⁹³ By representing Sonja’s fantasies as restricted to a binary (pop star or child), Grether provides an implicit critique of the limited choices available for women in the wider social field. By equating Sonja’s eating disorder with a fantasy of childhood, Grether suggests her anorexia connotes a regressive response to pressures experienced by young women. But it also constitutes a form of protest. On the one hand, her disciplined programme of starvation and exercise provides a single focus which relieves her from confronting the myriad overwhelming pressures of adult life. On the other, her emaciated physical form functions in a Butlerian sense as a grotesque parody of idealized female corporeality and masochism, which in its extremeness questions the nature, terms and consequences of the ideal. Sonja’s starved body thus becomes emblematic of both her silent compliance with and enraged protest against the demands placed upon women’s appearance. Her hatred of what she perceives to be society’s authoritarian conditions becomes re-routed and inflicted upon herself. By reproducing scenes from popular television shows, children’s books, journalistic articles and celebrity interviews, Grether deftly depicts how pop-cultural channels disseminate a melange of competing narratives concerning female iden-

89 Grether, Zuckerbabys, pp. 44, 216. 90 Ibid., p. 55. 91 Ibid., p. 186. 92 Ibid., p. 119. 93 Ibid., p. 138, p. 76.

162 

 Emily Spiers

tity which can lead to psychological instability. On a TV chat show, neoliberal individualistic logic rubs against postfeminist thinking about a ‘woman’s place’. A male celebrity claims, citing evidence in the form of successful female media personalities, ‘dass Frauen heute alles erreichen können, was sie wollen, wenn sie nur mit beiden Beinen fest auf dem Boden der nackten Tatsachen stehen’ [that women today can achieve anything they want to as long as they just face up to the bare facts of life].⁹⁴ Sonja’s psychological and physical return to childhood appears all the more striking against this backdrop. On the other hand, Grether demonstrates how a popularized notion of Butlerian performativity has been absorbed and modified by pop culture to give the impression that women can make autonomous choices about identity performance while the spectrum of female role models remains limited. Butlerian language and concepts permeate Sonja’s friends’ conversations and Butler herself is name-checked during a conversation about gender inequality at Micky’s birthday party.⁹⁵ Sonja refers ironically to ‘Kulturkritiker in schlauen Büchern’ [cultural critics in smart books] who argue that identity must be continually re-invented.⁹⁶ At the same time, she observes that television hosts interview only the thinnest and youngest women, providing they are not intellectually threatening. Sonja’s juxtaposition of theory and reality here reveals her scepticism towards the potential of performance to signify identity differently. She furthermore characterizes performance not as playful but as a concept hijacked by commercialized popular culture, modified along gendered lines and implemented as a rigorous disciplinary tool designed to increase consumption: ‘Immer wieder neu muss die Puppenidentität von allen Frauen in der westlichen Welt immer wieder neu hergestellt werden’ [over and over again the doll-identity of all women in the Western world must be re-fashioned over and over again].⁹⁷ Initially, Sonja believes she chooses her identity freely, gaining individual ‘control’ in terms of her appearance and consumer habits, aspects which become conflated with identity per se. Through the metaphor of Sonja’s eating disorder, Grether demonstrates how this initial sense of becoming and agency actually becomes an erasure of self: ‘Will ich wirklich so werden wie alle anderen? Meine Gestalt in den Spiegeln dieser Stadt: Je schlanker ich werde, desto kleiner und mickriger sehe ich aus. Ich bin so komisch unvorhanden’ [Do I really want to become like everyone else? The shape of my body in this city’s mirrors:

94 Ibid., p. 104. 95 Ibid., pp. 100–101. 96 Ibid., p. 185. 97 Ibid.

‘There’s No Lobby for Girls in Pop’: Writing the Performative Popfeminist Subject 

 163

the thinner I become, the smaller and more pathetic I look. I am so strangely absent].⁹⁸ As she descends further into illness, Sonja begins to perceive herself as already fully determined. She contrasts her experiences to those of male rock stars, who behave as if it were possible to choose how one lives. Viewing her personal experiences and those of other women in relation to broader socio-cultural structures, Sonja claims: ‘Keiner macht es uns leicht, einfach nur frei zu sein. Denn wir träumen davon, uns für die Träume anderer zu eignen [...]. Wir sind die Musen des Neoliberalismus – an uns sieht man, was man Menschen alles antun kann’ [Nobody makes it easy for us just to be free. For we dream of being suitable for other people’s dreams (…). We are the muses of neoliberalism – look at us, and you’ll see just what kind of things you can put people through].⁹⁹ Here, Grether critiques a culture which profits from and thus perpetuates the objectification of women, who then become unable to distinguish between physical appearance and sense of self. But Sonja’s comment also suggests a degree of complicity on the part of women and that they must take responsibility for improving their own circumstances. As she begins to recover from her eating disorder, she contends that she has been her ‘eigener schlimmster Feind, eine Kriegerin, die eine Schlacht gegen sich selbst gewonnen hat’ [her own worst enemy, a warrior who has won a battle against herself].¹⁰⁰ Grether’s critique of the socio-cultural factors impinging upon her protagonist’s identity and agency remains powerful, but this conclusion suggests that, while eating disorders connote a societal problem, women must acknowledge their complicity and take responsibility for their own recovery. The matter of ‘taking responsibility’ for oneself resonates with neoliberal individualist narratives of self-optimization, which allows Sonja’s self-guided recovery to be read as a renunciation of protest and capitulation to the neoliberal status quo. The penultimate scene supports this reading: Museabuse obtain their long-awaited record deal, but on the condition that they lose weight. They cede to the demand, commenting, ‘[w]ir regen uns über gar nichts mehr auf’ [we’re not getting worked up about anything anymore].¹⁰¹ Grether’s continued championing of pop exculpates the neoliberal consumerist culture on which it depends. For example, Sonja’s recovery is motivated in part by the desire to exercise her creativity through the medium of pop once more (cartoon design and writing pop songs). Sonja writes a song called ‘Träum den übernächsten Traum’ [Dream the Next Dream], modifying her comment about

98 Ibid., p. 63. 99 Ibid., p. 215. 100 Ibid., p. 246. 101 Ibid., p. 245.

164 

 Emily Spiers

women’s readiness to become the object of others’ dreams. In her song, Sonja envisages the possibility of women dreaming a different kind of dream, of imagining identity in new creative ways, of becoming the subject as well as the object of the dream, artist not muse. This is why, despite the prerequisites, the aptly named Museabuse accept the record deal: it will provide them with a platform for their feminist project. Thomas Meinecke’s comments, cited in the introduction, confirm that this strategy is not straightforward, but Grether still affirms pop’s potential to provide a platform that will reach many people, young women in particular. On the one hand, then, Grether clearly aligns herself with second-wave critique by associating Sonja’s eating disorder with images generated by pop culture, an aspect of the novel that has clear didactic intent. On the other, she claims that pop remains amenable to correction along progressive feminist lines and insists on its potential for imagining identity differently.

Conclusion My investigations reveal that examples of literary pop writing by women investigate the possibility of securing an authentic sense of identity beyond the surfaces of the pop-cultural archive. Pop literature can indeed align with feminist critique, albeit one beset by the pitfalls of the postfeminist neoliberal status quo. Furthermore, my analysis suggests that popfeminism does not connote a single, unified discourse but a range of aesthetic, generic and critical strategies for ensuring that women and girls do have a lobby in pop. Zuckerbabys and Feuchtgebiete highlight the challenges facing contemporary feminist critique in a climate of postfeminism, neoliberalism and intergenerational unrest. The novels reflect the paradigmatic turn to narratives of freedom of choice and individual responsibility perpetuated by neoliberalism and underscored by popular consumer culture. They imaginatively represent young women’s struggle to assert a sense of authentic identity in place of the unsatisfying options offered by a matriarchal legacy, the regulating forces of neoliberalism and misogynistic popular culture. In contrast to many of the essayistic popfeminist texts, the novels explore the social, cultural and familial factors which constitute identity and affect agency. However, they also underscore the role played by individual psychology in, for example, the perpetuation and cessation of self-destructive behaviour. Despite attempts to locate an alternative site of agency for their protagonists (parodic performance and pop), both novels still demonstrate an ultimately limiting oscillation between the alternatives of freewill and determinism as denoting the parameters of selfhood and agency.

‘There’s No Lobby for Girls in Pop’: Writing the Performative Popfeminist Subject 

 165

Zuckerbabys underscores the scale of the challenge facing feminism upon its encounter with popular culture. Grether challenges individual agency that relies on consumerism as the foundation of identity. Suspicious of interpretations of Butlerian performance that align with consumerism as well as postfeminist neoliberal individualism, Grether shows how the array of female identities available remains limited by the forces which regulate identity. She sets out to challenge the neoliberal mandate which states that individuals may transcend social contingency through individual endeavour and responsibility, yet concludes that Sonja must take responsibility for her own recovery. In Sonja, Grether creates a character capable of reflexive mediation, of overcoming the factors regulating her identity and selecting the aspects of pop culture which benefit her. Problematically, agency relies upon the ability to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ performances; in Butler’s view this is not always possible. Ultimately, Grether carves out a site of agency for Sonja in creative self-expression through pop, sparing the medium from rigorous critique. Feuchtgebiete enquires after the efficacy of applying feminist correction to the private sphere of sexual fantasy, yet Roche oscillates between claiming a private, autonomous performative space for Helen and depicting the factors that constitute and regulate her. In her novel, Roche addresses the shortcomings of Butler’s early thinking by foregrounding the role of the corporeal in identity construction and agency. She presents a spectrum of subversive corporeal performances which potentially signify female identity differently. As in Zuckerbabys, Helen’s body becomes the site of struggle between the exercise of free-will and the consequences of pre-determination. In Zuckerbabys, Sonja realizes that her body alone does not constitute identity, that agency can be sourced through creativity and engagement with one’s social environment instead of by pursuing unrealistic dreams of corporeal perfection. Helen does not seek corporeal perfection, but Feuchtgebiete does suggest that performance identity can be selected autonomously by a coherent sovereign subject, who, by patrolling the body’s borders, attains agency; this stance aligns troublingly with postfeminist consumer culture. The novel also demonstrates how the popfeminist strategy of performative identity does not always result in the subversion of gender norms or in progressive re-significations of female identity. In the final analysis, performance may also reveal the contours of an unstable psyche or indeed reinscribe the gender norms it appears to subvert.

Corinna Kahnke

Generation Golf Meets Zonenkinder: Gender, (N)ostalgia and the Berlin Republic Reading West, Reading East Two key texts have defined the 78er generation: Jana Hensel’s Zonenkinder [After the Wall] (2002) and Florian Illies’s Generation Golf. Eine Inspektion [Generation Golf. An Inspection] (2000).¹ If the purpose of literature is to diagnose the present and to reflect on society, then the great success of Illies’s book indicates that it accurately portrays the ‘Zeitgeist’, an observation that holds just as true for Hensel’s narrative.² The shared experience of loss and insecurity unites those born in the 1970s on either side of the wall in life experience and literature, and here specifically nostalgia is expressed via product placement. An aspect that is less explored, however, is that both texts illustrate the failure of the traditional binaries used in stories about unification and national identity, specifically east/west and female/male. Accessing these two exemplary texts of Popliteratur in a new fashion, namely through the lens of gender issues and relations, allows them to speak for their peer group as a whole and positions the genre itself as commentator on the state of the Berlin Republic. Literary critics such as Iris Radisch suggest a clear opposition between East and West German post-unification fiction in which irony, indifference and consumerism determine western writing, whereas eastern literature offers ideals, seriousness and soul.³ Others, like Thomas Brussig, himself one of the prominent authors of the former East Germany, criticise this position in Der Spiegel: ‘One of the most presumptuous stereotypes about young contemporary literature is that the more interesting literature is written in the East, and that this must be the case since downfall, upheaval and new beginnings […] offer abundant

1 The term 78ers was coined for those born in the mid-1970s. It parallels the generational moniker of the politically active 68er generation. I claim Zonenkinder as a text of Popliteratur rather than Ostalgie, which a comparative reading of both texts will highlight. Instead of ghetto-izing Ostalgie as its own genre/domain, my project approaches both texts as representatives of a new trend in German literature. 2 Markus Klein, ‘Illies, Florian’, in Lexikon der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur seit 1945, ed. by Thomas Kraft (Munich: Nymphenburger , 2003), I, p. 513. 3 Quoted and discussed in Anna Saunders, ‘“Normalizing” the Past: East German Culture and Ostalgie’ in German Literature of the 1990s and Beyond. Normalization and the Berlin Republic, ed. by Stuart Taberner (Rochester: Camden House, 2005), pp. 89–104 (pp. 98–99).

168 

 Corinna Kahnke

subject matter’.⁴ Stuart Taberner further complicates this opposition by identifying works that reverse the paradigm; he points to humorous narratives about the GDR as well as more somber texts from the West.⁵ Taberner concludes that in their heterogeneity the two literary strands actually share more similarities than differences, and consequently a larger inclusive literature characterizes the Berlin Republic and maps out an ‘increasingly homogenized German “normality”’.⁶ Taking Taberner’s argument further, I wish to propose that this more unified German-German identity is already present in pop literature, which may at first glance seem to re-inscribe the clichés associated with the east-west divide, but in fact offers a type of unification through a shared 78ers’ voice. While one cannot completely equate Illies’s consumer fetishism with Hensel losing the commercial products of her youth, both texts embody a loss of identity-forming markers and the newly unified generation’s subsequent response, namely a nostalgic withdrawal into childhood memories.

Claiming Zonenkinder for Pop Literature Critics have underscored the works’ differences, labelling Zonenkinder as ‘Ostalgie’ [nostalgia for the East, specifically East German every-day culture and products] and a work of non-fiction, and Generation Golf as an exemplary work of pop literature.⁷ By contrast, I align both narratives with pop literature since they adhere to its generic conventions with episodic writing and by indexing brand names and slogans. Both texts are structured by eight chapters, followed by a register or glossary of key terms and products. Each of those chapters has a double title – first a slogan, then content-related information. Participating in the same narrative structure, both texts represent a piece of the German cultural puzzle, offering a reflection of the sociopolitical crises of the unification process. In fact, the texts are startlingly similar in the ways they bring together memory and nostalgia with the language of consumerism.

4 Andrew Plowman, ‘Westalgie? Nostalgia for the “Old” Federal Republic in Recent German Prose’, Seminar, 40.3 ( 2004), 249–61 (p. 249). 5 GDR examples include Thomas Brussig, Ingo Schulze, Marcia Zuckermann and Kerstin Hensel. FRG examples include Gabriele Weingartner, Yade Kara and Richard David Precht. 6 Stuart Taberner and Paul Cook, ‘Introduction’, in German Literature of the 1990s and Beyond, p. 4. 7 Zonenkinder was listed in the bestseller list of Der Spiegel under the rubric ‘Sachbuch’, i. e. non-fiction.

Generation Golf Meets Zonenkinder: Gender, (N)ostalgia and the Berlin Republic 

 169

In Illies’s work specifically, commercials and product placement serve as structuring devices  – the catchy VW Golf slogans serve as chapter headings and their content advances the narrative. The members of the Generation Golf, as described by Illies’s protagonist, have grown into adulthood as an apolitical group, defined by the products they consume, devoid of any deeper sense of purpose than having a comfortable life according to the instructions they gleaned from the commercials of their youth. Margaret McCarthy declares this type of identity ‘a selfhood off the rack’, which ‘becomes a manifest destiny determined by brand names’.⁸ Identity, therefore, not only emerges within a Butlerian performance but can also figuratively and literally be acquired in a department store. Hensel’s Zonenkinder employs a similar narrative structure. The narrator describes a childhood in East Germany as well as the ‘Mauerfall’, ‘Wende’ [fall of the Wall; (political) turnaround] and unification that followed during her youth. She conveys nostalgia for her childhood, which ultimately seems to indicate a longing for the GDR. Critic Moritz Baßler implicitly classifies Zonenkinder as Popliteratur when he claims that it responds to the demand for a ‘counter concept of the East vis-à-vis Illies’s self-assured and successful inventory of the world of those born in the Federal Republic in the early 1970s.⁹ Indeed, Hensel’s text does create such an inventory, and in so doing, it engages in one of the conventions of pop literature, namely the encyclopaedic use of brand and product names as a narrative element. Examples in the text include GDR products, magazine titles, as well as school and youth activities, party-related customs, language and clothing, which serve to recall and reconstruct the East Germany of the narrator’s memory. Another shared trait, albeit with a different reception, lies in the way both texts aim to speak for their whole peer group. Generation Golf’s subsuming of its generation has been more readily accepted by readers and critics alike. Gillian Pye, however, sounds a critical note when she observes: ‘Posing as the ubiquitous “Ich” of the pop-lit generation, whilst at the same time adopting the mantle of pseudo-science, the narrator of Generation Golf stands outside to comment and judge, whilst simultaneously claiming brotherhood with the reader’.¹⁰ Eva Werth takes this stance even further by arguing that Illies’s insider discourse creates a ‘Lifestyle-Diktat’ [lifestyle-dictatorship] by generalizing memory, which

8 Margaret McCarthy, ‘Somnolent Selfhood: Winterschläfer and Generation Golf’, New German Critique, 37.1 (Winter 2010), 53–74 (p. 53). 9 Moritz Baβler, ‘“Die Zonenkinder” und das “Wir”. Ein Nachwort’, in Die Zonenkinder und wir. Die Geschichte eines Phänomens, ed. by Tom Kraushaar (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2004), pp. 78–81 (p. 80). 10 Gillian Pye, ‘Anxiety and the Archive: Constructing Value and Identity in the Pop-Lit Novels Soloalbum and Generation Golf’, German Life and Letters, 59. 2. (2006), 309–22 (p. 318).

170 

 Corinna Kahnke

clearly complicates a more accepting reception among readers and in the pages of the feuilleton.¹¹ The discourse around the ‘wir’ of Zonenkinder has taken on a much larger dimension. As one can glean from Tom Kraushaar’s edited volume Die Zonenkinder und Wir [Children of East Germany and Us] (2004), most readers reacted quite differently to Jana Hensel’s ‘we’ than the critical feuilleton when they enthusiastically accepted this offer of identification. In her Der Spiegel article, Doja Hacker, on the other hand, suggests that the criticism towards Hensel’s narrative comes from the collectivizing ‘we’ that upsets her fellow former GDR comrades.¹² This commentary re-inscribes the east-west binary by assuming two groups of readers, where the audience from the former GDR takes issue with the narrative voice and the narrative itself, whereas their western counterpart readily accepts both. Moritz Baßler explains the phenomenon best when he identifies the much debated ‘we’ as a pop literature phenomenon. The genre functions not only as a literature of integration, but also provides a dissenting voice. Hensel’s ‘wir’, similar to the one employed by Illies, therefore becomes a voice speaking against a superior authority like parents or an ‘empfindliche[s] ostdeutsche[s] Über-Ich’ [sensitive East German super-ego] and creates the ‘Enzyklopädie einer Kultur’ [encyclopaedia of culture], rather than telling just the ‘eigene, individuelle Geschichte’ [own individual story].¹³ A joint generational voice speaks about and against its parental generation of and in the Berlin Republic.

Reading through a Gendered Lens In donning a pair of ‘gender glasses’ to examine these two sample texts of pop literature, one gains a unique understanding of the genre’s socio-political aspects. To begin with and in accordance with generic conventions, pinning down the narrators’ identities is not an easy task: in both Zonenkinder and Generation Golf one encounters unnamed first-person narrators who remain somewhat elusive when it comes to revealing their gender. One does, however, hear of their respective romantic relationships, which are with women in the case of Generation

11 Eva Werth, ‘Literarischer Lifestylepop. Alltägliches und lebensgeschichtliches Erzählen in popliterarischer Perspektive’, in Das Populäre. Untersuchungen zu Interaktionen und Differenzierungsstrategien in Literatur, Kultur und Sprache, ed. by Olivier Agard and Christian Helmreich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), pp. 223–35 (p. 223). 12 Doja Hacker, ‘Ich bin aber nicht traurig’, Der Spiegel. (http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/ print/d-26060126.html). 13 Moritz Baβler, ‘Die “Zonenkinder” und das “Wir”. Ein Nachwort’, pp. 81, 82.

Generation Golf Meets Zonenkinder: Gender, (N)ostalgia and the Berlin Republic 

 171

Golf’s narrator, while Zonenkinder’s narrator engages with men. Because of the stereotypical norms employed by the two narratives, the narrators’ gender could be read through their romantic encounters. Yet, as with most narratives in this genre, such a reading is at least complicated by conflicted and unstable representations of gender. Just as in pop literature texts such as Faserland (1995) and Soloalbum [Solo Album] (1999), cultural and national identity is articulated in relation to gender and its performance. In the wake of German unification in the early and mid1990s, various idealized concepts of nationality emerged and attempted to posit a cohesive and integrated German identity, while simultaneously echoing stereotypes associated with the former east and west. In pop literature, the instability of gender and national identities, represented in the binaries male/female and east/ west, not only parallel one another but are also conflated. Specifically, gender turns into a cipher for culture: the West German author and the narrator of Generation Golf are male; the East German author and the text’s narrative voice are female. Both narratives utilize nostalgic remembrances to construct a personal and performative present that reflects on a gendered national past. One specific scene in Hensel’s narrative makes the west/east split strikingly apparent. A West German describes his experiences when driving through the GDR before and after unification. He cites improvements, and while his son Jonathan views these changes as positive, the idea that ‘the East has cleaned up and dressed up nicely’ places it in an inferior position. The East becomes the woman dressing up for an expected boyfriend in order to please him, and he, of course, is a Westerner. In addition, Jonathan’s father alludes to the taxes levied on West Germans to pay for unification, for which they might expect a certain amount of gratitude. Jonathan’s girlfriend Jenny reacts as the representative for the East with ‘appropriate’ behaviour, expressing gratitude by smiling thankfully, which positions her in an inferior position, both symbolically and literally. All the characters in this scene perform their gender on the surface and with it their national roles in a traditional and prescribed manner. At the same time, the overt use of irony undermines those very stereotypes. After smugly praising Jonathan’s father, ‘[…] drückte [Jenny] ihren Rücken stärker durch als normal, setzte ihr stolzestes Gesicht auf und lächelte Jonathans Vater dankbar neudeutsch ins Gesicht’ [(...) Jenny sat up more straight than usual, put on her proudest face and smiled at Jonathan’s father in a grateful, new-German manner].¹⁴ While the subtle irony might be completely lost on the father, it is accessible to the

14 Jana Hensel, Zonenkinder (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2002), p. 68.

172 

 Corinna Kahnke

reader. The term ‘neudeutsch’ [new-German], for instance, refers to Jenny as if she had not been German before. Yet the term also signifies a ‘new Westerner’, because the east, and with it Jenny, have been successfully assimilated – or have they? What first appear to be stable, correlated binaries – gender as male/female and nation as east/west – are thus complicated by the narrative in Zonenkinder. Generation Golf, as representative of a seemingly masculinized West Germany, takes this uncertainty about gender even further. In Illies’s text, the instability of gender roles feeds an intense apathy and an apolitical, yet nostalgic and charged perspective of Generation Golf. The narrator invokes such connections through his merging of confused musings about masculinity and femininity with commentary on political topics. In one instance, he examines current images of femininity and masculinity: Muskeln waren natürlich auch bei der Vorgängergeneration ein erotisches Kriterium, das der Mann erfüllen mußte. Doch das waren noch Muskeln von ganz anderem Schrot und Korn [...]. Diesem Bild des muskelbepackten Mechanikers setzen wir den muskulösen Body entgegen, der im Fitneßstudio entstanden ist und nicht bei der Arbeit und der nach Duschgel riecht und nicht nach Schweiß. Bei den Frauen äußert sich das gewandelte Körpergefühl vor allem darin, dass jede jederzeit BH trägt. [For the prior generation, muscles had of course also been an erotic criterion that had to be met. But these were muscles of a quite different calibre (...). We replaced the image of the mechanic’s swelling biceps with the muscular body sculpted at the gym, not at work, a body smelling of shower gel, not sweat. For women, this change in body attitude shows itself in the fact that every woman wears a bra at all times.]¹⁵

According to his observations, a sexually attractive male body has to sport a healthy and muscular physique. The narrator points in other places to the magazines Men’s Health and Fit for Fun, which have become the “bible” of the Generation Golf in their display of the ideal male and female body. However, these attributes are acquired in the gym rather than at the workplace. This difference, in turn, points to a certain sterility and stylization of the body. Not only has physical beauty become de-naturalized, leisure and class play new roles as well. The female body experiences a similar de-naturalization. In contrast to the 1970s, when bras were shunned and banished as tools of oppression, a new body-consciousness has emerged. The body culture appears to be less ‘one with nature’ and more restrictive and artificial, with a bra guarding, encasing

15 Florian Illies, Generation Golf. Eine Inspektion (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, 2001), p. 171.

Generation Golf Meets Zonenkinder: Gender, (N)ostalgia and the Berlin Republic 

 173

and even restricting the female body. The narrator understands this change in negative terms and mournfully remembers the summers of his childhood when he caught glimpses of uncontained breasts beneath light attire. This perception provocatively re-interprets what in the 1970s had been perceived by feminists as an act of liberation. The narrator subjects both 1970s and 1990s breasts to the male gaze, and politics are seemingly lost on him – both in his youth and in the 1990s. He is a conventional middle-class subject whose nostalgia and apoliticism blocks an understanding of feminist politics. On the other hand, he experiences a sense of uncertainty and apprehension; female sexuality becomes a weapon and the newly encased breasts a symbol of empowerment, as illustrated through pop idol Madonna, a figure many a Popliteratur author has utilized for her or his narrative.¹⁶ Women wearing bras again are now portrayed as having reclaimed ownership of their breasts and their display, thereby disarming the male gaze. But not only the reception and presentation of the male and female body has changed. The interaction between men and women has also undergone an extreme transformation. While the narrator is more than happy that feminism has been overcome, evident when he alludes to stereotypical 1970s ‘man-hating feminism’, he expresses his concern about what has taken its place. He refers to young women as ‘girlies’, a term that has been reclaimed, just as the term ‘Mädchen’ [girl] has become an empowering label for young women.¹⁷ Those he encounters now follow in the footsteps of Madonna, who earlier had been characterized already as threatening and now receives the moniker ‘die Große’ [the great]. This phrase carries several meanings, portraying her as a grown up role model for young women and referring to her as a reigning figure of (pop) royalty. The international American pop-icon evokes images of a strong, sexual, yet sensitive femininity of ever-changing re-invention. And indeed, this is how the narrator experiences the young women of his generation – as possessing a womanly sensitivity, yet remaining egotistical, sexy and very smart. All these traits unsettle the narrator, as they remain unfamiliar and slightly threatening. Nonetheless, the term ‘girlies’ bespeaks the ironic tone (also present in his critique of male gender roles) with which the narrator of Generation Golf mocks ‘Girl Power’. As is the

16 During her ‘Blonde Ambition’ tour, Madonna wore the (in)famous pink cone-shaped bra that Jean Paul Gaultier designed specifically for her. In this garment, her breasts looked indeed like weapons, which she employed to attract and attack the male gaze at the same time, while always toying with the situation. 17 One may think here of the often quoted ‘girl power’, reinforced by the Spice Girls, or Lucilectric’s song ‘Weil ich ‘n Mädchen bin’ (1992).

174 

 Corinna Kahnke

generic convention of pop literature, seemingly clear statements have to be read with a grain of salt because the texts ironically deconstruct norms via tone or by depicting stereotypically stable identities or ideas. While physical display and attitude may present themselves in new forms, the ideal of an intact relationship, according to the narrator, is just as much an ideal for his generation as for the previous one.¹⁸ Despite the ongoing changes within the social construct of gender roles, the ideal remains and is expressed in items of pop culture such as commercials which feature faithful characters and stable relationships. Similar to other pop literature texts, this type of relationship is depicted as inaccessible to the Generation Golf. Precisely because interactions between men and women are undergoing distinct changes, a traditional heterosexual relationship becomes a reactionary countermeasure to the status quo. The possibility that the need for a close, personal relationship comes from the commercials presented in the text further complicates matters. The media, an often conservative and idealized branch of a larger hegemonic system, might be responsible for any drive toward a traditional heterosexual relationship. Within Generation Golf, a change in power distribution becomes apparent: the ‘Gleichberechtigung ist halbwegs Wirklichkeit geworden’ [gender equality has become a partial reality].¹⁹ The narrator explains how much lifestyle and behaviour for many women have changed. Women know that they can take what they want, ‘weil sie von Sharon Stone gelernt haben, daß man nur die Beine richtig übereinanderschlagen muß’ [because they learned from Sharon Stone that one just has to cross one’s legs in the right way].²⁰ With this phrase, he attributes agency and power to women, but the connection to Sharon Stone and her (in) famous scene in the thriller Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992) simultaneously emphasizes how unnerved he is by such a femininity. The character portrayed by the author is very sexual, highly intelligent and murders men (after intercourse) with an ice pick she keeps under her bed at all times. And she gets away with it, thereby confirming and embodying male fears of the proverbial ‘vagina dentata’. Men, on the other hand, stand rather helpless before this new strong femininity. Many, according to the narrator, have not figured out yet how to respond. Indeed, they often do not even realize that a new behaviour is required of them. Masculinity finds itself in crisis:

18 Florian Illies, Generation Golf, pp. 172–73. 19 Ibid., p. 173. 20 Ibid.

Generation Golf Meets Zonenkinder: Gender, (N)ostalgia and the Berlin Republic 

 175

Wir verteidigen uns, entschuldigen uns, bemühen uns. Und sollen doch weiterhin die Stereoanlagen reparieren können. Erst dachten wir alle, statt Machogehabe sei nun der Softie gefragt, aber dann merkten wir, daß es das nun auch nicht war, was die Frauen wollten. Nun herrscht erst mal Ratlosigkeit, und jeder macht weiter wie bisher, spült aber öfter mal ab. [We defend ourselves, apologize, make an effort. And we’re still expected to be able to fix the stereo system. First, we all thought being a softie instead of a macho was the ticket, but then we realized that wasn’t what women wanted either. For now, confusion has taken over and everyone goes on as before, except for doing dishes a little more often.]²¹

Male self-understanding seems to be strongly connected to the expectations that women might have towards them, rather than a self-determined set of values, which indicates a distinct level of insecurity. Linking these problems with masculinity back to the frame of nationality facilitates an understanding of the Berlin Republic without the former West as the clear ‘winner’. Rather, unified Germany becomes a place with destabilized values and markers of (self) definition, suffering from a larger systemic crisis. Germany will have to be newly defined since it lacks a clear sense of itself.

Inter-German Identity The correlation between gender, personal and national identity as well as history is further articulated in the text. In a seemingly clumsy transition, the narrator of Generation Golf observes, after elaborating on his confusion about existing gender roles and changed expectations: ‘Das ist keine gute Überleitung: Das Verhältnis unserer Generation zur Geschichte allgemein und zum Holocaust ist dermaßen Roman-Herzoghaft unverkrampft, daß Kritiker dahinter Geschichtsvergessenheit vermuten, Ignoranz und Schlimmeres’ [This is not a good transition: Our generation’s relationship with history in general and the Holocaust in particular is so very Roman-Herzogian relaxed that critics suspect a forgetfulness toward history, ignorance and worse].²² In order to understand the correlation between gender roles and politics, one has to examine the first sentence more closely. In it the narrator refers to a topic discussed earlier, namely the TV persona Verona Feldbusch and her signature transition.²³ When moderating the programme ‘peep!’ she

21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., p. 174. 23 Verona Feldbusch is a beauty pageant winner, TV persona, occasional actress and shrewd business woman. From 1995–1998 she moderated the erotic educational show ‘peep!’. For fem-

176 

 Corinna Kahnke

always stated ‘das ist eine gute Überleitung’ [this is a good transition] between segments, even and especially when that was not the case. This quirk earned her the ironic title of ‘Hohepriesterin der Continuity’ [high priestess of continuity] from the narrator.²⁴ In quoting Feldbusch, the narrator places himself, with a good portion of self-irony, into the context of ‘Häppchenkultur’ [appetizer culture] and constructs, yet simultaneously mocks the connection between gender roles and politics by inverting the Feldbusch quotation.²⁵ The text’s seemingly disconnected move from gender politics to national politics and history is embodied in the figure of Verona Feldbusch. Both through her seeming idiosyncrasies and the fact that she is not what she appears to be (i. e. clever businesswoman rather than slightly dumb pageant queen and TV persona), she points to the need for a closer look at textual structure and conveyed content. A bad transition indeed draws the reader’s attention to a connection between gender and national politics via precisely such an abrupt move. And just like Feldbusch, Generation Golf remains aware of historical and political events while acting in a purposefully ignorant fashion. Here the parental generation is fundamentally mistaken in their judgment of the Generation Golf’s relationship with Germany’s Nazi history. Although their parents label the 78er generation as apathetic, the 78er’s easy-going attitude remains much more a symptom of helplessness and confusion than disinterest. Of course the members of Generation Golf know what happened during the Third Reich. Indeed, it appears that the most formative historical event in Generation Golf, parallel to the ‘Wende’ for Zonenkinder, was National Socialism rather than a significant moment experienced first-hand. Every year in school this subject plays a prominent role in the curriculum. How formative these lessons were becomes clear when the text reports that members of the Generation Golf could more easily recount the eight reasons for the decline of the Weimar Republic than list the Ten Commandments. Furthermore, this cultural and historical imprint has precluded the possibility of engagement in current politics; just as Generation Golf is incapable of forming successful romantic or generation-spanning bonds, its ability to form relationships to history and politics are fraught. The fall of the Wall and unification receive just a few lines in the narrator’s account, thus complicating his statement that Generation Golf experienced for the first some kind of patriotism.²⁶

inist and Emma editor Alice Schwarzer she represents contemporary post-/anti-feminism; their ‘feud’ is a well-known staple of German popular culture. 24 Florian Illies, Generation Golf, p. 132. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., p. 176.

Generation Golf Meets Zonenkinder: Gender, (N)ostalgia and the Berlin Republic 

 177

Where many critics have criticized this scene, bemoaning Generation Golf’s lack of political motivation, their excessive superficiality and lack of clear values, a layer of self-critical irony emerges that provides an alternative reading. One finds the loss of clear markers and categories across the board; nothing can be deemed stable, and neither private nor public identities are thus reliable. This assessment of the Berlin Republic portrays an awareness of issues yet delivers no solutions. This instability lies at the core of what unites Generation Golf and Zonenkinder, wherein (self) irony becomes a self-defence mechanism as well as an instrument to uncover and comment on the socio-political issues at hand. Like those who lived through the war, the Generation Golf feels itself to be in a situation where old norms and ideals have been proven wrong, and this experience prompts a nostalgic look back at childhood. Yet it remains important to understand Generation Golf’s lack of ideology and political interest as closer to the post-war generation than to their parents, which establishes Popliteratur as a kind of ‘Großväterliteratur’ [grandfather literature].²⁷ In an effort to escape the confusions of the contemporary, this text, like Hensel’s, attempts to re-instate the security that came from not questioning the status quo and from being comforted by clearly accessible values. Generation Golf feels itself to be in a situation where old norms and ideals have been proven wrong, and this experience leads to a nostalgic look back into childhood as a time of stability and comfort. The opening scene of Illies’s narrative, for example, presents the first person-narrator as a child taking a bath with his Playmobil figures and preparing to watch a hit television show: ‘Es war damals selbstverständlich, daß man Wetten, daß...? mit Frank Elstner guckte, niemals wieder hatte man in späteren Jahren das Gefühl, zu einem bestimmten Zeitpunkt genau das Richtige zu tun’ [Back then it went without saying that one would watch ‘Wanna bet…?’ hosted by Frank Elstner, never again in later years did one have the feeling of doing the exact right thing at the exact right moment].²⁸ Gillian Pye refers to this passage as ‘[...] typical of the nostalgic sentimentalism of certain sections of the thirty-something generation ...’, where ‘the feel-good moment is created in an ironic glance at the past [...]’.²⁹ I would argue that in addition this quote expresses a longing for knowing what ‘the right thing to do’ is. A similar phenomenon can be observed in the parental generation and the boom of nostalgic,

27 This term would operate similarly to the genre of Väterliteratur, in which post WW II authors confronted the crimes of their fathers. 28 Florian Illies, Generation Golf, p. 9. 29 Gillian Pye, ‘Anxiety and the Archive’, p. 321.

178 

 Corinna Kahnke

overly sweet and romantic Schlager music of the 1950s and 1960s, which delivered a similar means of escapism. In Zonenkinder this sense of ‘doing the right thing’ relies on a straightforward and harmonious relationship between social expectations, gender and politics as illustrated in an anecdote about the narrator falling in love with her class mate Sascha. The narrator recalls Sascha, who was the handsomest boy in her class, and with whom she was secretly in love. To her great regret, these feelings were never reciprocated. One day Sascha disappears, and it turns out that he and his mother illegally and secretly went to the West.³⁰ He does, however, write to the protagonist and confess his secret love for her, whereupon they meet. But when he wants her to be his girlfriend, she declines, since he abandoned the Republic: ‘Seine Briefe habe ich danach nicht mehr geöffnet, sondern sofort weggeschmissen. Und mit Liebe zu Westdeutschen, schwor ich mir, wollte ich in meinem Leben nichts zu tun haben’ [After that, I didn’t open his letters anymore but instead threw them out immediately. And I swore to myself that I’d never in my life get involved with love for a West German].³¹ Right and wrong were determined by the goals of the socialist state, and she believed in her duties: she was ‘[...] einer der jüngsten Staatsbürger der jungen DDR und sollte den Sozialismus weiterbringen, damit er vielleicht doch noch, eines fernen Tages, zum Kommunismus würde’ [(...) one of the youngest citizens of the young GDR, and she should further socialism so that it might turn, maybe one day, into communism].³² After the fall of the Wall, the Cold War still exists in her head; she cannot switch from the idea of the western class enemy to the assumption that she could fall for a West German and superficial western decadence. Not experiencing hard times has prevented them from developing depth and serious emotions, and if they proclaim otherwise, this stance merely underscores in the narrator’s eyes their carefree life. For her, bonding with a West German in a romantic way remains utterly inconceivable, even though she acknowledges evidence to the contrary. In a move from the personal to the public, the narrator now quotes newspaper articles and reports on marriages between former Easterners and Westerners. Strikingly, though, she does not speak of friends or acquaintances, but rather cites the press as her source and thereby makes her examples much less personal. Her choice of the word ‘Mischehen’ [mixed marriages] for these relationships

30 Jana Hensel, Zonenkinder, pp. 116–17. 31 In this scenario, East and West Germany are gendered once more, this time within a romantic relationship: the ‘good’ East German girl plays the feminine to the western boy. Jana Hensel, Zonenkinder, p. 118. 32 Ibid., p. 85.

Generation Golf Meets Zonenkinder: Gender, (N)ostalgia and the Berlin Republic 

 179

provides another tell-tale sign since this term usually refers to interracial marriages. She finds her scepticism about the success of such unions confirmed when soon thereafter she hears reports of the first divorces. In describing them with the neologism ‘Mischscheidungen’ [mixed divorces], she ridicules them further. In reading marriages as a representation of the German unification, Zonenkinder supports the gendered depiction of the former East and West Germany. Having succumbed to the colonizing, masculinized west, the barriers against consummation have been broken. Relationships between East and West Germans are nothing unusual anymore. However, a true ‘one people’ does not exist yet, as indicated by the prefix ‘Misch-’ for both marriages and divorces. This word is a rather loaded term within the German context, since it invokes racial marriage legislation during the Third Reich. Indeed, a ‘Mischehe’ implies that one of the partners is perceived as ‘inferior’, as was the case during National Socialism between Aryan and non-Aryan partners. In the context of East and West Germany and given the stereotypes, one must assume that the east would represent the ‘inferior’ part within the ‘marriage’ of unification. However, describing German unification and the coming together of east and west as symbolized in romantic relationships does not need to be entirely negative. Within these relationships, one also finds an attempt to reconcile the different backgrounds of Zonenkinder and Generation Golf : ‘Aber wenn ich verliebt bin, will ich glauben, dass meine Geliebten all die Jahre eigentlich nur in der Parallelklasse gewesen sind, und ich ihnen einfach nie begegnet bin. Ich wünsche mir, dass meine Fahnenappelle nichts anderes waren als ihre Gottesdienste’ [But when I’m in love, I want to believe that my beloved actually have been in the same school all this time, just in a different classroom, and I just didn’t run into them at school. I wish that my pledge of allegiance was just like their school church service].³³ Despite earlier claims, we find the narrator able to actually have romantic relations with former Westerners, and we witness her attempt at closing the gap by imagining a shared past. The connection based on a made-up childhood is rather fragile and only exists in her imagination, but it touches on the shared strategy of resorting to childhood when the present becomes too complicated. Zonenkinder uses pop literature’s irony to suggest that the east has assimilated too easily. For instance, when the narrator claims that she finally understands the ‘Pet Shop Boys’ song Go West, which a western friend recorded a long time ago for her, she states rather sarcastically, ‘Ich muss lachen, singen mir die beiden Engländer “we will fly so high, tell all our friends goodbye, we will start a new life” ins Ohr, und wundere mich: Was es wohl daran einst nicht zu verstehen

33 Ibid., p. 129.

180 

 Corinna Kahnke

gab?’ [Hearing the two Englishmen sing into my ear ‘we will fly so high, tell all our friends goodbye, we will start a new life’, I have to laugh, and I wonder: What was it that I once didn’t understand here?].³⁴ As in many other pop literature texts, such as Soloalbum or Crazy (1999), a song speaks for the narrator. The original song by The Village People indeed praises the West; the Pet Shop Boys remix, however, is a campy remake, in which the two homosexual and thereby non-normative performers subvert the original song. And it is exactly that subversion, which quoting their version evokes, that destabilizes the narrator’s seeming conformity within German unification. Instead, Hensel writes against a discursive and simplified way of remembering the GDR and the years following unification.³⁵ Memory, remembering and engaging with Germany’s past serve as an integral part of Zonenkinder and Generation Golf. Both narratives engage and address aspects of Germany’s history to explain the issues of one generation. In Generation Golf, identity and history are defined by the Nazi past, whereas socialism provides the defining ideology/political system for Zonenkinder. The Nazi past does not play the same role here, in part because children of the GDR were taught that all the GDR’s citizens had been anti-fascists, the war had not happened there and history began after 1945.³⁶ As a citizen of the new Berlin Republic, the protagonist later confronts the realization that she did not really know anything about the past: [...] was unsere Großeltern gemacht, ob sie kollaboriert oder Widerstand geleistet hatten; wir wurden als Gegenwartsgeneration in einen Vergangenheitsstaat hineingeboren, der uns Fragen und unschöne Geschichten abgenommen hatte... Meine Freunde wussten bereits, dass sie die Enkel des Dritten Reiches ware. Ich war eine von ihnen. Doch erst jetzt wusste ich es auch. [(...) what our grandparents had done, if they had collaborated or resisted; as a generation of the present, we were born into a state of the past that had protected us from questions and uncomfortable stories. (...) My friends already knew that they were the grandchildren of the Third Reich. I was one of them. But only now did I understand this, too.]³⁷

Despite the narrator’s initial impression that Zonenkinder are vastly different from the Generation Golf, she suggests here that they remain instead part of

34 Ibid., p. 167. 35 Susanne Lebauff, ‘Neue Formen der “Ostalgie” – Abschied von der “Ostalgie”? Erinnerungen an Kindheit und Jugend in der DDR und an die Geschichtsjahre 1989/90’, Seminar, 43.2 (2007), 177–93 (p. 192). 36 Jana Hensel, Zonenkinder, p. 108. 37 Ibid., p. 112.

Generation Golf Meets Zonenkinder: Gender, (N)ostalgia and the Berlin Republic 

 181

one German generation, connected by their grandparents’ past as well as in the present by the post-‘Wende’ Berlin Republic that they inhabit together. Zonenkinder and the members of the Generation Golf find themselves side by side in the Germany of the new millennium. Losing older values, norms and codes, as well as the experience that true family is not based on blood but rather a common relationship to historic events, shape their reality and self-understanding. Both Generation Golf and Zonenkinder therefore reject their parents’ generation and embrace their own peer group for identity models. At the end of Zonenkinder, the narrator claims that the ‘zwittrigen OstWestkinder’³⁸ [hermaphrodite east-west children] are connected to their predecessors only by geographical origin, and that they feel much more comfortable in the company of their West German peers.³⁹ The distinctly gendered colonialization that I described above appears toward the end as more of a fusion, although still a gendered one, when the narrator states that the Zonenkinder are the first Wessis from East Germany and can no longer be distinguished by language, behavior or looks.⁴⁰ Hybridity characterizes the newly inhabited identity, alluded to by the moniker ‘hermaphrodite’, which creates simultaneously a new space while remaining open, flexible and non-normative.

Popliteratur Beyond the East-West Divide. United in Confusion Generation Golf and Zonenkinder reflect on the cultural movements of their time on both an individual as well as a larger systemic level. Both narratives show the break-down of cultural security and norms, which in turn triggers a nostalgic look at a lost time. Pye concludes her essay with a similar analysis when she states: Underlining the way in which culture enters the historical archive, pop literature is not, as some critics have claimed, Warholian, but post-warholian, highlighting the destructive way in which the now is constantly constructed as history, to the extent that a post-memory generation finds itself cast adrift.⁴¹

Pop literature links the breakdown of traditional categories, specifically the binary East and West Germany, to a break down in male and female gender roles

38 Ibid., p. 54. 39 Ibid., p. 158. 40 Ibid., p. 166. 41 Gillian Pye, ‘Anxiety and the Archive’, p. 322.

182 

 Corinna Kahnke

and to a more general identity crisis. Certainly authors and narrators from the former east and west bear the markers of gender and geography. However, what informs the texts is not so much the specific ‘Ostalgie’ or ‘Westalgie’ [nostalgic longing for pre-unification West-Germany] as much as a common nostalgia for one’s childhood. These childhood memories are indeed located in the former East or West Germany and their socio-political and cultural contexts. However, rather than seeing these settings as a dividing factor, creating separate literatures for east and west, pop literature offers common ground through its generic conventions and thereby becomes a shared platform for the German-German generation of the unified Germany and Berlin Republic. The authors’ struggles with questions of national and personal identity through and within the genre of Popliteratur – via the characters portrayed, the narrative structure employed, the encyclopaedic construction of (pop) cultural frameworks and especially the shared retreat into childhood as one of the coping mechanisms – underline the commonalities between the texts. This parallel becomes especially obvious when reading Generation Golf and Zonenkinder together: not only do they share the same format, they also present similar crises of identity and react to them through a nostalgic return into childhood. Gender is portrayed as a social construct and as an insufficient identityforming concept. ‘Gendering’ the two former Germanys points to a similar break-down of east and west as functioning markers in determining personal or national characteristics. Masculine and feminine become unstable categories, and East and West Germans are portrayed in a similar way. All identities are performed and performable and therefore not secure, reliable markers. In Generation Golf, the narrator depicts among other issues the change and break-down of masculine roles and the resulting crisis of masculinity, a topic that the text shares with other pop literature narratives such as Soloalbum, Christian Kracht’s Faserland or Tomboy by Thomas Meinecke (1998). Similarly, one finds out from the narrator of Zonenkinder that East or West German identity mostly lies within attitude and performance. As one discovers that such behaviour can be modified and learned – at least as far as the narrator’s generation is concerned – this distinction loses its power as a permanent characteristic of identity. The narratives allow their readers to partake and ‘experience feelings of loss and nostalgia’ as well as ‘a sense of feeling lost in the Berlin Republic’.⁴² In both cases, childhood is constructed through idealized memories of customs

42 Nicole Thesz, ‘Adolescence in the “Ostalgie” Generation’, Oxford German Studies, 37.1 (2008), 107–23 (pp. 108, 110).

Generation Golf Meets Zonenkinder: Gender, (N)ostalgia and the Berlin Republic 

 183

and products as they were experienced in school, at home and at play. Furthermore, childhood appears to offer clear answers to questions of identity. In both texts, the reader finds statements referring to the clarity of things. For Generation Golf this clarity emerges in a childhood afternoon as he prepares to watch the ‘right’ Saturday night show⁴³; in Zonenkinder, a similar confidence results from (socialist) youth group activities.⁴⁴ While this perceived security stems from different sources  – consumerist ideology in the case of Generation Golf and socialist ideals for Zonenkinder – in both instances the certainty of knowing what was right outweighed the means by which this perceived clarity was achieved. Questions and insecurities which in the present trouble the respective narrators, specifically regarding gender identity or the question of national characteristics, were not an issue within their childhoods. Nonetheless, it stands to reason that by locating this certainty within childhood, the narrators implicitly acknowledge that this certainty remains tied to ignorance and naiveté and cannot be sustained. Nostalgia plays a crucial role in these escapist accounts of childhood. What remains intriguing here is the mingling of what Fred Davis calls private and collective nostalgia. Whereas private nostalgia […] refers to those symbolic images and allusions from the past that by virtue of their source in a particular person’s biography tend to be more idiosyncratic, individuated, and particularistic in their reference, collective nostalgia, by contrast, refers to that condition in which the symbolic objects are of a highly public, widely shared, and familiar character, those symbolic resources from the past that under proper conditions can trigger wave upon wave of nostalgic feeling in millions of persons at the same time.⁴⁵

The personal nostalgia offered in both of these narratives springs from pop-cultural artefacts, familiar material that carries particular significance for the authors’ peers, and thus blurs the distinctions between personal and collective nostalgia to create common ground. This theme carries over into the new millennium. If we read Zonenkinder as an answer to Generation Golf, then we can also interpret Illies’s latest narrative Ortsgespräch [Local Call/Talk of the Town] (2006) as a continued exploration of the themes of home, nostalgia and the estrangement from one’s youth and ori-

43 Florian Illies, Generation Golf, p. 9. 44 Jana Hensel, Zonenkinder, pp. 83–88. 45 Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday. A Sociology of Nostalgia (New York: Free Press, 1979), pp. 122–23.

184 

 Corinna Kahnke

gins.⁴⁶ In this text, just as in Zonenkinder, the narrator finds himself returning to his childhood by taking a trip from Berlin to his provincial hometown, Schlitz, hoping to re-visit his early years there. Significantly, he wants to escape Berlin, by then the capital of the Berlin Republic. Once again, a trip down memory lane serves as an escapist route away from current problems, and the attempt to recreate a childhood functions as a reaction towards the loss of individual and national identity and clear definitions of gender roles. This crisis is counteracted by the exploration of the concept of ‘Heimat’ [native home] within a nostalgic return to the narrator’s early days. Just as in the two previously discussed narratives, Ortsgespräch establishes its idealized childhood moments through (now lost) products and behavioural models. And just as in Zonenkinder and Generation Golf, the attempt to return fails, as neither time nor place are the same as what the narrator was hoping to return to. Yet it is exactly this loss that connects the narrator to others in his generation, confirming the unification of east and west (literature) in pop literature.

46 Albert Meier, ‘Witzige Erforschung der Heimat’, in Zwischen Globalisierung und Regionalisierung. Zur Darstellung von Zeitgeschichte in deutschsprachiger Gegenwartsliteratur, ed. by Martin Hellström and Edgar Platen (Munich: Iudicum, 2008), pp. 157–65 (p. 164).

Section 4: Pop in the New Millennium

Gillian Pye

The Party’s Over: PeterLicht and the End of Capitalism Described as surreal class clown, pop-phantom and multi-media poet, singer/ author PeterLicht¹ is one of German pop’s most fascinating and mysterious figures. Licht first captured the public’s attention in 2001 with the single ‘Sonnendeck’ [Sun Deck] and has since released five albums, with another on the way.² In addition, he has also made headlines on the German literary scene by receiving two of four awards at the 2007 Ingeborg Bachmann Prize.³ The Bachmann Prize jury warmly praised Licht, with Iris Radisch in particular valuing his ‘mastery of double perspective’.⁴ Licht has since published his prize-winning story ‘Die Geschichte meiner Einschätzung am Anfang des dritten Jahrtausends’ [‘The Story of My Assessment at the Beginning of the Third Millennium’], as well as a collection of short texts entitled Wir werden siegen. Buch vom Ende des Kap italismus [We Will Be Victorious. Book of the End of Capitalism].⁵ His current project entitled Lob der Realität [Praise of Reality] will also be released in book

1 Julian Weber, ‘Was ist Popliteratur?’, Stern.de, 1 January 2008; (http://www.stern.de/kultur/ buecher-was-ist-popliteratur-605768.html). All translations in this chapter are my own; Frank Sawatzki, ‘Wir werden siegen’, Zeit Online, ‘Musik’ section, 11 May 2006 (http://www.zeit. de/2006/20/D-Aufmacher_xml). The missing space is intentional and for critics such as Sawatzki this is because Licht stages himself ‘like an event show or a multi-purpose arena’. Ibid. Licht’s real name is reputedly Meinrad Jungblut. 2 ‘Vierzehn Lieder’ (Munich: Modul, 2001); ‘Stratosphärenlieder’ (Munich: Modul, 2003); ‘Lieder vom Ende des Kapitalismus’ (Berlin: Motor Music, 2006), ‘Melancholie und Gesellschaft’ (Berlin: Motor Music, 2008), ‘Das Ende der Beschwerde’ (Berlin: Motor Music, 2011). The most recent album, forthcoming at the time of writing and entitled ‘Lob der Realität’ [‘In Praise of Reality’] is scheduled for release in October 2014 with distributor Rough Trade/Staatsakt, thus indicating that PeterLicht has now split from his previous record company Motor Music. According to his website, http://www.lob-der-realitaet.de/, the artist is inviting fans to contribute pictures which may be used as images for the vinyl/CD release. The online edition of the music magazine Spex specifies that these images should be composed so that artist’s face remains hidden (http:// www.spex.de/2014/07/07/peter-licht-lob-der-realitaet/). 3 Licht received the 3Sat Prize and the audience prize. The other two awards presented at this annual literary festival are the Kelag (Jury) prize and the Ernst Wilner Prize. 4 A summary of the jury’s discussion can be found online at: http://bachmannpreis.orf.at/bachmannpreis/texte/stories/203843/index.html. 5 Wir werden siegen. Buch vom Ende des Kapitalismus (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2008). Further references to this text will be given with the abbreviation WWS; ‘Die Geschichte meiner Einschätzung am Anfang des dritten Jahrtausends’ (Munich: Blumenbar, 2008).

188 

 Gillian Pye

form in autumn 2014.⁶ Moreover, with S. Esther Struck, he has written his first full-length play, ‘Das Abhandenkommen der Staaten’ [‘The Disappearance of States’].⁷ The following discussion considers Licht’s writing in the context of his pop persona and explores both his thematic concerns and narrative strategies against the background of debates sparked by the so-called Popliteratur of the 1990s. Defining a generic Popliteratur is difficult because this umbrella term is an artificial construct. As Eckhard Schumacher suggests, the argument about whether pop literature is dead is therefore rather misleading, since its existence is predicated upon the critical discussions sparked by certain texts.⁸ If we must admit that we cannot define pop literature, we can, however, be certain of two facts.⁹ First, authors associated by critics with German pop writing of the 1990s are still publishing and, second, their work often continues to be judged against assumptions about typical themes and techniques of pop writing. As Schumacher shows, such assumptions reflect two broad tendencies: on the one hand, hedonistic ‘Partytalk’ and superficial descriptions of the consumer capitalist world, a tendency which has often been associated with Christian Kracht and Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre, whose early work has come to represent the pop literature of the ‘Spaßgesellschaft’ [fun society].¹⁰ On the other hand some pop writing has been defined by formal experimentation akin to early twentieth-century avant-garde modernism. This writing, associated with the so-called ‘Suhrkamp-

6 The book is scheduled to appear with Blumenbar Verlag in October 2014. 7 Staged versions of Licht’s song texts were presented at the Münchener Kammerspiele by Christiane Pohle in 2006 and in 2009 by Mareike Mikat at the Skala theatre in Leipzig. See Silvia Stammen, ‘Christiane Pohle nach Peter Licht [sic] ‘Wir werden siegen! Und das ist erst der Anfang’ Theater Heute, May 2006, p. 36 and Christian Horn, ‘Die Geburt der Poesie aus dem Geiste des Pop’, Frankfurter Rundschau, 25 May 2009 (http://www.fr-online.de/kultur/theater/diegeburt-der-poesie-aus-dem-geiste-des-pop/-/1473346/2878412/-/index.html). In addition, from January-March 2009 PeterLicht staged the ‘Festival vom unsichtbaren Menschen’ [‘Festival of the Invisible Person’] at the Munich Kammerspiele, which included readings, concerts and staged versions of his work ( http://www.muenchner-kammerspiele.de/programm/peterlicht-festivalvom-unsichtbaren-menschen/). 8 Eckhard Schumacher, ‘Das Ende der Popliteratur. Eine Fortsetzungsgeschichte (Teil 2)’, in Poetik der Oberfläche. Die deutschsprachige Popliteratur der 1990er Jahre, ed. by Olaf Grabienski, Till Huber and Jan-Noël Thon (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), pp. 53–67 (p. 55). 9 Ibid., p. 65. 10 Ibid., pp.  60–61. Stuckrad Barre’s and Kracht’s respective debut novels are amongst the best-known examples of this trend: Benjamin von Stuckrad Barre, Soloalbum (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1998) and Christian Kracht, Faserland (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1995).

The Party’s Over: PeterLicht and the End of Capitalism 

 189

Pop’ authors, might be considered more of a method than a set of thematic concerns.¹¹ This chapter draws two consequences from Schumacher’s discussion: first, although it is difficult to define pop literature, preconceptions about its forms and themes offer interpretive frameworks for new texts. Second, critical conceptions of pop literature continue to influence the texts themselves.¹² This essay situates Licht’s work in relation to the two main strands of the debate sketched above. It begins by considering how the artist interprets the relationship between his writing, pop music and the media and explores how Licht moves pop literature on from the hedonistic models of the late 1990s. Specifically, it looks at his response to the post-9/11 environment by returning quite explicitly to the roots of pop literature, namely modernist avant-garde traditions such as Dada, Surrealism and Expressionism.¹³ The analysis centres on the eclectic mix of short prose texts, one liners, lyrics, poems and drawings contained in Wir werden siegen, the short story ‘Die Geschichte meiner Einschätzung am Anfang des dritten Jahrtausends’ as well as selected examples from Licht’s song lyrics.

Okayfinden, Supersagen. Pop as Theme and Method In their discussion of texts published between 1995 and 2001, Frank Degler and Ute Paulokat argue that Popliteratur tends to exhibit the following features: it involves the intermedial staging of an author’s identity and is part of his or her

11 Ibid., pp.  63–65. The term ‘Suhrkamp Pop’ refers to writers who published pop texts with Suhrkamp and whose writing is often formally experimental primarily. This includes in particular Andreas Neumeister, Thomas Meinecke and Rainald Goetz. Neumeister’s texts frequently consist of repeated and modulated words and phrases, recalling the structure of electronic music. Thomas Meinecke often employs the technique of extensively listing information, which his protagonists collect in obsessive research. Goetz collages momentary impressions and scraps of information as they are perceived by a narrator figure. Typical examples include Andreas Neumeister, Gut Laut. Version 2.0 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2001); Andreas Neumeister, Angela Davis löscht ihre Website (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2002); Thomas Meinecke, Hellblau (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2001); Thomas Meinecke, Musik (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2004); Rainald Goetz, Rave (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1998); Rainald Goetz, Abfall für alle (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1999). 12 Schumacher, ‘Das Ende der Popliteratur’, p. 60. 13 See for example Thomas Ernst’s discussion of Dada, Surrealism and pop in Popliteratur (Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 2005), pp. 10–13.

190 

 Gillian Pye

wider creative portfolio, often including music or journalism; it usually features pop music as theme and/or formal influence; it practises an archiving function, particularly with respect to contemporary lifestyles and the branding of consumer objects; it portrays the mood and interests of a young generation; it exercises social criticism, even if this means the withdrawal to a neo-conservative or apolitical position; it explores gender roles; it is preoccupied with death and illness; and it responds to the overwhelming sense of the banal with an ironic-melancholic attitude.¹⁴ With the exception of the issue of gender, Licht’s work corresponds to almost all of the main criteria listed by Degler and Paulokat. In some cases it represents a continuation or intensification of these key trends. At the same time, by employing the ‘mastery of the double perspective’, it often engages with such trends self-reflexively and critically. Perhaps one of PeterLicht’s most obviously pop characteristics is his concern with the staging of his own persona. This aspect is most evident in his frequent refusal to allow his face to be filmed or photographed. Instead, objects often obscure his features or even appear in his place.¹⁵ At the reading for the Bachmann Prize, although the studio audience could see the author, television viewers saw only the back of his head and a caption reading ‘PeterLicht. Doesn’t want to show his face’. During early concert tours he even refused to appear on stage.¹⁶ This manipulation of media conventions certainly functions as a riposte to the image-saturated world of pop music. However, as one reviewer remarked, it also appears to be a reaction to the ‘the great times of literary revolt’ of the late 1990s, when so-called Popliterati courted the media.¹⁷ Perhaps most notoriously, in 1999 Christian Kracht and Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre appeared together

14 Frank Degler and Ute Paulokat, Neue Deutsche Popliteratur (Munich: Fink, 2008). See especially pp. 9–14. For a similar list see also Dirk Frank, Popliteratur. Arbeitstexte für den Unterricht (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003), pp. 5–31 and Thomas Jung, ‘Trash, Cash oder Chaos? Populäre deutschsprachige Literatur seit der Wende und die sogenannte Popliteratur’, in Alles nur Pop? Anmerkungen zur populären und Popliteratur seit 1990 (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2002), pp. 15– 27. 15 An office chair replaced the singer in the video for ‘Sonnendeck’ (2001). Elsewhere, Licht has appeared as a potato man. See ‘Feste der Schönheit, Hymnen des Schmerzes’, FAZ.NET, 22 April 2003, text attributed to @jöt (http://www.faz.net/-00mthd). Licht’s official Facebook site currently shows a picture of the artist with a teacup obscuring his face. More recently, Licht has appeared in person: see for example Daniel Herder’s account of a face to face meeting in ‘Das Phantom der Popper’, in Spiegel Online, 18 May 2006 (http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/ musik/0,1518,416730,00.html). 16 See ‘Feste der Schönheit, Hymnen des Schmerzes’. 17 ‘Seichtgebiete der modernen Literatur. Was wurde aus der viel gehypten Popliteratur?’, Profil 30, August, 2008. (http://www.profil.at/articles/0835/560/217568/seichtgebiete-literatur).

The Party’s Over: PeterLicht and the End of Capitalism 

 191

in an advertisement for the Peek & Cloppenburg clothing store, prompting the criticism that they had overstepped the boundary between literature and commerce.¹⁸ As well as the concern with his media image, Licht embodies the notion of the Popliterat as multi-talented crossover artist.¹⁹ He is certainly not alone in combining a successful pop music career with literary activity: artists such as Christiane Rösinger (vocalist with Lassie Singers and subsequently Britta), the singer Funny von Dannen and the musician Hans Platzgumer are all published writers.²⁰ Despite their involvement in the music industry, however, such crossover artists do not necessarily write about it and indeed only two texts by those mentioned above focus on this theme.²¹ Likewise, Licht does not thematize music and aside from a reference to the singer Johannes (Joopi) Heesters there is virtually no mention of it in his texts.²² In formal terms, however, music is an important influence. As well as the clearly fertile crossover between literature and music, with lyrics included in Wir werden siegen, Licht also employs musical strategies for poetic ends.²³ His use of repetition and modulation, for example, recalls Andreas Neumeister’s work: in Neumeister’s Angela Davis löscht ihre Website [Angela Davis Deletes her Website], we read: mobile Kameras immobile Kameras Kameras filmen Kameras

18 On this see Degler and Paulokat, Neue Deutsche Popliteratur, p. 17. 19 Thomas Meinecke is one example of an established ‘crossover’ Popliterat, as he is also well known as a DJ and as part of the band Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle (FSK) formed in 1980 by contributors to the underground magazine Mode und Verzweiflung. 20 Christiane Rösinger, Das schöne Leben (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2008), Liebe wird oft überbewertet. Ein Sachbuch (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2012); Hans Platzgumer, Expedition. Die Reise eines Underground-Musikers in 540 KB (Innsbruck: Skarabeus, 2005), Weiß (Innsbruck: Skarabeus, 2008), Der Elefantenfuß (Innsbruck: Limbus, 2011); Funny van Dannen, Der Tag als Rosi kam (Munich: Heyne 2004), Neues von Gott (Munich: Heyne, 2006), Komm in meine Arme (Munich: Heyne, 2006), Am Wegesrand (Munich: Heyne, 2007), Zurück im Paradies (Munich: Kunstmann, 2007). 21 Namely Rösinger’s Das schöne Leben and Platzgumer’s Expedition. Die Reise eines Underground-Musikers in 540 KB. 22 In ‘An einem großen Erdloch’ [‘In a Huge Hole in the Earth’], WWS, pp. 58–59. On Heesters see endnote 73. 23 Julian Weber points out that the book Wir werden siegen served as inspiration for the 2008 album ‘Melancholie und Gesellschaft’. Weber, ‘Was ist Popliteratur?’.

192 

 Gillian Pye

mobile Infrarotkameras immobile Infrarotkameras Kameras filmen Kameras, wie sie Kameras filmen [Mobile cameras immobile cameras cameras film cameras mobile infra-red cameras immobile infra-red cameras cameras film cameras, filming cameras]²⁴

In an untitled short text Licht writes: Vieles ist super/katastophal Vieles ist nur mittelsuper/mittelkatastrophal viele Sachverhalte das stimmt mich mittelglücklich oder zumindest nur ein Drittel unglücklich [Lots of things are super/catastrophic Lots of things are just medium-super/medium-catastrophic Lots of things That makes me feel medium-happy Or at least only a third unhappy]²⁵

Both examples show pop as method in which the techniques of repetition and modulation, often associated with electronic music, highlight features of contemporary society. In the repetitive and rhythmic insistence on the words ‘mobil/ immobil’ and ‘Kamera’, Neumeister invokes the claustrophobic atmosphere of surveillance. Licht, on the other hand, plays with the potential of the German compound form to explore the psychological challenges posed by global media communications. The connection established by the modulation between internally contradictory terms like ‘mittelkatastrophal’ [medium-catastrophic] and ‘mittelglücklich’ [medium-happy] points to the need to reconcile large amounts of external information about the experiences of (unknown) others with an internal

24 Angela Davis löscht ihre Website (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2002), p. 20. 25 WWS, pp. 7–9 ( p. 8).

The Party’s Over: PeterLicht and the End of Capitalism 

 193

sense of personal well-being. Licht’s use of the modulated compound reflects the struggle to cope with these demands and it suggests a resultant loss of proportion and scale, which appears absurd. Hence some forms of suffering are belittled as merely ‘medium catastrophic’, while personal happiness is minutely observed and categorized, here in terms of fractions (‘at least only a third unhappy’). Licht’s interest in archiving the language of his generation might also be described as typically pop. As Moritz Baßler argues in Der deutsche Pop-Roman. Die neuen Archivisten (2002), the drive to classify, record and archive the styles and discourses of the moment provides one of the defining features of German pop writing in the late twentieth century.²⁶ Baßler shows how pop writers employ strategies associated with the lexicon and the archive in order to conserve the here and now in literary form and identifies classifying, sorting, annotating, list-making, note-taking and a reflection on these processes as common features across a diverse body of work. In addition to strategies such as listing, note-taking and a self-reflexive attitude to observation, which appear throughout Wir werden Siegen, Licht employs the vocabulary of his generation, thereby archiving current modes of communication.²⁷ The terms Beipflichten Okayfinden Supersagen [Agree Think it’s ok Say it’s super]²⁸

which appear as the last of a series of one- or two-line texts following a piece entitled ‘Ich gehe durch einen Park’ [‘I Walk through a Park’], typify this tendency.²⁹ All three terms reflect the attitude of a generation which seems unwilling or unable to engage in conflict or critical thinking. Rather, in post-industrial consumer capitalism, maximum flexibility and cooperation are essential and with the terms ‘okay’ and ‘super’ Licht records the actual vocabulary in which this

26 Moritz Baßler, Der deutsche Pop-Roman. Die neuen Archivisten (Munich: Beck, 2002). 27 See for example the song ‘Wir sind jung und machen uns Sorgen über unsere Chancen auf dem Arbeitsmarkt’ [‘We are young and we’re worried about our chances on the job market’], WWS, p. 134, track 10 of ‘Vierzehn Lieder’. 28 WWS, p. 28. These lines also appear in the song ‘beipflichten’, track 5 of ‘Melancholie und Gesellschaft’. 29 WWS, p. 25.

194 

 Gillian Pye

behaviour crystallizes.³⁰ Via the compound forms including the verbs ‘finden’ and ‘sagen’, however, he also distances the narrator slightly. Despite the somewhat mocking tone the lyrical ‘I’ nevertheless identifies with his generation, often referring to ‘wir’ [us]. This simultaneous presentation of two slightly different standpoints perhaps exemplifies the ‘double perspective’ Radisch admires in Licht’s work. This feature constitutes a means of addressing two of the central problems associated with pop’s drive to archive the superficial, the ordinary and the banal: first, that pop constitutes little more than a process of name-checking and thus merely reproduces consumer capitalist superficiality; and second, by adopting the banal, limited language of ordinary young people, pop remains necessarily restricted in its capacity to express critical ideas.³¹ The ‘double perspective’ employed by Licht in this brief example goes some way to addressing these issues by constructing a sense of narrative distance and critical awareness, while simultaneously maintaining a sense of empathy with the generation evoked. In this way, Licht is able to practise a form of cultural archiving while also adopting a self-reflexive, critical stance, without speaking entirely from the outside or from a position of (generational) superiority. The prologue to the album ‘Lieder vom Ende des Kapitalismus’ [‘Songs from the End of Capitalism’], printed in the cover booklet accompanying the CD, offers another example of Licht’s ironic engagement with the mood and language of his generation. As the following extract shows, the dialogue, featuring a lone voice and a chorus, is littered with contemporary colloquial turns of phrase: Ich hab so festgestellt: ich bin immer am Machen. Arbeit oder Liebe oder meine eigenen Pläne noch und so. Eigentlich immer beschäftigt. Ganz schön viel. Ich muss da so vorneweg gehen denk ich mir. Das ist so ein breiter Strom. Und das kommt so daher und ich komm so daher und das hört nicht auf denk ich mir, das ist glaub ich das was man sehen muß. Das hört nich auf. Das ist erst der Anfang. Das muss man so umarmen. Aber irgendwie. Ich würd gern mal genauer wissen. Irgendwie, ich bräuchte einen Praktikanten.

30 This effect is achieved in Kathrin Röggla’s documentary novel wir schlafen nicht (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2004), in which Röggla explores the alienation of a postmodern, post-industrial workforce. See Elaine Martin, ‘New-Economy Zombies. Kathrin Röggla’s wir schlafen nicht’, in Transitions. Emerging Women Writers in German-language Literature, ed. by Valerie Heffernan and Gillian Pye, German Monitor, 76 (2013), pp. 131–48. 31 Reviewing Tristesse Royale, Henryk M. Broder and Reinhard Mohr deplore the focus on the material, which in their view denies any real critical perspective: ‘The weight of the world evaporates in laborious insider jargon and all that remains is the pure surface of the commodity world’. See ‘Die faselnden Fünf’, Der Spiegel Online, 49/1999 (http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/ print/d-15188916.html). On Tristesse Royale, see footnote 40 below.

The Party’s Over: PeterLicht and the End of Capitalism 

 195

[I’ve noticed that I’m always doing something. Work or love or my own plans and stuff. Actually I’m always busy. Loads of stuff. I kind of think I have to move forward. It’s such a broad stream. And it kind of comes up on you and there I am and it just doesn’t stop and I think that’s what you have to see. It just doesn’t stop. And that’s just the start. You just have to kind of embrace it. Somehow or other. I’d kind of like to know more exactly. Somehow I would need an intern.]

The frequent use of the particle ‘so’ characterizes this utterance, as well as qualifying terms such as ‘eigentlich’, ‘ganz’ and ‘irgendwie’ [actually, rather, somehow], which express uncertainty and disorientation. At the same time, such insecurity articulates itself in a self-conscious manner, which reflects concerns about the need to position oneself in society and to control and maintain an image. This problem recalls the disorientation and apathy experienced by the ‘depressive Dandys’ of the 1990s.³² This mood was captured most notoriously by the 2001 book Tristesse Royale: Das popkulturelle Quintett [Tristesse Royale: The Popcultural Quintett] (1999), in which the authors record their disaffection with contemporary society, while luxuriating in the Hotel Adlon in Berlin.³³ The protagonist in Christian Kracht’s Faserland embodies another example of this tendency, this time represented in (more overtly) fictional form. Kracht’s rich young man, who travels around Germany from party to party, seems only interested in surface phenomena and in the trappings of wealth. His world view is limited to clichéd assumptions and to cataloguing the expensive brands, such as Rolex, Barbour and Mercedes, consumed by his rich friends. His limited ability to express his own thoughts and feelings and the alienation which seems to be symptomatic of his generation is portrayed through the ‘largely empty diction of the world of commerce’.³⁴ Not only the repetition of brand names characterizes this ‘empty diction’, but also the language of uncertainty expressed frequently in expressions such as ‘irgendwie’, ‘glaube ich’ and ‘ich meine’ [somehow, I believe, I think]. In an essay in which he compares Kracht to his American role model Bret Easton Ellis, Matthias Mertens criticizes this narrative strategy, arguing that it attempts

32 See Alexandra Tacke, Depressive Dandys. Spielformen der Dekadenz in der Pop-Moderne (Vienna: Böhlau, 2009). 33 Joachim Bessing, Christian Kracht, Eckhart Nickel, Alexander von Schönburg and Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre, Tristesse Royale. Das popkulturelle Quintett (Berlin: Ullstein, 1999). The explicitly theatrical staging of text and the heavily ironic overtones make it clear that the authors were aware of their provocative stance. The combination of a genuine stocktaking of the situation of a generation of Germans born in the 1980s with a snobbish invective on styles and trends and an, at times, pointed disrespect for history fuelled the notoriety of these so-called ‘popliterati’. 34 Anke S. Biendarra, ‘Der Erzähler als “popmoderner Flaneur” in Christian Krachts Roman Faserland’, German Life and Letters, 55.2 (2002), 164–79 (p. 168).

196 

 Gillian Pye

to give the reader the (erroneous) impression that ‘underneath, the story is replete with meaning and is narrated in full consciousness’.³⁵ If PeterLicht cites the similarly vague lexis of his generation, then he does so, as suggested above, with a mixture of self-reflexive distance and empathy. In the examples already discussed, Licht creates such distance in the construction of incongruities, be they mediated via the compound forms ‘okayfinden’ and ‘supersagen’, or in the text accompanying ‘Lieder vom Ende des Kapitalismus’, by the disparity set up between disorientation – ‘ich würd mal genauer wissen’ [I’d like to know more precisely] – and the suggested solution to hire a ‘Praktikant’ [intern]. The approach is certainly gentler than that of the protagonists in Soloalbum [Solo Album] or Faserland, who express their frustration and disaffection in aggressive bouts of snobbery, which for one critic amounts to a kind of ‘Geschmacksterrorismus’ [terrorism of taste].³⁶ The above examples from Licht’s work suggest how the writer deals with pop concerns, specifically the archiving of a generation’s sounds and styles and its experience of disorientation. However, at the same time these examples also illustrate Schumacher’s assertion that some texts continue to be informed by pop literature as critical framework. In other words, Licht’s self-reflexive stance as he archives the lexis of his generation underscores his conscious use of vague jargon as a narrative strategy which may have an ambiguous relationship to emptiness. Furthermore, in Licht’s work the exploration of the banal and the focus on disaffection and alienation, which link his writing thematically with pop texts by Kracht, von Stuckrad-Barre et al., merges with the more formally experimental strand of pop writing exemplified by writers such as Neumeister. Moreover, Licht reverts to the very roots of pop by drawing more explicitly on modernist models such as Surrealism, Expressionism and Dada. In so doing, he communicates an early twenty-first century experience of alienation in which the nonsensical experiences of globalized, late consumer capitalism are juxtaposed with an awareness of the apocalyptic-catastrophic.

35 Matthias Mertens, ‘Robbery, assault and battery. Christian Kracht, Benjamin von Stuckrad Barre und ihre mutmaßlichen Vorbilder Bret Easton Ellis und Nick Hornby’, in Pop-Literatur, ed. by Heinz Ludwig Arnold and Jörgen Schäfer (Text + Kritik, Sonderband [2003]), pp. 201–217 (p. 208). 36 An anonymous reviewer commented: ‘in Soloalbum hatred is the first-person narrator’s answer to the confusion of post adolescence’, and then ‘behind the angry young man there is only a terrorist of taste’. See ‘Amoklauf eines Geschmacksterroristen’, Der Spiegel, 37/1998.

The Party’s Over: PeterLicht and the End of Capitalism 

 197

Großstadtgiraffen [Big City Giraffes]. Infusing Pop with the Absurd The links between avant-garde modernism and pop are part of a long tradition, which has led to the almost ubiquitous presence of avant-garde style in advertising and popular culture today. Recently, for example, the American singer Lady Gaga (whose very name recalls Dada), has drawn attention to surreal imagery in pop culture, with amongst other things a ‘meat dress’. Designed by Franc Fernandez and worn by Gaga at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards, the dress aroused huge media interest and some controversy. The idea is in fact borrowed from Canadian artist Jana Sterbak, who is well known for her surreal meat sculptures, including ‘Vanitas. Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorexic’ (1987) and the wittily titled ‘Chair Apollinaire’ (1996). Gaga’s use of this image, as well as its appearance in other contemporary artworks, such as Mark Ryan’s painting ‘Incarnation’ (2009), reflect the currency of the surreal in the world of pop, although the exact aesthetic origins of images often go unmentioned.³⁷ In Wir werden siegen Peter Licht himself uses the image of meat-clothing in the expression ‘Kappe nähen aus frischen dünnen Rindfleischlappen’ [sewing a cap out of fresh, thin beef cloths].³⁸ This image shows that Licht’s writing is not only concerned with archiving the sounds and language of the environment, using formal techniques which recall pop music, but that the visual also serves as a very strong influence in his literary work. The opening text in Wir werden siegen, entitled ‘Der Beginn des dritten Jahrtausends’ [‘The Beginning of the Third Millennium’], offers one example of Dada-esque absurd images in Licht’s work: ‘[D]raußen vor dem Fenster zogen die Großstadtgiraffen vorbei (Großstadtgiraffen mit Bestuhlung an den Beinen)’ [Outside the window the city giraffes passed by. (City giraffes with seating on their legs)].³⁹ Elsewhere, the influences of nonsense poetry are clear, for example in the poem ‘Mein Verhältnis zu Insekten’ [‘My Relationship to Insects’] where the final verse reads: Mücken zerdrücken Asseln bestaunen Auf Motten hocken

37 On Surrealism and pop music see John Richardson, Popular Music and the Audiovisual Surreal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 38 WWS, p. 7. 39 Ibid., p. 7.

198 

 Gillian Pye

Zecken necken bevor wir sie zwicken (in der Mitte durch mit dem Daumennagel). [Squashing gnats Marvelling at woodlice Sitting on moths Teasing ticks Before we squish them (right through the middle with our thumbnail).]⁴⁰

Some texts, such as ‘Die transylvanische Verwandte ist da’ [‘The Transylvanian Relative is Here’] which also features in song form on Licht’s first album ‘Vierzehn Lieder’ [‘Fourteen Songs’], seem to rest on a corny joke: here the literal embodiment of the phrase ‘blood is thicker than water’.⁴¹ This translation of the saying from the metaphorical to the literal operates with an absurd logic which extends into the banal: the Transylvanian relative arrives unannounced and then exploits the narrator’s hospitality by eating large amounts of meat and drinking only ‘thick, red, sweet wine’.⁴² Aside from the collage-like strategy employed in many of the texts in Wir werden siegen and Licht’s apparently Dadaist employment of the absurd, a central feature of his work which particularly links it to Surrealism is his ethnographic attention to the daily environment.⁴³ The Surrealists’ fascination with the surface of things, itself a reworking of a Romantic impulse, can be seen as a precursor to pop’s fascination with the ‘now’. As Andrew Calcutt argues, in the 1960s the cult of spontaneity encapsulated in the Beatle’s call to arms ‘Be Here Now’ had ‘acquired the status of authenticity and truth’.⁴⁴ Beginning already a decade or so earlier, pioneers of U.S. pop writing such as Jack Kerouac had embraced spontaneity as both a lifestyle choice and a mode of writing, and this impulse has continued to inform pop writing up to the present.⁴⁵ By the late 1990s Popliteratur

40 Ibid., p. 43. 41 Ibid., p. 44. 42 Jerry Palmer describes the logic of the absurd as a comic strategy which creates absurdity by juxtaposing incompatible schemes of reasoning as possible resolutions to the incongruity set up in a comic situation. See Jerry Palmer, The Logic of the Absurd (London: BFI, 1987), p. 39; WWS, p. 44. 43 See Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life. Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 59–94. 44 Andrew Calcutt, Arrested Development. Pop Culture and the Erosion of Adulthood (London: Cassell, 1998), pp. 49, 56. 45 On the ‘now’ and (German) pop writing, see Eckhard Schumacher, Gerade Eben Jetzt. Schreibweisen der Gegenwart (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2003).

The Party’s Over: PeterLicht and the End of Capitalism 

 199

reflected a generation who, having turned their backs on the past and lost faith in the future, were stranded in a ‘now’ of empty hedonism.⁴⁶ What is striking in Licht’s texts, however, is that despite his interest in archiving the everyday, even the ‘now’ seems elusive: time itself appears to be subject to disturbances, as suggested in the poem ‘Blaues Blau’ [‘Blue Blue’]: Wir stürzen in diesen Morgen blaues Gras und morgen war hier mal ozean blaues Land morgen fliegen wir Flugzeug blaues Blau in irgendeinem Himmel sind wir gewesen. [We fall into this morning blue grass and tomorrow there was once here ocean blue land tomorrow we’ll fly in an aeroplane blue blue we have been in some sky or other.]⁴⁷

The confusion of tenses in this verse expresses an experience of dissolution, or the sense that time and space are imploding, reflecting the information society that forms the context for Licht’s writing. Moreover, Licht’s portrayal of the material world is also disturbed. Often, close observation of objects is disrupted by absurd, dream-like juxtapositions which undermine rational functionality. Of ‘Pürierstäbe’ [stick blenders], for example, Licht says, ‘Ich träumte ich wäre mit einem Pürierstab unterwegs und pürierte die Lampen einer Stadt’ [I dreamed I was walking around with a stick blender, blending the lamps in a town].⁴⁸ In addition, the texts often blur the boundaries between people and things, recalling the way Licht himself has substituted inanimate objects for himself. This practice evokes Surrealist imagery, epitomised by René Magritte’s painting, ‘The Son of Man’ (1964), in which an apple obscures the face of a gentleman. In ‘Nationalitäten’ [‘Nationalities’]⁴⁹ for example, Licht describes Belgians as having ‘gedrechselte Füße aus Holz’ [feet made of turned

46 Jung, ‘Trash, Cash oder Chaos’, pp. 19–20. Christian Kracht’s Faserland (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1995) is a prominent example of this tendency, as is Alexa von Henning Lange’s Relax (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1999). Even Rainald Goetz’s account of the rave community, part of his ‘Geschichte der Gegenwart’ entitled Heute Morgen, features both the prosaic commercialization and the drug-fuelled alienation of the club scene. Rave (Frankfurt a. M: Suhrkamp, 1998). 47 WWS, p. 11. 48 Ibid., p. 86. 49 Ibid., pp. 68–71.

200 

 Gillian Pye

wood]⁵⁰ whilst the French are ‘üblicherweise luftgefedert’ [usually have air suspension] with bones that are ‘verstärkt durch ein hochwertiges Titangestänge’ [strengthened with high quality titanium rods].⁵¹ Conversely, material objects often have human characteristics. In the text ‘Ich wollte glücklich sein’ [‘I Wanted to be Happy’] the narrator visits the trash heap at Ossendorf, where objects seem to come to life as machinery crushes them: 1. Der Koffer verändert seine Form. 2. Das Sideboard tanzt ein wenig. 3. Die Stühle machen letzte Geräusche. 4. Nur der Futon bleibt stumm, wie er da liegt und sich irgendetwas ein letztes Mal auf ihm waltzt. [1. The suitcase changes shape 2. The sideboard dances a little. 3. The chairs make their last sounds 4. Only the futon says nothing, lying there as something rolls around on it for the last time.]⁵²

This imagery recalls the practice of Surrealists like Aragon, who adopted an ethnographic viewpoint, seeking to ‘piece together the mythology of a society on the basis of close scrutiny of its material culture’ and thereby hoping to disrupt conventional viewpoints by means of surprising juxtapositions.⁵³ The desire to grasp objects ‘in the present of their presence as events rather than forms’ reflected the belief that focusing on the banal and the everyday could revitalize the environment and make an epiphany possible.⁵⁴ By drawing heavily on such surreal techniques, Licht not only reflects the current interest in Surreal imagery in pop culture but also draws on a tendency already present in the pop literature of the 1990s, namely the concern with lifestyle and identities formed through consumption. Here, he connects this to the engagement with the everyday material environment which appeared at an earlier stage of industrialized consumer capitalism. Exemplified by Surrealism, the modernist preoccupation with materiality often betrayed a more optimistic view of the power of objects to disrupt our perspective, thereby offering access to truth. Although Licht’s texts adopt the techniques of absurd juxtaposition and

50 Ibid., p. 68. 51 Ibid., p. 69. 52 Ibid., pp. 55–59 (p. 55). 53 Sheringham, Everyday Life, p. 75. 54 Ibid., p. 81.

The Party’s Over: PeterLicht and the End of Capitalism 

 201

the scrutiny of the banal as a means of disrupting and perhaps enlivening conventional ways of seeing, they nevertheless reflect an uncertainty associated with the very process of observation itself. Such uncertainty is shown in fluctuating perspectives of scale. An earlier example demonstrated how Licht highlighted doubts about proportion in the alternation between ‘mittelkatastrophal’ and ‘mittelglücklich’. This shift between perceptions of scale also applies to visual images evoked in Licht’s work, the microscopic view alternating with the telescopic. The minute attention to insects, or a worm’s eye viewpoint from which ‘keiner ist kleiner als du der du hüfthoch im Teppich steckst’ [no-one is smaller than you, who stands waist high in the carpet], contrasts images of the vast, lonely expanse of the universe where the last person to walk the earth may let his ‘Beine baumeln […] in die Wärme des Weltalls’ [legs dangle (…) in the warmth of space].⁵⁵ Even bodily materiality appears to dissolve into nothingness: Americans are ‘gedunsen […]. Ihr Körper ist eingesackt in ein schwemmiges Fluidum kostengünstiger Partikel’ [evaporated (...). Their body is slumped in a watery fluid of cheap particles], while the wind blows through ‘Moderatoren’ [presenters], who remain aware of their materiality only because their saliva forms puddles on the studio floors.⁵⁶ The sense of bodily materiality as the ‘letztes Refugium des [...] fragmentierten Subjekts’ [last refuge of the (…) fragmented subject], which Thomas Jung identifies in German pop literature of the 1990s, does not seem to apply here.⁵⁷ Rather, Licht’s work expresses a heightened sense of insecurity, reflected in a lack of physical solidity as well as in the unstable boundaries between human and non-human and in uncertainties of scale and proportion. It is as if the vision of a world where ‘all that is solid’ will ‘melt into air’ has finally become reality.⁵⁸ If the Surrealists’ fascination with everyday materiality manifests itself in the concept that ‘attention is all’, for the generation reflected in Licht’s text this motto seems to have quite a different resonance.⁵⁹ In twenty-first century consumer capitalism attention itself has become a form of currency and in an

55 ‘Die Nacht im Inneren’ [‘The Inside of the Night’], WWS, p. 30; ‘Das absolute Glück’ [‘Absolute Happiness’], WWS, p. 100. 56 Ibid., p. 76. 57 Thomas Jung, ‘Trash, Cash oder Chaos’, p. 20. 58 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983). Berman’s book, which takes its title from Marx and Engel’s expression in The Communist Manifesto, has become a classic text of postmodern cultural theory. Berman explores what is means to be modern in a contemporary sense and argues that modernization results in our experience of contemporary life as fragmented and in constant flux. 59 Sheringham, Everyday Life, p. X.

202 

 Gillian Pye

age of social networking maintaining a personal profile is a major preoccupation.⁶⁰ Licht’s critical response to this issue manifests itself in his refusal to show his face and in his articulation of a language which expresses anxieties about status and positioning. However, he also extends this anxiety beyond everyday concerns: Licht’s focus on materiality, scale and proportion and its expression in absurd and surreal juxtapositions, reflects a broader sense of disorientation in the globalized world. Perhaps this experience provides one explanation for the overwhelming tone of fatigue in Licht’s texts. While a hedonistic lifestyle – however jaded – informs much of the Popliteratur of the 1990s, Licht’s lyrical ‘I’ voices a desire for the peace and quiet more typically associated with old age. The members of the young generation he evokes compete with one another to relax, and are ‘von Beruf Endverbraucher’ [professional end-users] guided by the motto ‘letztendlich wollen wir unsere Ruhe haben’ [at the end of the day we just want a bit of peace].⁶¹ It is rather fitting therefore that Licht’s only reference to pop culture invokes Joopi Heesters, a nonagenarian pop star with a Nazi past.⁶² This self-involved, fatigued generation apparently longs for the security of the retirement home rather than the comforts of childhood as outlined in Florian Ilies’s Generation Golf, or the hedonistic pleasures of nightclubs or parties portrayed in texts by Kracht or Goetz.⁶³ The chorus of the song ‘Trennungslied’ [‘Break-up Song’] states: Hauptsache wir sitzen am Ende alle im selben Heim denn ohne all die anderen Getrennten möchten wir nicht alleine sein. [The main thing is that we are all in the same home at the end because without all of the other separated people we don’t want to be alone.]⁶⁴

60 See Georg Franck, Mentaler Kapitalismus. Eine politische Ökonomie des Geistes (Munich: Hanser, 2005). 61 See ‘Wettentspannen’ [‘Competitive Relaxation’], WWS, pp. 102–103, track 3 of ‘Lieder vom Ende des Kapitalismus’; WWS, pp. 28, 12–13. 62 Born in 1903, Johannes Heesters was, until his death in 2011, reputedly the world’s oldest living entertainer. Heesters earned a certain notoriety – particularly in his native Holland – because of his association with the Nazis. In 2011, he starred in an advertisement for the energy drink Enerxy with DJ Rapper Harris, who at the time was some seventy-three years his junior. 63 Florian Ilies, Generation Golf. Eine Inspektion (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2000). 64 WWS, pp. 22–23; track 6, ‘Melancholie und Gesellschaft’.

The Party’s Over: PeterLicht and the End of Capitalism 

 203

Although this generation seems to crave togetherness, lyrically expressed in the image ‘wir bilden ein gemeinsames Sonnengeflecht’ [together we form a web of sunshine]⁶⁵ it nevertheless remains isolated and lonely: der raum ist voll doch keiner ist irgendwie da. [the room is full but somehow no-one is there.]⁶⁶

‘Kosmosbeschiessen’ [‘Shooting at the Cosmos’]: Melancholy, Absurdity and Catastrophe The feeling of being lonely in a crowd brings to mind the flâneur, that melancholy observer of early twentieth-century life, whose pop literary descendant is the protagonist in Christian Kracht’s Faserland.⁶⁷ Kracht’s flâneur, however, has none of the ease and leisure of his modernist predecessors. Journeying through Germany and into Switzerland by plane, train and car, he adopts the position of lone observer, but remains unable to offer any conscious insights into the people and places he encounters. Instead, his mind appears full of clichés and he is as soulless as the airports, hotels and drunken parties through which he moves. In Licht’s work, however, the flâneur’s perspective acquires a cosmic scale. In ‘Kosmosbeschiessen’, the lyrical ‘I’ outlines his nonsensical and yet poignant plan to fire a canon up into the sky in the hope that ‘vielleicht fällt ja etwas ab für uns’ [maybe something will fall down for us].⁶⁸ In ‘Fünfmal über Licht’ [‘Five Times about Light’], the human world is part of a dark galaxy lit only by a dying star: ‘Das späte Licht einer dunklen Sonne leuchtet in die Nacht in der wir liegen’ [the late light of a dark sun shines into the night where we lie].⁶⁹ The perspective of the melancholy flâneur here becomes that of the cosmonaut, alone in a vast universe. Again, this vantage point reflects anxieties of scale, which link to the

65 WWS, p. 15. 66 ‘Die Sekunden meines Tages’, WWS, p. 48, and ‘Räume räumen’, track 1 of ‘Melancholie und Gesellschaft’. 67 Anke S. Biendarra, ‘Der Erzähler als “popmoderner Flaneur”’. 68 WWS, p. 33. 69 Ibid.

204 

 Gillian Pye

context in which Licht writes, one dominated by the globalized world of communications on the one hand and an awareness of environmental change and destruction on the other. Licht’s melancholy figure perhaps has more in common with eighteenth-century precursors of the flâneur than it does with the witty, urbane dandies of the nineteenth century or their stunted progeny, Kracht’s protagonist. Licht’s direct reference to melancholy in his album title ‘Melancholie und Gesellschaft’ as well as the album credit to Wolf Lepenies, author of an academic study on the subject, typifies an often flippant pop mixing of high and low culture.⁷⁰ At the same time, however, the reference signals Licht’s active engagement with melancholy. This may derive from his own post-unification German context, which some commentators have associated with a pervasive sense of melancholy.⁷¹ In Licht’s text, images of abandoned cityscapes invoke feelings of loss and disorientation experienced in the wake of unification. The appearance of the city as a wounded body in need of nursing and comfort, for example, expresses the material and psychological loss incurred in a period of transition, loss which was made manifest in the renovations and demolitions that transformed many former East German cities: wir salben den Beton wir verbinden die Drähte wir trösten die Maschinen Tropfen für die Elektronik Der Infrastruktur legen wir die Hände auf. [we rub ointment into the concrete we bandage the cables we comfort the machines drops for the electronics we place our hands on the infrastructure.]⁷²

As Lepenies argues, the German fascination with melancholy stems from the eighteenth century, when it served as a response to political disempowerment.⁷³ He shows how at this time the melancholy mode, with its emphasis on an observ-

70 Wolfgang Lepenies, Melancholie und Gesellschaft (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1969). 71 Judith N. Shklar, foreword to Wolfgang Lepenies, Melancholy and Society, trans. by Jeremy Gaines and Doris Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. vii-xvi, xvi. See also Mary Cosgrove, Born under Auschwitz. Melancholy Traditions in Postwar German Literature (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013). 72 ‘Die Sekunden meines Tages’, WWS, pp. 48–49, and ‘Räume räumen’, Ibid. 73 Ibid., p. 61.

The Party’s Over: PeterLicht and the End of Capitalism 

 205

ing, lone consciousness which seeks to shut itself away from the world and find solace in the natural or the provincial, offers a paradoxical means of empowerment.⁷⁴ Such empowerment resides in a ‘privileging of the emotions’ which finds a ‘source of intrinsic value within enforced inactivity and powerlessness’.⁷⁵ Tracing this strategy through into the twentieth century, Lepenies sees it resurfacing in the figures of the dandy and the flâneur, and he argues that they adopt the stance of the melancholy outsider (or in the case of the dandy rather the eccentric outsider) as a form of resistance to the modern world.⁷⁶ As some of the examples discussed here suggest, Licht’s texts may be seen in this tradition of eccentric-melancholy responses to capitalist society, perhaps reflecting the political disenfranchisement of a generation of people who feel that the nebulous, yet overwhelming forces of the global market economy control their fate. In addition to the gentle melancholy – which typically smacks of politically impotent resignation rather than a cry for change  – some of Licht’s texts also evoke fears of catastrophe or apocalypse. For example, images of collapsing buildings recur in a number of his texts, recalling Expressionist precedents.⁷⁷ In the short prose piece ‘Ich stand auf dem Dach’ [‘I Stood on the Roof’] for instance, the narrator stands on the roof of a tower block and imagines the destruction of the building opposite: Ich stand auf dem Dach eines Hochhauses, das gegenüber von einem anderen Hochhaus stand. In meinem Kopf die grobkörnige Vorstellung, daß das andere Gebäude sehr kräftige Schläge oder Schütterungen abbekäme, wie etwa durch eine riesige Abrißbirne oder ein Erdbeben. Siehe da. Genau das geschah. Ich lenkte mit meinen Gedanken die Dekonstruktion des gegenüberliegenden Hauses. Schlag für Schlag zappelte das Gebäude.

74 Ibid., p. 66. 75 Ibid., p. 66. 76 Ibid., pp. 69–70. 77 Perhaps the best known example is Jakob von Hoddis’s poem ‘Weltende’ [‘World’s End’] (1911), which describes an absurd and apocalyptic scene: ‘Dem Bürger fliegt vom spitzen Kopf der Hut / In allen Lüften hallt es wie Geschrei / Dachdecker stürzen ab und gehn entzwei’ [The citizen’s hat flies from his pointed head / the air echoes as if with screams / roofers fall and split in two]. In Expressionismus Lyrik (Stuttgart: Klett, 1980), p. 16. The Expressionist image of collapsing buildings is also prevalent in the poems of Dada writers. Hugo Ball’s poem ‘Cabaret’ (1916) ends with the line ‘das brennende Dach fällt herunter auf ihren Enkel’ [the burning roof falls in on her grandson]. See Gesammelte Gedichte, ed. by Annemarie Schütt-Hennings (Zurich: Die Arche, 1963), p. 23. In both the poems ‘Gesang zur Dämmerung’ and ‘Morfin’, Emmy Hennings-Ball uses the image ‘hochaufgetürmte Tage stürzen ein’ [days piled high come crashing down]. Dada Gedichte (Zurich: Die Arche, 1957), pp. 29, 2. Here, especially in the examples from von Hoddis and Hennings, the imagery frequently operates by blurring the boundaries between objects and humans.

206 

 Gillian Pye

[I stood on the roof of a tower block, which was opposite another tower block. In my head the grainy imagining that the other building would receive very powerful blows, as if by a huge wrecking ball or an earthquake. Look at that. Exactly that happened. I steered the deconstruction of the block opposite with my thoughts. Blow for blow, the building jittered.]⁷⁸

As the destruction reaches the narrator’s building, he jumps. This image of the two tower blocks, and other ones of people jumping from high buildings, unmistakably evoke the catastrophic events of 9/11.⁷⁹ Similarly, the text ‘Die Geschichte meiner Einschätzung am Anfang des dritten Jahrtausends’ moves from rather banal mediations on the narrator’s financial position and the quality of his sofa to an apocalyptic scene in which the building where he lives explodes, recalling the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001: ‘Mit der Wucht eines Kometen mußte irgend etwas in dieses Haus gefahren sein’ [something must have driven into the building with the force of a comet].⁸⁰ The narrator is surrounded by a swirling mass of objects: ‘Ein Regen aus Videokassetten, Dachziegeln, Besteckkästen, Neonröhren, Plastiksandalen, Teppichresten, Kunsstofflaschen und Hausmüll’ [A shower of video cassettes, roof tiles, boxes of cutlery, neon bulbs, plastic sandals, bits of carpet, plastic bottles and household rubbish] before he is hit by a ‘größenwahnsinniger Schwall Wasser’ [a megalomaniac gush of water] which engulfs the entire building.⁸¹ The flood pulls the narrator away past objects and people into a space of oblivion: Ich rauschte durch das Loch inmitten der Wassersäule und schoß durch das Haus, in dem wir einmal gelebt hatten. Stockwerk für Stockwerk. Hinab. Hinab. Schwerelos schwebte der ein oder andere Fernseher an mir vorbei. Manch ein Salat und manches Brot. Ich sah verschiedene Menschen. Mitunter schien es, als schliefen sie. Ich fühlte mich, als ob es mich nie gegeben hätte, als ob alles, was ich je berührt hätte, mit meinen Händen oder mit meiner Seele, ein negatives Abbild gewesen wäre in einer Welt der Verneinung. Unfaßbare Mengen an negative Energie. Jedes Ding, jeder Mensch, jede Idee hatte eine reinste negative Kraft in seinem Innersten, die sich nun entlud und freifuhr. [I whooshed through the hole in the middle of the column of water and shot through the house, where we had once lived. Storey by storey. Down. Down. One or two televisions

78 WWS, p. 41. 79 For example in the short prose text ‘Von den Partypeoplen, die von Hochhaus springen’ [‘On the party people who jump from the tower block’], Ibid, pp. 46–47. 80 Text quoted from the online version available at: http://bachmannpreis.orf.at/bachmannpreis/texte/stories/203843/index.html. Further references will be given with the abbreviation GE, page number; GE, p.12. 81 Ibid., p. 15.

The Party’s Over: PeterLicht and the End of Capitalism 

 207

floated weightlessly past. The odd salad and loaf of bread. I saw various people. Sometimes they seemed to be sleeping. I felt as if I had never existed, as if everything I had ever touched with my hands or my soul, was a negative image in a world of negation. Unfeasible amounts of negative energy. Every thing, every human, every idea had a purely negative force inside it, which had now been discharged and released.]⁸²

In this apocalyptic vision, Licht invokes a competing range of contemporary anxieties, from terrorism to the crisis of consumer capitalism to ecological meltdown. Such anxieties reflect a greater awareness of ‘big history’ and the forces of entropy which govern all human life and the universe itself. However, not only is this scene preceded by a protracted and comically banal meditation on the state of the narrator’s sofa, it also appears to be immediately negated by the text’s closing paragraph: Doch glücklicherweise war es das nicht […]. Wir frühstückten und ließen uns ein bißchen mehr Zeit als sonst. Ich trank einen Roiboschtee [sic] und machte ausnahmsweise zwei weiche Eier für uns beide. Das Radio dudelte, ihr Kaffee duftete. Die Schläge waren heute für den Nachmittag angekündigt. Es war also noch Zeit bis dahin. Wir besprachen den Tag, und ich muß sagen, daß ich mich heute richtig freute auf die Fahrt durch den kühlen Sommermorgen zu meiner Arbeit. [But fortunately that wasn’t it (…). We had breakfast and took a little more time than usual. I drank a cup of rooibos tea and made us two soft boiled eggs for a change. The radio played, her coffee smelled good. The strikes had been announced for this afternoon. So there was still time before then. We discussed the day and I must say that today I was really looking forward to the journey through the cool summer’s morning to work.]⁸³

The revelation of the apocalypse as a daydream and the subsequent suggestion that the catastrophe is yet to come means that the narrator appears to be sleepwalking into the abyss, unable or unwilling to assess the reality of his situation. In conclusion, this example epitomizes the achievement of Licht’s ‘double perspective’: the surrealist clown performs a balancing act between the banal-melancholic, the absurd and the catastrophic. In so doing, he portrays the experience of his generation, who are inundated with images of catastrophe and warnings of imminent danger, yet simultaneously trapped, if also cushioned, by the banalities of daily life. In this way, Licht’s work goes beyond the indictment of ‘Luxusdeutschland’ [materialistic Germany], which some critics have read into

82 Ibid., p. 16. 83 Ibid., p. 17.

208 

 Gillian Pye

pop literature texts of the 1990s.⁸⁴ Rather, he portrays a sense of uncertainty regarding the possibility of catastrophe and the difficulties of assessing the scale of the danger, specifically its proximity to us and its relationship to everyday life in the privileged First World. Whether this uncertainty results from willful self-delusion, from the complexities of the contemporary world or from both remains unclear. However, the narrator’s anticipation of the day ahead and the journey to work on that ‘cool summer’s morning’ certainly captures the moment of caesura which 9/11 signified for many people: the sudden recognition of the contingency and the fragility of the everyday world. Re-connecting pop with the poetics of the absurd, Licht’s work thus provides one answer to the question of how a literature infused with the themes and methods of pop might capture the experience of the ‘now’ at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

84 Although scathing about much of the pop literature of the late 1990s, author Maxim Biller acknowledged the potential of Kracht’s Faserland as a critique of ‘Luxusdeutschland’. See ‘Feige das Land, schlapp die Literatur’, Die Zeit, 16/2000.

Gary Schmidt

Fear of the Queer? On Homosexuality, Masculinity and the Auratic in Christian Kracht’s Anti-Pop Pop Novels On the Auratic and the Auto-Erotic. Poisoned Officers and Masturbating Priests In Christian Kracht’s novel Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten [I will be Here in Sunshine and Shadow] (2008), set in a dystopian Swiss Soviet Republic, the first-person narrator is an unnamed African-born man who was educated first by British and Portuguese missionaries and subsequently by Swiss Army officers in Nyasaland. At the beginning of the narrative, the Swiss Soviet Army has just retaken Neu-Bern from the German-British fascist alliance. The plot consists principally of the narrator’s pursuit of a mysterious Polish Jew named Brazhinsky, whom he eventually tracks to the Swiss National Redoubt, a series of interlinking subterranean tunnels and caves apparently based on the historical Réduit Suisse, or Schweizer Alpenfestung. The narrative present time, characterized by extreme coldness, material deprivation and ironically even by the apparent death of the written word, is interlaced with flashbacks to the narrator’s childhood in East Africa.¹ The remembered episodes describe his ascension to literacy and his transformation into a Swiss soldier as a series of rituals and aesthetic experiences resembling the Benjaminian auratic.² Yet, these auratic experiences are threatened and tainted by carnal episodes, and ultimately the adult narrator’s socialist convictions are belied by his embrace of a fascist aesthetic. Ich werde hier sein intensifies the author’s attempt in his two earlier novels Faserland (1995) and 1979 (2001) to transcend pop’s fascination with beauti-

1 As the narrator walks through the wintry streets of the newly recaptured city, he sees ‘die herausgerissenen Seiten eines deutschen Buches […] unter dem Eis, fast waren einzelne Sätze zu lesen’ [the torn out pages of a German book (…) under the ice, one could almost read individual sentences]. Christian Kracht, Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2008), p. 12. The narrator’s literacy, as well as his explicit association with Switzerland in opposition to Germany, links him to Kracht as an author working from a marginalized position in a literary tradition dominated by Switzerland’s far more powerful neighbour to the north. 2 Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), pp. 222–26, 243–44.

210 

 Gary Schmidt

ful surfaces in order to achieve interiority. Like these anti-pop pop novels, Ich werde hier sein frames its struggle to overcome pop aesthetics as a narrative of heterosexual masculine development, combining it with a transformation from black African to white European. The novel’s self-referential moments suggest an allegory for the situation of an author who aspires to literary greatness but is caught between pop writing practices derided as mere play with surfaces and a modernist literary aesthetic that has been appropriated by queer politics. This essay concerns itself with Kracht’s novels as texts that perform a quest for authorial status by producing a narrative in which characters ascend to heterosexual manhood. The novel links this process not only with aesthetic authenticity but also with psychoanalytic discourses that both assert and subvert heterosexual masculine identity. The queer images that recur in Kracht’s writing function on one level as spectres of abjection that challenge the identities to which the protagonist-narrators aspire. On another level they demonstrate the illusoriness of such identities and their dependence on disavowing the heterosexual male’s phallic ambivalence. Just as Kracht’s novels can be read as anti-pop pop texts, they can also be seen as anti-queer queer texts. In Ich werde hier sein, a spectre of queerness materializes in the form of an officer whom the narrator encounters while observing Brazhinsky treating patients in the alpine redoubt: Ein anderer Offizier, ein Leutnant, hatte sich durch die Aurotherapie langsam, aber stetig vergiftet. Er hatte sich jahrelang Goldsalz injiziert, dies wurde von seinem Körper nicht mehr ausreichend abgebaut, er konnte es nicht mehr ausscheiden, seine Haut und seine Augen hatten einen unwirklich erscheinenden Grünstich bekommen, ganz wie die von der Feuchtigkeit angegriffenen kupfernen Dächer der Kirchen in England und Deutschland. Der Leutnant trug eine taillierte hellgraue Uniform aus Lodenwolle, darüber eine gewachste grüne Jacke mit ansprechend kariertem Innenfutter. So sass er, phlegmatisch zurückgelehnt, in einem Sessel am Ende eines Ganges, die Beine gespreizt, Hausschuhe aus Walkfilz an den Füssen. Er war ganz offensichtlich homosexuell, Brazhinsky untersuchte ihn erst oberflächlich und dann mit akribischer Gründlichkeit, klopfte ihm mit einem kleinen Hämmerchen auf die Knie, um seine schwindenden Reflexe zu testen, und legte dem Leutnant sanft die Hand an die feuchte Stirne. Ausser ihm einige Morphiumampullen zu geben, konnte er nichts weiteres für ihn tun, der Offizier würde in ein paar Tagen an einer Überdosierung Gold sterben. [Another officer, a lieutenant, had slowly but steadily poisoned himself through aurotherapy. For years he had injected himself with gold salts that were no longer broken down sufficiently by his body, he could not excrete them, his skin and eyes had obtained a green tinge that appeared surreal, just like the copper roofs of the churches in England and Germany corroded by dampness. The lieutenant wore a fitted light grey wool uniform, over it a waxed green jacket with an attractive plaid lining. Thus he sat, slouching phlegmatically in an armchair at the end of a corridor, legs spread, felt slippers on his feet. He was quite obviously homosexual, Brazhinsky examined him first superficially and then with meticulous

Fear of the Queer? On Homosexuality, Masculinity and the Auratic 

 211

thoroughness, tapped him on the knee with a little hammer in order to test his dwindling reflexes and gently laid his hands on the lieutenant’s damp forehead. Other than giving him a few vials of morphium he could not do anything more for him, in a few days the officer would die of an overdose of gold.]³

The gold-poisoned officer not only condenses all the major components in a recurring trope of Kracht’s prose  – the homosexual aesthete standing in for a moribund European culture obsessed with surfaces  – he also exemplifies how Kracht as author creates meaning: through self-reference and the citation of a canonical literary heritage.⁴ The explicit naming of ‘aurotherapy’ – derived from the Latin aurum or gold, it refers literally to the injection of gold salts into the body – allows for a metonymic slippage suggested by recurrent images found in Kracht’s prose. By the substitution of just one letter, ‘auro’ becomes ‘aura’, which Walter Benjamin defines as the quality of an art work attributable to its ‘unique existence at the time and place it happens to be’. This unique existence, or the aesthetic object’s ‘presence’, provides the ‘prerequisite to the concept of authenticity’ that disappears in the age of mechanical reproduction.⁵ That such word play is not merely whimsical becomes apparent in another esoteric and seemingly unmotivated passage in 1979. In it, the explicitly homosexual and nameless narrator of Kracht’s second novel engages in conversation before his silent and disapproving partner Christopher with their Iranian driver Hasan: Nach einer Weile schickte er [Hasan] seine Frau aus dem Zimmer, stand auf und holte etwas aus der Schublade einer Kommode. Er wickelte es aus, sehr vorsichtig, als wäre es zerbrechlich. Es war ein gerahmtes Foto von Farah Diba, der Frau des Schahs. ‘Ist sie nicht wunderschön? Sie ist so voll von Oral. Wie sagt man? Oral?’

3 Kracht, Ich werde hier sein, pp. 115–16. All translations of Kracht are my own. This passage is representative of the novel as a whole because it suggests the application of Freudian dream interpretation as an appropriate hermeneutical tool. As an example, the officer sits at the ‘Ende eines Ganges’ [end of the hallway]. In the genitive form, the word for hallway might be interpreted as a displacement of the name of the Indian River that in Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig is the source of the deadly cholera epidemic. The officer’s homosexuality of course links him to both Aschenbach and Mann. 4 See David Clarke, ‘Dandyism and Homosexuality in the Novels of Christian Kracht’, Seminar, 41.1 (2005), 36–54. Also Claudia Breger, ‘Pop-Identitäten 2001. Thomas Meineckes Hellblau und Christian Krachts 1979’, Gegenwartsliteratur, 2 (2003), 197–225. Moritz Baßler sees the celebratory reception of Faserland as the new German pop novel par excellence as an example of selective reading that ignores the more traditional aspects of Kracht’s writing. See Baßler, Der deutsche Pop-Roman. Die neuen Archivisten (Munich: Beck, 2002), p. 115. 5 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, p. 220.

212 

 Gary Schmidt

‘Oralsex?’ ‘Ja. Von der Versprechung einer besseren Welt,’ sagte Hasan. Christopher war inzwischen schulterzuckend nach draußen gegangen, spazieren, wie er sagte. [After a while he sent his wife out of the room, stood up, and took something out of a dresser drawer. He unwrapped it, very carefully, as if it were fragile. It was a framed photo of Farah Diba, the wife of the Shah. ‘Isn’t she gorgeous? She is so full of oral. How do you say? Oral?’ ‘Oral sex?’ ‘Yes, of the promise of a better world,’ said Hasan. In the meantime Christopher had shrugged his shoulders and gone outside, to go for a walk, as he said.]⁶

The narrator of 1979, an interior designer ridiculed by his partner and other characters as simple-minded, mongoloid and even called a ‘Fotze’ [cunt], renders the auratic banal with this slippage from ‘aura’ to ‘oral’, turning what Hasan describes as a utopian promise into a sexual act.⁷ It is perhaps the same kind of literalization of the auratic that leads the lieutenant of Ich werde hier sein to believe in the possibility of internalizing the superficial splendour of gold.⁸ In such passages, Kracht condenses and disavows the superficiality and camp of earlier pop texts, including his own, proclaiming perhaps the death of pop. But by foregrounding the process by which both text and narrator attempt to disavow their own continued investment in image-based identities, Ich werde hier sein demonstrates the futility and fraudulence of all identities, whether literary or sexual, that purportedly rest on an interior authenticity. Homosexual characters play a problematic role in their relationship to aesthetics in Kracht’s writing. In particular, male homosexuality appears whenever aesthetic experiences are contaminated by material forms, whether this process manifests itself as commodification of consumer goods or as a de-romanticized sexuality. Kracht’s narratives set up binary oppositions between such terms as

6 Christian Kracht, 1979 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2001), p. 27. 7 Kracht, 1979, pp. 31, 23. 8 Clarke points out the significant reference to an ostensible ‘Sehnsucht nach Glamour’ [longing for glamour] and theatricality claimed by Kracht in Tristesse Royale to be a universal characteristic of gay men. Further, Clarke points out that ‘in 1979 there is a potential blurring between the superficiality of postmodern identities and homosexuality per se’, such that the overcoming of such superficiality is figured also as the death of homosexuality, or at least quite literally in the death of the homosexual lover. But who is this lover exactly? Might not the Christopher of 1979 be yet another avatar of the author Christian Kracht whose disdain for the ‘simple-mindedness’ of his lover and his obsession with beauty reflects the author’s disdain for a component of literary production, in particular pop literary production aiming for the creation of glamour, style – i. e. his own complicity in the postmodern phenomena that he critiques?

Fear of the Queer? On Homosexuality, Masculinity and the Auratic 

 213

spiritual/material, sublime/mundane, aesthetic/pornographic or even man/ machine that are then undermined when they become visible as projections arising from the need of the protagonist-author to create an identity through disavowal. An exemplary passage from Ich werde hier sein describes the narrator’s memory of an auratic experience that becomes tainted by an almost universal cliché, that of the paedophile priest⁹: Ich hatte bei den britischen und portugiesischen Missionaren in der Nähe meines Dorfes Lesen und Schreiben gelernt, der aus der kanadischen Dominion stammende Padre, Bruder Keith, fühlte sich genötigt, mich nach den Unterrichtsstunden aus der Schar der Kinder herauszusuchen und alleine zu den Felshöhlen am Chongoni zu bringen, um mir dort die geheimnisvollen Malereien zu zeigen, jene konzentrischen Schraffierungen meiner Urahnen, deren steingewordene Wirbel und eigentümliche Figürlichkeit mich derart fesselten, dass ich erst sehr viel später und nur ganz beiläufig merkte, dass der Padre sich, hinter mir stehend, im schwachen Schein einer Öllampe, leise keuchend selbst befriedigte. [I had learned to read and write from the British and Portuguese missionaries near my village, Brother Keith, a padre from the Canadian Dominion, felt compelled to select me from among the throng of children and take me alone to the caves in the Chongoni to show me the mysterious paintings there, those concentric hatchings of my ancestors whose petrified whirls and idiosyncratic figurativeness captivated me to such a degree that only much later did I notice, quite by chance, that the padre, standing behind me, was masturbating while moaning softly in the weak glow of an oil lamp.]¹⁰

This passage mingles an auratic, almost spiritual experience with a sexual act that many readers will consider perverse and that leaves them with potentially conflicting affective responses. They may, on the one hand, share the child’s awe for the concentric drawings or instead find themselves abruptly disgusted, and hence disappointed, by the sexualization of the experience. Ultimately, an ambiguity remains that suggests also an ambivalence towards art in general and the act of writing specifically, for Brother Keith has taught the narrator to read and write, a skill that will set him apart from almost all his contemporaries in the present-time of the narrative. The passage moves immediately from the description of learning to read and write to the sexualized auratic experience in the cave, so that literacy, aesthetics and carnality appear in syntactical proximity but without a defined logical relationship. In this passage, as elsewhere in the text, the aes-

9 I do not wish to suggest that the priest is homosexual because he is a paedophile but merely to point out that Kracht recycles a stereotype that, in spite of medical/legal discourses, almost always represents paedophilia as a same-sex activity and links it tropologically to adult-male homosexuality. 10 Kracht, Ich werde hier sein, p. 55.

214 

 Gary Schmidt

thetic/carnal cross-contamination works counter to the narrator’s compulsive need to draw boundaries between these two realms, which opens up the possibility of reading the persistent and repetitive stereotypical images as projections and disavowals. The masturbating paedophile priest who introduces the boy to both literacy and to the auratic functions as a mise en abyme for Kracht’s text, which thus reveals itself to be masturbatory. Like the priest, Kracht’s novel attempts to impart to the ostensibly innocent reader an auratic experience  – a sense of mystery and awe in encountering artfully arranged images and words. At the same time, the experienced reader can recognize the author’s careful attempts to pursue his own, rather than the reader’s pleasure. One might imagine Kracht standing behind his enraptured readers, narcissistically stimulated by the power of his own writing, which Kracht himself has on occasion described as kitsch.¹¹ The reader is left not knowing whether to direct his/her gaze to the aura of the cave drawings or to the masturbating priest, who himself appears auratic in the glow of an oil lamp. A close reading of the gold-poisoned officer makes visible how stereotypical images disavow repressed characteristics of the creator of such images. The narrator simply asserts without providing evidence that the officer is ‘quite obviously’ homosexual, but the description of the officer reveals itself to be a composite of the narrators of Faserland and 1979. The officer’s ‘waxed green jacket with an attractive plaid lining’ is the green Barbour jacket of Faserland’s narrator/protagonist, and his slippers made of ‘Walkfilz’ are the homemade felt shoes cobbled together for the narrator of 1979 by his ‘Führer’ after his expensive Berlutis fell apart.¹² This self-referential intertextuality allows the reader to move beyond the current narrator’s limited perspective to become aware of his projections and disavowals. At the same time, because such correspondences occur not only within individual novels but across Kracht’s oeuvre, they can be read as allegories of how writing itself reflects or participates in psychic mechanisms that transcend the personal. In other words, textual production becomes visible as transference, projection and disavowal. The fact that this apparently minor stereotypical character ultimately embodies traits of the narrator-protagonists of Kracht’s earlier novels challenges boundaries that the narrator of Ich werde hier sein continues to defend, boundaries that define and defend the territory of masculine authority, phallic integrity and unequivocal heterosexuality.

11 In a television interview with Harald Schmidt, Kracht expressed his own amazement regarding what he considered the large amount of kitsch he had inserted into 1979. The interview can be viewed on YouTube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUJypXBsJJQ. 12 Kracht, Faserland, p. 13; 1979, p. 138.

Fear of the Queer? On Homosexuality, Masculinity and the Auratic 

 215

The auto-erotic aspect of masturbation emphasized by the German ‘Selbstbefriedigung’ [self-gratification] in the description of Brother Keith resonates with a second potential for metonymic slippage regarding the golden-poisoned officer. This emerges in the narrator’s claim that the lieutenant poisoned himself, that he injected himself with the gold salts. Whether self-treatment or self-poisoning, the switch from ‘auro’ to ‘auto’ invokes the conflation of homosexuality and narcissism often found in psychoanalysis.¹³ The image of self-injection recalls an equally abject scene of self-medication in Faserland, whose narrator is drawn, like Fridolin in Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle [Dream Novella], as if against his will to a dangerous place where he confronts the perils of his own desire. Just before leaving a party in Heidelberg, the narrator finds himself ‘aus irgendeinem Grund’ [for whatever reason] descending a staircase to a basement only to find to his horror his friend Nigel lying on the floor in a drug-induced ecstasy with a needle stuck in his arm: Er hat den rechten Arm mit einem Ledergürtel abgebunden, und aus einer kleinen Wunde in seiner Armbeuge rinnt ein dünner Streifen Blut. Das glaube ich einfach nicht. Ich habe das Gefühl, als würde ich innerlich vollkommen ausrasten, als ob ich völlig den Halt verliere. So, als ob es gar kein Zentrum mehr gäbe. Nigel, rufe ich. Scheiße. Nigel. Er antwortet nicht. Ich frage ihn, ob er mich denn verdammt nochmal nicht kennt. Und er sagt, das sagt er wirklich: Sollten wir uns denn kennen? Dann lächelt er und verdreht die Augen, so, daß nur noch das Weiße zu sehen ist, und dann kriegt er so einen Ausdruck vollkommener Zufriedenheit im Gesicht, und dann sackt sein Kopf nach vorne, und die Haare fallen ihm in die Stirn. Auf seiner beigen Hose ist ein bisschen Kotze. [He has tied his right arm with a leather belt, and a thin streak of blood runs from a small wound in the crook of his arm. I simply don’t believe it. I feel as if I were losing all control inside of me, as if I were losing my footing. As if there were no longer any center. Nigel, I call. Shit. Nigel. He doesn’t answer. I ask him if he doesn’t still know me, dammit. And he says, he really says: should we know each other? Then he smiles and rolls his eyes in such a way that you can only see the whites and then he gets an expression on his face of perfect contentment, and then his head sinks forward, and his hair falls in his forehead. There is a little bit of vomit on his beige pants.]¹⁴

13 For an excellent discussion of the conflation of narcissism, autoerotism and homosexuality in Freud’s writings see Tim Dean, ‘Homosexuality and the Problem of Otherness’, in Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, ed. by Tim Dean and Christopher Lane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 120–43. 14 Kracht, Faserland, p. 105.

216 

 Gary Schmidt

If one reads the hypodermic needle as a phallic object, Nigel’s wielding of it expresses an ambivalence that permeates Kracht’s writing. It is both an instrument of pleasure and of castration, and indeed the former is impossible without the latter. The projection of this paradoxical relationship onto stereotypical homosexuals like the gold-poisoned officer cannot free Kracht’s narrators from being implicated in the paradoxical logic of a phallic order in which power creates and destroys at the same time.

Fear of the Queer The emphasis on external beauty so often associated with homosexual figures in Kracht’s texts mirrors the dilemma of the pop literati who eschewed the role of the serious, engaged intellectual favoured by the German literary establishment in favour of marketing themselves as images, in some cases even playing the role of fashion models.¹⁵ Kracht’s texts in particular abound with self-referential moments, suggesting that he as author both inhabits and rebels against the author’s role as producer of beauty and entertainment. In Kracht’s novels, the male homosexual appears often in the context of aestheticism, sometimes linked to fascism, but almost always in a manner that reflects Kracht’s ambivalence as an author who participates in an aesthetic of surfaces yet also remains fascinated by interiority. In Ich werde hier sein the artist Spieß, who has fled the Réduit, is described by another artist named Roerhrich as a ‘Naif. Ein Schmierer, ein Homosexueller, der nur an den Schenkeln seiner Modelle Interesse findet’ [naïf, a dauber, a homosexual, who is only interested in the thighs of his models].¹⁶ However, in 1979 the mentor Mavrocordato describes the homosexual narrator’s receptiveness to beauty as the one redeeming value that imbues him with an openness to transformation, although the narrator ultimately does not achieve the spiritual metamorphosis he desires. The narrator of Faserland expresses a similar ambivalence towards homosexual aestheticism when he relates an encounter with the filmmaker Wim Wenders and ‘a strange painter, whose name I have forgotten but who always painted naked men under the shower groping at each other’.¹⁷ Yet the narrator himself asks Wenders if he had intended the beginning of his film Der Himmel über Berlin [Wings of Desire] (1987) to invoke

15 Frank Degler and Ute Paulokat, Neue Deutsche Popliteratur (Paderborn: Fink, 2008), p. 17. 16 Kracht, Ich werde hier sein, p. 119. 17 Kracht, Faserland, p. 61.

Fear of the Queer? On Homosexuality, Masculinity and the Auratic 

 217

Der Triumph des Willen [Triumph of the Will] (1935), thus contaminating the masterpiece of New German cinema through association with Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda. In this manner, Kracht also reinscribes the triple metaphorical link of homosexuality, Nazism and aestheticism.¹⁸ As metaphor, homosexuality has the ability to subvert and preserve the phallic identity of the narrator. Jonathan Dollimore has theorized the queer as the proximate, that which is at once similar and different and hence unsettling to the process of identification.¹⁹ In particular, the increasing visibility of male homosexuality appears to have unsettling effects not only on representations of masculinity and the heterosexual male privilege that they support but more generally on the very possibility of sex-gender identity and even representation itself. As Lee Edelman writes in Homographesis: Indeed, as I would inflect it, the signifier ‘gay’ comes to name the unknowability of sexuality as such, the unknowability that is sexuality as such: it’s always displaced and displacing relations to categories that include, but also exceed, those of sex, gender, class, nationality, ethnicity, and race. As the figure for the textuality, the rhetoricity, of the sexual, ‘gay’ designates the gap or incoherence that every discourse of ‘sexuality’ or ‘sexual identity’ would master.²⁰

Approaching the question from a psychoanalytic perspective, Leo Bersani echoes Edelman’s assessment of homosexuality in claiming: ‘Its privileging of sameness has, as its condition of possibility, an indeterminate identity. Homosexual desire is desire for the same from the perspective of a self already identified as different from itself’ because the homosexual desiring subject identifies himself with castration and hence femininity.²¹ Bersani’s and Edelmann’s readings of gay

18 The construction and instrumentalization of the stereotype of the homosexual Nazi has been examined, for example, by Andrew Hewitt, Jörn Meve and Gary Schmidt. See Andrew Hewitt, Political Inversions. Homosexuality, Fascism, and the Modernist Imaginary (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Jörn Meve, ‘Homosexuelle Nazis’. Ein Stereotyp in Politik und Literatur des Exils (Hamburg: MännerschwarmSkript, 1990); and Gary Schmidt. The Nazi Abduction of Ganymede. Representations of Male Homosexuality in Postwar German Literature (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2003). 19 Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence. Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). 20 Lee Edelman, Homographesis (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. xv. I owe it to my rereading of Leo Bersani’s Homos that my attention was drawn to this particular quotation from Homographesis, a work of queer theory that is significant in its emphasis on gay male sexuality as queerness. Leo Bersani, Homos (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1996). 21 Bersani, Homos, p. 59.

218 

 Gary Schmidt

male desire take much from Freud’s case study of the Wolf Man, itself an important intertext for a central scene in Faserland in which the narrator discovers his friend Nigel having sex with a man and a woman simultaneously. According to Freud, as an infant the Wolf Man witnessed his father penetrating his mother from behind, which confirmed the reality of castration for the child, even if this scene entered his consciousness only later when he obtained the language with which to describe sexual difference. This primal scene remains inaccessible to memory and instead reemerges when the adult patient recounts a dream that he experienced two and a half years afterwards. Yet it creates a psychic conflict between the boy’s desire for his father and his realization that this desire would lead to his own castration. In short, the child’s ego, invested in a masculine identity that promises him authority and control over his environment and protection from the threatening female figures surrounding him, comes into tragic conflict with an id that desires ‘feminine’ submission and hence would destroy the very basis of his masculine ego.²² The conflict between this longing for submission to the father and the fear of castration in the Wolf Man parallels the situation of the young male writer caught between his pleasure in producing an aesthetic text and his fear of the emasculation associated with this practice. In interpreting the portrayal of male homosexuality in Faserland and 1979 as an appropriation of high modernist dandyism, David Clarke suggests that Kracht’s narrator remains troubled by his inability to properly decode the signs of sexual orientation in a society in which beauty and surface play a central role in self-stylization.²³ This problem is indeed an issue in both texts and, one might add, a reflection of a post-coming-out society, in which, as Edelman convincingly argues in Homographesis, the homosexual comes to stand for the impossibility of identification/identity. In Faserland the narrator attempts to survive in a society that seems to be moving precisely towards a queer definition of the sexual, in which male authority is no longer guaranteed by the Phallus and in which other characters appear untroubled by castration anxiety. By contrast, the kind of ‘self-shattering jouissance’ that Bersani describes confronts Faserland’s narrator wherever he goes: Following Jean Laplanche, who speaks of the sexual as an effect of ebranlement, I call jouissance ‘self-shattering’ – in that it disrupts the ego’s coherence and dissolves its boundaries  […]. Psychoanalysis has justifiably been considered an enemy of anti-identitarian politics, but it also proposes a concept of the sexual that might be a powerful weapon in

22 Sigmund Freud, ‘Aus der Geschichte einer infantilen Neurose [‘Der Wolfsmann’]’ in Zwei Kinderneurosen, Studienausgabe (Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 1969), VIII, pp. 125–232. 23 Clarke, ‘Dandyism and Homosexuality’, pp. 44–45.

Fear of the Queer? On Homosexuality, Masculinity and the Auratic 

 219

the struggle against the disciplinarian constraints of identity. Furthermore, as the writers discussed in the next chapter will help us to see, self-shattering is intrinsic to the homo-ness in homosexuality. Homo-ness is an anti-identitarian identity.²⁴

A similar association between homosexuality and identity-shattering queerness leads the narrator of Faserland to the question: ‘Warum tun bloss alle so schwul?’ [Why is everyone acting so gay?]²⁵ Beyond the coincidental fact that Faserland and Bersani’s Homos were both published in 1995 and Edelman’s Homographesis a mere one year earlier, these texts attest to the cultural anxiety surrounding the significance of homosexuality, and in particular male homosexuality’s visibility, for male heterosexual identity. Significantly, not only homosexuals came out of the closet in post-reunification Germany. In addition a critical discourse of queer theory emerged, accompanying a cultural movement that sometimes threatened traditional reading strategies and challenged the very foundation of identities based on binary distinctions between male/female, heterosexual/homosexual. Both the public emergence and, in Germany and many European countries, official recognition of samesex identities and relationships and the burgeoning of theoretical discourse that aimed to subvert norms of gender and sexual identity partly explain the obsessive, recurring iteration of the queer in pop writings. In the same decade that one author went so far as to proclaim the advent of a Schöne Schwule Welt [Beautiful Gay World] (1997) in which gays had obtained their objectives of absolute equality, Thomas Meinecke published his novelistic parody of Butlerian queer theory, Tomboy (1998).²⁶ Meinecke’s novel provides the most obvious example of what one might dub a cultural backlash against the queer movement, but one can also point to virulently masculine poses that sometimes express themselves with the lexicon of misogyny and homophobia in texts by Stuckrad-Barre, Feridun Zaimoğlu and Thomas Brussig.²⁷

24 Bersani, Homos, p. 101. 25 Kracht, Faserland, p. 42. 26 Werner Hinzpeter, Schöne Schwule Welt (Berlin: Querverlag, 1997); Thomas Meinecke, Tomboy (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1998). See Claudia Breger, ‘Postmoderne Inszenierungen von Gender in der Literatur. Meinecke, Schmidt, Roes’, in Räume der literarischen Postmoderne. Gender, Performativität, Globalisierung, ed. by Paul Michael Lützeler (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2000), pp. 97–126. See also Gabrijela Mecky, ‘Ein Ich in der Genderkrise. Zum Tomboy in Thomas Meineckes Tomboy’, Germanic Review, 76.3 (2001), 195–214. 27 Clarke cites a significant example in Soloalbum (43). See also Claudia Breger, ‘Pop-Identitäten 2001’, pp. 197–225 (p. 211–212). Stuckrad-Barre argues against Kracht’s claim in Tristesse Royale that there is no discrimination against gays in Germany. See pp. 90–92.

220 

 Gary Schmidt

Yet far more than other pop texts, Kracht’s novels engage a uniquely German configuration of sexuality and literary production evident in the legacy of Thomas Mann.²⁸ Critics have noted allusions to Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig [Death in Venice] in Faserland, including the replication of a journey from North to South, the references to homoeroticism and the likely death of the protagonist at the end of the novel in a setting recalling the River Styx.²⁹ In addition, the narrator’s consumption of beer with grenadine in a café in Zurich hints at his ultimate demise, given this beverage’s association with the pomegranate, which Aschenbach drinks in juice form on the hotel terrace not long before he dies of cholera. Kracht makes no attempt to veil the references to Mann; indeed, the narrator even describes Mann as one of his favourite authors and unsuccessfully searches for his grave. However, Mann’s legacy is problematic precisely because of his homosexuality, and indeed an anxiety that Kracht’s text will be read as somehow ‘gay’ pervades the narrative. This concern comes to the foreground in the narrator’s experience at a party at his friend Rollo’s home, an event haunted again by the vision of Nigel ‘[…] mit der Nadel im Arm, mit den leeren Augen und dem ganz dünnen Blutfaden in der Spritze’ [(…) with a needle in his arm, empty eyes, and the very thin trickle of blood from the syringe].³⁰ At Rollo’s party the narrator engages in a kind of homosexual role play with some gay waiters who he obviously believes are attracted to him, but for whom he feels nothing but disdain. In spite of his disdain for the waiters’ superficiality, the narrator engages in a performance that he believes will excite them, loosening his tie, gazing at the men longer than necessary, and toasting them with a ‘Lachaim’.³¹ Though this episode suggests cultural hybridity, which I will discuss below, on a narrative level it leads the protagonist to recall an encounter

28 Clarke and others have addressed the role of Mann’s writings in Kracht’s texts, particularly in Faserland. In particular, the allusions to Der Tod in Venedig in Kracht’s first novel support an interpretation of that text as a mirror on which the author reflects his own anxieties and desires for recognition via literary production. Buddenbrooks is another potentially significant intertext that also suggests a reading of the narrator of Faserland as a dilettante author, for his repeated assertions that he is uncertain as to whether he has expressed himself properly mirror the remarks of Christian Buddenbrooks in conversation with his brother Thomas, ‘Ich weiss nicht, ob du mich verstehst […].’ [I don’t know if you understand me (…)]. This rhetorical gesture serves as an indicator of Christian’s self-absorption, his belief that his own thoughts and emotions are so extraordinary as to be incomprehensible to his interlocutor, yet Christian’s self-image contrasts sharply with Thomas’s view of him as a mere jester. Thomas Mann. Große kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1974), 1.1, p. 351. 29 Clarke, ‘Dandyism and Homosexuality’, p. 50. 30 Kracht, Faserland, p. 126. 31 Ibid., p. 131.

Fear of the Queer? On Homosexuality, Masculinity and the Auratic 

 221

on Mykonos, where he had once found himself in the middle of a group of naked, aging homosexual men who stared at his backside as he gazed at the ocean.³² Clarke discusses the Mykonos episode in context of the narrator’s fear of being misrecognized as a homosexual, but the scene also further underscores issues of authorship by invoking Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig. As the narrator ponders a way out of the situation, he suddenly sees a steamship in the distance: Ich zeige mit dem Finger auf den Dampfer, bewege mich dabei nicht und kann sehen, wie das Schiff sich in Relation zu mir bewegt. Ganz klein, hinten, wo der Horizont fast schon weiß ist, fährt es an meinem ausgestreckten Finger vorbei. Und das Beste daran ist: Meine Kopfschmerzen gehen weg, die Panik wegen den Schwulen geht weg, alles geht wieder in Ordnung. Es ist fast so, als ob ich keine Angst mehr haben müßte im Leben, für einen Moment. [I point to the steamship with my finger but don’t move and can see how the ship moves in relation to me. Tiny, in the background, where the horizon is almost white, it steams past my outstretched finger. And the best thing about it: my headache goes away, the panic because of the gay men goes away, everything is ok again. It is almost as if I didn’t need to have any more fear in my life, for one moment.]³³

The narrator finds himself not only in the role of Tadzio pointing to the horizon, but also in a position much like that of the African child transfixed by the cave drawings of his ancestors while the priest masturbates behind him. Only the vision of the unreachable steamship protects him psychically from the extreme carnality of the grotesque gay men. Yet this vision, in its unattainability and renunciation of language, relegates narrative to a wholly corrupt state, always already tainted by association with the queer, which becomes a trope for the inability of the author to control the interpretation of his own text. Faserland followed in the wake of revelations in Mann’s diaries regarding his erotic life. Publication of the diaries began in 1977 and continued over the next two decades, leading to new biographies and scholarship reinterpreting Mann’s work through the lens of Gay Studies and Queer Theory. Faserland appeared just one year prior to Anthony Heilbut’s Eros and Literature, which interpreted Der Tod in Venedig as ‘a virtual Baedeker’s guide to homosexual love’.³⁴ This biography in turn prompted Robert Tobin to claim that a ‘reader conversant in the lore of the European homosexual subculture finds something gay in almost every element of

32 Ibid., pp. 135–38. 33 Ibid., p. 137. 34 Anthony Heilbut, Eros and Literature (New York: Knopf, 1996), p. 261.

222 

 Gary Schmidt

Aschenbach’s writing’.³⁵ If one considers the fear of being viewed as a gay writer whose signifiers point to homosexuality, it becomes possible to see the title of the novel in a new light. The narrator uses the verb ‘faseln’ [to talk drivel] to describe the speech of the gay waiters. Anke Biendarra correctly observes that ‘Faserland’ resembles a German-accented pronunciation of the English word ‘fatherland’, but we might also consider the similarity of these two words from the opposite perspective. The word ‘fatherland’ results when a speaker substitutes an English ‘th’ sound for the sibilant in the invented German word ‘Faserland’, i. e., it is the product of a lisp. And, lisps, of course, have so often been used to signify effeminate male homosexuality.³⁶

Faserland and the Primal Scene Faserland can and already has been understood as a developmental narrative of sorts, or more specifically a novel of failed development. Moritz Baßler labels it the story of an unsuccessful coming out, which exemplifies this kind of reading, but one should not assume that Faserland’s narrator possesses a fixed sexual identity.³⁷ A queer reading of the novel assumes not an underlying truth to the protagonist’s sexuality, but rather that such a clearly defined sexuality cannot be identified. Instead the text both resists and performs the impossibility of ending the path of sexual development, whether by embracing heterosexual masculinity or coming out as gay. Indeed, it is the fear of queerness as non-identity that so clearly haunts the narrator of Kracht’s first novel, even though male homosexuality often becomes the focal point of these anxieties. Read in this light, Kracht’s Faserland appears as a very early literary depiction, though fraught with anxiety, of the queer challenge to heterosexual patriarchy. Indeed, in the discussions of the ‘popkulturelles Quintett’ in Tristesse Royale (1999), Kracht even goes so far as to claim not only that discrimination against gays in Germany no longer exists, but also that this distinguishes Germany from France and the United States.³⁸

35 Robert Tobin, ‘The Life and Works of Thomas Mann’, in Death in Venice, ed. by Naomi Ritter (Boston: Bedford, 1998), pp. 225–44 (p. 232). 36 Anke Biendarra, ‘Der Erzähler als “Popmoderner Flaneur” in Christian Krachts Roman Faserland’, German Life and Letters, 55.2 (2002), 164–79 (p. 177). 37 Baßler, Der deutsche Pop-Roman, p. 113. 38 Tristesse Royale, p. 35. In making this claim, Kracht, whether consciously or unconsciously, replicates Thomas Mann’s dichotomizing of France and Germany as characterized respectively

Fear of the Queer? On Homosexuality, Masculinity and the Auratic 

 223

The instability and fluidity of sex-gender identities figures centrally in a scene in Faserland that appears to rewrite Freud’s Wolf Man episode. Whereas Freud’s primal scene emphasizes a clear distinction between phallic integrity and castration and associates the latter with the act of penetration, Kracht’s rewriting of it renders penetration of any kind by the penis conspicuously absent. The sexual act witnessed by the narrator thus functions neither as a strictly homosexual encounter nor as one in which the participants have clearly identifiable sexual roles. Instead it blurs traditional sex-gender stereotypes that associate passivity with penetrability, femininity, and homosexuality and activity with penetration and heterosexual masculinity. The narrator sees a threesome in which any assignment of binary sex-gender roles shifts when a third party appears: Ich reiße also ohne anzuklopfen die Schlafzimmertür auf und sehe, wie Nigel nackt auf dem Bett liegt, und auf seinem Gesicht sitzt dieses schwarze Model, die von der Party vorhin, natürlich ist sie auch nackt, und auf der Bettkante sitzt der Stüssy-Kappen-Jazzfreak und hält Nigels Penis in der Hand, und mit der anderen Hand reibt der Jazzfreak an den Brüsten von dem Model herum, die eingecremt sind mit Babyöl. [I tear open the bedroom door without knocking and see Nigel lying naked on the bed, that black model from the party is sitting on his face, she is naked too, of course, and on the edge of the bed sits the jazz freak in the Stussy cap holding Nigel’s penis in his hand, and with the other hand the jazz freak is fondling the model’s breasts, which are slathered in baby oil.]³⁹

In the dream used by Freud to reconstruct the primal scene behind the Wolf Man’s childhood neurosis, seven wolves stand upright and motionless, intently watching the four year old boy through the window. Further, Freud interprets the wolves to represent both the child’s desire for sexual fulfilment from his father and his fear of castration, which he associates with such sexual fulfilment.⁴⁰ As an adult Faserland’s narrator comprehends the significance of the acts without the Wolf Man’s ‘Nachträglichkeit’ [afterwardness]. At the same time, his shock temporarily suspends his ability to process what he has perceived: ‘Das Ganze ist irgendwie so unglaublich, ich meine, ich bin richtig vor den Kopf geschlagen. Das kann doch gar nicht wahr sein’ [Everything is somehow so unbelievable, I mean, I

via love for the feminine and love for the masculine, a dichotomy that he emphasized in associating Männerbund Nazism with homosexuality in a 1934 diary entry on the Röhm Putsch, published as part of ‘Leiden an Deutschland’. Thomas Mann. Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1974), II, p. 734. 39 Kracht, Faserland, p. 49. 40 Freud, ‘Aus der Geschichte einer infantilen Neurose’, p. 147.

224 

 Gary Schmidt

am absolutely dumbstruck. That cannot possibly be true.]⁴¹ Further, this inability to place what he sees in an existing symbolic system recurs throughout the text, most often in connection with male figures who have been compromised and who appear either as father substitutes or figures of erotic attraction, or in the case of the Wolf Man both. Unlike the Wolf Man, who sees heterosexual coitus and according to Freud thus perceives the mother’s castration by the father, the narrator witnesses a multiply coded, polymorphously perverse scene in which the penis remains but appears to have lost its symbolic meaning as Phallus. Not only are borders between the heterosexual and homosexual violated, but also the participants transgress the boundaries of nationality, race and language. The black model from the party speaks only English. Rather than appearing castrated like the Wolf Man’s mother, she symbolically castrates Nigel by sitting on his face, an image which further suggests the narrator’s fear of intellectual castration and loss of national as well as gender and sexual identity. As mentioned above, the narrator struggles at first to integrate this polymorphously perverse violation of the symbolic order into his consciousness. A second moment of perception, however, causes the narrator to focus more carefully on objects in the room, including the tattoo of a cartoon-style, blind mole with his eyes crossed out: In diesem Moment sehe ich noch einiges mehr: Das löcherige Bastrouleau, das im offenen Fensterrahmen hin und her weht, das Bettlaken mit den Blutflecken drauf, die zwei benutzten Kondome auf dem Parkettfußboden, die umgeworfene Blumenvase, das linke Auge des Stüssy-Menschen, das mich fixiert, weil er etwas schielt, die Farben der Tätowierung auf seinem Oberschenkel. Der hat tatsächlich einen Maulwurf da tätowiert, und zwar einen, der auf dem Rücken liegt, die Pfoten von sich gestreckt und anstelle von zwei Augen hat der Maulwurf so Kreuze, wie bei Tom und Jerry, wenn einer tot ist. [In this moment I see something more: the bastrouleau full of holes waving back and forth in the window frame, the sheets with the blood stains on it, the two used condoms on the parquet floor, the overturned vase of flowers, the left eye of the Stussy person that stares at me because he is a bit cross-eyed, the colours of the tattoo on his upper thigh. He actually has a mole tattooed there, and what’s more: it’s lying on its back with its paws stretched out in front of it and instead of two eyes the mole has crosses like the ones in Tom and Jerry when someone is dead.]⁴²

If we read this encounter as a rewriting of Freud’s primal scene in the Wolf Man case study, the replacement of the intently gazing wolves with the blind mole

41 Kracht, Faserland, p. 49. 42 Ibid., pp. 49–50.

Fear of the Queer? On Homosexuality, Masculinity and the Auratic 

 225

becomes a symbol for an economy of desire that is no longer dominated by the presence or absence of the Phallus. In this sexual economy, castration anxiety no longer determines sex/gender identity or sexual object choice. Viewed from a perspective invested heavily in a heterosexual narrative of development, it is a queer economy of desire dominated by the blind drive. As suggested above, the binary identities anchored by the Phallus begin to dissolve; in addition, intentionality and direction appear threatened from the narrator’s perspective. If heterosexual identity anchors desire by identifying an appropriate object and defining an aim  – coitus, and ultimately procreation  – desire in Faserland has no such direction. Neither objects nor aims are stable. Not only does the Phallus no longer hold the authority to ground desire in the male/ female binary, but it also can no longer maintain the illusion of the masculine ego as an independent agent in control of the individual masculine subject and his relationship to his environment. The narrator appears to have realized this at a very young age, evident in the following description of his experience flying in an airplane as a child: Die Stewardessen der Alitalia haben mich immer behandelt wie einen kleinen Prinzen. Ich durfte immer ins Cockpit und dort den Steuerknüppel halten, obwohl ich schon damals wußte, daß die Piloten auf Automatik geschaltet hatten, ich das Flugzeug also nicht ganz alleine flog, wie die Piloten mir ständig versicherten. Si, Si haben sie gesagt, du machst das wie ein großer, wie ein richtiger Pilot. Come un vero Pilota [...] Ich habe es mir vor den Piloten nie anmerken lassen, daß ich die Wahrheit wußte: Es ist nur der Autopilot. [The Alitalia flight attendants always treated me like a little prince. I was always allowed to go into the cockpit and hold the pilot stick, even though I already knew at that time that the pilots had switched to automatic, so that I was not flying the plane by myself like the pilots kept assuring me. Si, si they said, you are doing it like a grownup, like a real pilot (...) I never let on to the pilots that I knew the truth: it is just the autopilot.]⁴³

The phallic imagery is less than subtle; the child’s manipulation of the steering shaft stages an empty symbolic transferring of status and authority to the child that is revealed to be empty and both pilot and child-pilot become mere human masks for a faceless drive. While the pilot perhaps adheres to the illusion vicariously through the child’s putative belief, the child himself sees through it but faithfully preserves the illusion of phallic integrity and masculine agency for the adult pilot.⁴⁴

43 Ibid., pp. 51–52. 44 For a queer theoretical perspective on the function of the child in preserving the illusion of heterosexual agency, see Lee Edelman, No Future. Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).

226 

 Gary Schmidt

The narrative trajectory reinforces the resonance of such vignettes with the blind drive, for example in the narrator’s self-description as being driven (‘sich treiben lassen’) without any clear direction. His landing in the middle of Germany occurs by chance, although he still perhaps longs for the efficacy of the phallic illusion evident in Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens. Indeed, the impersonal pronoun reference that begins the very first sentence of the novel, ‘Also, es fängt damit an’ [Well, it starts with], can be read as a dehumanizing gesture reflecting Roland Barthes’s assertion in his famous essay ‘The Death of the Author’ regarding the situation of the postmodern writer: ‘It is language which speaks, not the author: to write is to reach, through a pre-existing impersonality – never to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realistic novelist  – point where language alone acts, “performs”, and not “oneself”: it is language that speaks rather than the author’.⁴⁵ Kracht punctuates his nomadic narrative with fleeting auratic moments obtained only when a kind of semiotic ecstasy temporarily allows the narrator to forget the failure of phallic illusion. If, following Kristeva, one understands semiotic elements of language as ‘drive discharge’, that is ‘associated with rhythm and tone’ rather than ‘the ability to take a position or make a judgment’ associated with the symbolic, then one can interpret a whole array of the narrator’s utterances as a mechanism to release bodily or psychic discomfort.⁴⁶ For example, he disavows and projects reviled identities onto others, whether they are fascist or homosexual. In spite of the narrator’s constant flinging of the epithet ‘Nazi’ at others, he himself reveals fascist attitudes. This tendency emerges in his recurrent fear of and disdain for cultural hybridity, which almost always appears in conjunction with homosexuality and often elicits the use of the attribute ‘Zwischending’ [in-between thing] or ‘Mittelding’ [cross between]. Just as the black, English-speaking model engaged in sex with two men combines queer sexuality with cultural hybridity, so too does the narrator’s suicidal friend Rollo speak a kind of ‘komische Hybridsprache’ [comic hybrid language] when drunk. At one point, Rollo even asserts a mutual happiness between the two men by uttering the Spanish words ‘Yo soy feliz y tu tambien’ [I am happy and so are you] that

45 Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image, Music, Text, trans. by Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press, 1977). 46 Kelly Oliver, ‘Kristeva’, in The John Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. by Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 446.

Fear of the Queer? On Homosexuality, Masculinity and the Auratic 

 227

again elicit the narrator’s incomprehension and trigger the memory of the gay beach on Mykonos.⁴⁷ The narrator’s increasingly vicious use of anti-gay stereotypes appears in psychoanalytic terms as a flight from queer hybridity, allowing him to preserve a masculine ego identity against a Theweleitian flood of queerness.⁴⁸ For example, immediately prior to seeing Nigel with a hypodermic needle inserted into his arm in Heidelberg, the narrator meets a student named Eugen in a bar who reveals himself to be both a conservative nationalist and homosexual. The narrator describes Eugen’s advances as a rape attempt.⁴⁹ Significantly, an even more intense and explicit description of a putatively gay neo-Nazi named Uwe Kopf follows the narrator’s flight from Eugen. In both of these characters Kracht links Männerbund Nazism with homosexuality. This stereotype, which hardly originated with Kracht or his narrator but instead regurgitates decades of discourse from literature, psychoanalysis and critical theory, functions as an attempt to reseal the ruptured boundaries between heterosexual masculinity and a clearly defined male homosexuality which the narrator disavows as fascist.⁵⁰ Just as the narrator reflects anxieties surrounding late twentieth-century German society’s move away from rigid identities of nationality, gender and sexual orientation to more fluid or queer ones, the text demonstrates the queerness of identity by foregrounding resistance to such queerness, last-ditch retrenchments that provide psychic defence mechanisms against a perceived loss of identity and male privilege. Moritz Baßler correctly points out that Faserland provides an example of ‘Rollenprosa’ [literature in which the author plays a role different than his/her own] and that critics who simplistically equate its narrator with the author Christian Kracht obstruct rather than facilitate an understanding of the text. I also seek to avoid conflating an author’s and narrator’s subjectivities, for example by identifying the ironic moments that create distance from the perspectives of Kracht’s narrators.⁵¹ Yet, in spite of all the differences between Kracht the author and Faserland’s narrator, significant commonalities repeatedly suggest that one can read this narrator as a cipher for the odyssey of an author caught between creating

47 Kracht, Faserland, p. 131. 48 See Molly Knight’s essay in this volume for a Theweleitian analysis of male pop authors. Certainly the repeated images of bodily fluids and references to water resonate with the fascist imagery accompanying fear of castrating women examined by Theweleit in Männerfantasien. Klaus Theweleit, Männerfantasien. Vol. 1. Frauen, Fluten, Körper, Geschichte (Munich: dtv, 1995). 49 Kracht, Faserland, p. 103. 50 See Hewitt, Meve and Schmidt, among others. 51 Baßler, Der deutsche Pop-Roman, p. 115.

228 

 Gary Schmidt

meaning with the themes, images and metaphors of high modernism and regressing to a pre-Symbolic stage. Anke Biendarra has identified the narrator’s urge to narrativize. His self-reflective statements indicate an awareness of his difficulties in expressing himself, but also fantasize a narrative omnipotence that would be secured by his status as father in a heterosexual relationship.⁵² Countering this apparently ego-driven desire to attain father/narrator status are ecstatic epiphanies associated with the Semiotic, for example at a party when a girl utters the following sentence while the title track from the television series ‘Twin Peaks’ plays: ‘Angelo Badalementi ist gar nicht mal so dementi’ [Angelo Badalementi isn’t that demented at all]. The narrator’s euphoric reaction to the sentence seems disproportionate to the actual content of the utterance: Das haut mich um. So ein brillanter Satz. Ich drehe mich um, schwanke und starre das Mädchen an [...]. Jedenfalls sehen wir uns an, und plötzlich merke ich, daß dieses Mädchen, das ich ganz zufällig auf dieser blöden Party treffe, alles verstanden hat, was es zu verstehen gibt. Das ist mir in dem Moment klar. Da gibt es überhaupt keinen Zweifel. Ich weiß auch nicht, woher diese Erkenntnis kommt. [That floors me. Such a brilliant sentence. I turn around, reel, and stare at the girl (…) In any case we look at each other, and suddenly I notice that this girl, who I am meeting completely by chance at this party, has understood everything there is to understand. This is clear to me in that moment. There is absolutely no doubt about it. And I don’t know where this insight comes from.]⁵³

The rhyming, yet nonsensical and banal utterance creates for the narrator an epiphanic moment based solely in the pleasure of the sentence and its appropriateness to that unique moment. It embodies the auratic due to its uniqueness and ability to evoke awe, yet it lacks the content or materiality of an auratic work of art. In this sense, it might be dubbed a semiotic, auratic moment. It quickly passes, however, to be followed by a vomiting scene in the bathroom that shifts us from the Kristevan Semiotic to the Kristevan abject.⁵⁴ Such a fleeting moment occurs again later in a similar context that contrasts the failure of narrative grounded in the Symbolic with semiotic ecstasy. The non-

52 Biendarra, ‘Der Erzähler als “Popmoderner Flaneur”’, p. 176. 53 Kracht, Faserland, pp. 44–45. 54 Langston has noted the centrality of the abject in both Faserland and 1979; I wish to suggest that Faserland presents us with an image of the authorship as inhabiting abjection and hence always potentially queer. See Richard Langston, ‘Escape from Germany. Disappearing Bodies and Postmodern Space in Christian Kracht’s Prose’, German Quarterly, 79.1 (2006), 50–70.

Fear of the Queer? On Homosexuality, Masculinity and the Auratic 

 229

sensical babbling of the narrator’s friend Karin evokes memories of a Hungarian teacher who was victimized for speaking: Ich starre weiter auf Karins Mund, und ich sehe Herrn Solimosis Mund, wie er in einem Keller der ungarischen Geheimpolizei auf und zu schnappt, in diesem Moment redet er auch viel, und die Geheimpolizisten verstehen ihn, aber es gefällt ihnen nicht, was er sagt und sie schlagen Herrn Solimosi deswegen auf den Mund, immer wieder. In diesem Moment beuge ich mich nach vorne, weil ich Karins Mund küssen will. ich will diesen wunderschönen, dummen Mund küssen, aus dem nur sinnloses Geplapper herauskommt, leeres, wirres Zeug. [I keep staring at Karin’s mouth, and I see Herr Solimosis’s mouth snapping open and shut in a basement of the Hungarian secret police, at this moment he is also talking a lot, and the secret police officers understand him, but they don’t like what he is saying and therefore hit him on the mouth, again and again. At this moment I lean forward because I want to kiss Karin’s mouth. I want to kiss this gorgeous, dumb mouth, out of which only senseless babble is coming, scatterbrained stuff.]⁵⁵

The narrator’s embrace of meaningless language constitutes a flight from the threat of emasculation symbolized in the violence against one who utters clearly understandable, perhaps political speech. Depoliticization and the flight from realism hence suggest a kind of infantilization: metonymically linked with the feminine via Karin, it ultimately ends in a symbolic return to the womb at the end of the novel.

1979 and Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten. From ‘God Hates Fags’ to Polymorphously Perverse Fascism The narrative subjectivity of 1979 begins precisely from the point at which Faserland so abruptly ended. If for the narrator of Faserland German society threatened to become entirely queer, then it logically follows that the first-person narrator of 1979 becomes an explicitly gay man. Not only is he overtly homosexual, but he also apparently hates himself. Derided by his more intellectual partner and mocked with homophobic epithets, he even agrees with a taunter who states that God hates gays by replying, ‘Ja, das weiß ich. Ich mag auch keine Homos’ [Yes,

55 Kracht, Faserland, p. 143. Italics not in original.

230 

 Gary Schmidt

I know. I don’t like homos either].⁵⁶ One might interpret the gay couple as two manifestations of an authorial ego, both of which need to be killed off. Christopher is the apolitical, hedonistic, intellectual snob who has no need for love and recognition – the ego ideal of high modernist writing. Conversely, the narrator as interior designer suggests the pop author who purveys superficial beauty, even kitsch, and for this very reason seeks the recognition and love of his author ideal, Christopher.⁵⁷ The separation of the homosexual couple brought about by Christopher’s death in a filthy hospital in revolutionary Tehran thus represents a messy surgical removal from the literary super-ego and the desire for a social role that is more than decorative. Both the narrator of 1979 and his partner Christopher exhibit continuities with the diction of Faserland’s narrator. Christopher indulges in knee-jerk vitriolic attacks on the black-robed cleaning ladies in the hotel, which resemble the overuse of the epithet Nazi or SPD-Nazi in Faserland, and the two novels’ respective narrators both use the word ‘Mittelding’.⁵⁸ In 1979, the narrator’s complaint about the lack of communication between Christopher and his partner mirrors the difficulty in postmodern literary production, and more specifically in German pop writing that seeks to move beyond ironic posturing and clichéd identities. This attempt, in turn, tells us something about the writing process itself: Es war schwierig geworden in letzter Zeit, mit ihm zu reden, weil alles so gleichförmig schien, es war nur noch ein Austauschen von Formeln, es war alles wie eines dieser schrecklichen Küchenrituale geworden; als ob da jemand kocht und abschmeckt und dies, und dann steht da niemand, der einen dabei beobachtet und sich darüber freut. [Recently it had grown difficult to talk to him because everything seemed so uniform, everything was just an exchange of formulas, everything had become like one of these horrible kitchen rituals; as if someone is cooking and tasting and such, and then someone is standing there watching you and is happy about it.]⁵⁹

As mentioned above, the narrator of 1979 remains entrapped in banality, incapable of recognizing art’s auratic potential. Yet this problem results from his clinging to the ego ideal which Christopher represents. Christopher as both beautiful and sick could represent the decadence of a moribund European literature

56 Kracht, 1979, p. 39; see also Breger, ‘Pop-Identitäten 2001’, p. 212, for an analysis of this passage. 57 Kracht, 1979, pp.  49–50. Christopher even mocks the narrator for his choice of words and limited reading. 58 Kracht, 1979, p. 24; Faserland, p. 18. 59 Kracht, 1979, p. 26.

Fear of the Queer? On Homosexuality, Masculinity and the Auratic 

 231

or perhaps even European culture in general that has lost social relevance and instead embodies the stance of l’art pour l’art. No cure for this cultural malaise seems evident, just as there is no cure for Christopher; ultimately, his transport to the hospital resembles the disposal of carrion. Again, homosexuality appears in close metaphorical proximity to the absence of spirit and the reduction to mere flesh without form or identity. While in the filthy hospital the narrator recounts the following encounter: Ich sah, wie in einem der Betten zwei bandagierte Männer in Schlafanzügen aufeinander lagen und sich mit ruckartigen Bewegungen sexuelle Erleichterung verschafften. In ihren Gesichtern war nichts zu sehen, kein Ausdruck, nichts. [In one of the beds I saw two bandaged men in pyjamas lying on top of one another, sexually relieving each other with jerking movements. There was nothing to see in their faces, no expression, nothing.]⁶⁰

Such an image of soulless flesh, or a sexual drive that continues even as the contours of identity have melted away, mirrors of course the many similar metaphors haunting Faserland that link aesthetic bankruptcy with queerness and abjection. This particular image of abject queerness in 1979, with its invocation of impersonal, faceless sexuality, could counter certain proponents of queer theory who understood the anonymity of queer encounters as a liberation from the constraints of identity, for example the highly influential Guy Hocquenghem text Homosexual Desire (1972).⁶¹ While such spectres of soulless queerness haunt Kracht’s individual narrators, the broader perspective offered by all of his novels, read singularly or together, reveals such horrific visions as psychic defence mechanisms, projections of qualities inherent to the narrators themselves. Hocquenghem’s claim that all sex is dehumanized – a matter of ‘organs look[ing] for each other and plug[ging] in’ – appears to constitute the narrator’s reality in Ich werde hier sein after he sleeps with a ‘woman’ named Favre, whose ‘apple jumped back and forth in her neck like a bouncing ball’.⁶² Just as the description of her Adam’s apple calls into question her gender identity as a female, the post-coital revelation of a socket in the skin of her armpit that resembles ‘the snout of a pig’ calls

60 Ibid., pp. 73–74. 61 Dean and Lane, Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, pp. 19–20. Significantly, Theweleit cites Hocquenghem as a source for a definition of ‘real homosexuality’ as opposed to acts performed by men who attempt to compensate for the psychic anxiety of not being fully born by engaging in sadistic homosexual acts against others. See Theweleit, Männerfantasien, II, pp. 307–23. 62 Dean and Lane, Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, p. 20; Kracht, 1979, p. 31.

232 

 Gary Schmidt

her very humanness into question.⁶³ Significantly, shortly after these sudden revelations, Favre is struck by a grenade and simply dematerializes, as if the entire basis for her existence as a phantasm of heterosexuality has evaporated.⁶⁴ If the narrator of 1979, after going through an ascetic process of purification, still remains unfit for literary production, then it is fitting that he becomes the mere servant of the first-person narrator of Ich werde hier sein. The non-European, non-white, ostensibly heterosexual narrator of the latter novel is served by a ‘mongoloider Bursche’ [Mongoloid fellow], one of the epithets flung at the narrator of 1979 by his partner Christopher. Significantly, the recurrent threat of castration and emasculation accompany the two parallel journeys made in the narrative  – one the child’s ascent to the summit of Kilimanjaro, narrated as a memory, the other the adult’s penetration of the alpine redoubt. Indeed, one might interpret the entire plot as the narrator’s fantasy of evading penetration by another male as the means to a rebirth and a new, purified identity. This fantasy of a unique identity, mediated through childhood memories, relates to the narrator’s heart being on his right side. The child first learns of this anomaly during an examination by one of the Swiss military doctors, whose astonishment at the discovery causes him to knock over and shatter a vial containing a grasshopper preserved in formaldehyde. For the child, the image of the shattered vial becomes a metaphor for transformation: In meinen giftigen Träumen sah ich allerdings oft das Glas mit der Heuschrecke zerspringen und fühlte die Kälte der Stethoskopscheibe auf der Haut an meiner linken Brust, dort wo kein Herz verborgen lag. Es schüttelte mich am ganzen Leib, ein Gefühl der Übelkeit überkam mich stets, es war, als würde etwas aus mir geboren, als ob sich etwas abspaltete oder abschälte, es war wie eine Häutung von innen. [In my poisonous dreams, however, I often saw the jar with the grasshopper shatter and felt the coldness of the stethoscope on the skin of my left breast, under which no heart was hidden. My body shook all over, a feeling of nausea always overcame me, it was as if something was being given birth to from within me, as if something was separating itself or peeling off, like a moulting from within.]⁶⁵

The image of the grasshopper reappears unexpectedly in the present time of the narrative when the narrator stops during his pursuit of Brazhinsky to investigate an apparently abandoned hut. In it he finds a copy of a book entitled The Reverend Keith Gleed’s Entomology of Canadian Insects, the Grasshopper Lies Heavy. In

63 Ibid., p. 46. 64 Ibid., p. 47. 65 Kracht, Ich werde hier sein, p. 61.

Fear of the Queer? On Homosexuality, Masculinity and the Auratic 

 233

spite of the obvious connection to both the masturbating priest who taught him to read, as well as to the broken vial, the narrator makes only the terse comment that these books are ‘definitely not fascist propaganda’.⁶⁶ This discovery thus represents a return of repressed elements that elicit a defensive response by the narrator: when the hut’s inhabitant, a dwarf named Uriel, returns asking for food, the narrator reacts by shooting at him, a literalization of the psychic function of defence.⁶⁷ Uriel represents the danger posed by a return of repressed memories and desires from childhood, seen clearly in the fact that he speaks the narrator’s native tongue, Chichewa, and that he recites the Hail Mary, a Catholic prayer, in that language. Further, the narrator emphasizes his sharpened incisors, linking him to the leeches that threatened the children on their ascent to Kilimanjaro. As a dwarf, Uriel represents failed manhood and the danger of returning to childhood fantasies, including the threat of emasculation. Yet his arrival on the scene is textually productive, since it invokes an act of remembering and accompanies an interweaving of chapters in which the motifs of the Kilimanjaro ascent recur in slightly altered form in the images of the Alpine hut. For example, Uriel appears as a queer figure in his connection to the leeches but also in his final utterance. This utterance is understood by the narrator first as ‘fasern’, an invented verb suggestive of the title of Kracht’s first novel, the verb ‘zerfasern’ [to fray out], and the verb ‘faseln’ [to talk drivel]. Ultimately, however, the narrator realizes that Uriel has actually said ‘Favre’. Leeches are androgynous animals explicitly associated in the text with a primitive stage of development. They threaten to trap the young recruits in the primal forest and prevent their ascent to the summit of the mountain and symbolic attainment of heterosexual masculinity. The narrator describes the encounter with the leeches using images of both penetration and castration: Wir waren Schweizer Offiziere, wir schnitten uns lachend mit den Messern die Blutegel von den Beinen, einem Kameraden jedoch war ein Egel während des Marsches unbemerkt in das Nasenloch gekrochen. Als er es bemerkte, begann er zu schreien und wollte nicht mehr aufhören. Wir legten ihn auf eine Decke und hielten ihn an den Schultern und Beinen fest, ich zog mit Daumen und Zeigefinger am Endes des Wurms, der aus seiner Nase ragte, er schrie, wir sollen aufhören, er habe grosse Schmerzen, ich griff zum Messer, nahm die Spitze der Klinge zwischen Daumen und Zeigefinger, zog und zog am Egel, dieser riss sich los, die Widerhaken in seinem Kopf rissen ihrerseits etwas Fleisch aus dem Naseninneren des Kameraden, der Egel flog in blutiger elliptischer Bahn in das organische Ganze des Urwaldes zurück, und während schon die nächsten Würmer mit für ihre geringe Grösse erstaunlicher

66 Ibid., p. 68. 67 Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Das Vokabular der Psychoanalyse (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1973), pp. 24–28.

234 

 Gary Schmidt

Geschwindigkeit auf unser kleines tableau vivant zukrochen, lichtete sich für einen Augenblick der Nebel, die Sonne brach durch, und die Sicht wurde frei auf eine Ebene baumloser Felsen über uns, hellbraunes, kristallines Geröll, soweit das Auge reichte, dann war an dessen Ende die abgeflachte Spitze des Berges zu sehen. Dort, dort oben war das weisse Wasser, der Schnee, das ewige Eis, welches die ganze Schweiz bedeckte. [We were Swiss officers, laughing we cut the leeches off each other’s legs, but one leech, unnoticed, had crawled into the nose of one of our comrades. When he noticed it he began to scream and wouldn’t stop. We laid him on a blanket and held him firmly by the shoulders and legs, I pulled with my thumb and forefinger on the end of the worm that protruded from his nose, he screamed for us to stop, he was in great pain, I reached for my knife, took the tip of the blade between my thumb and index finger, pulled and pulled on the leech, which tore itself free, the barbed hooks in its head ripped some flesh from the inside of our comrade’s nose, the leech flew in a bloody elliptical course back into the organic whole of the primal forest, and while the next worms already were crawling towards our little tableau vivant with an astounding speed given their small size, the fog lifted for a moment, the sun broke through, and we could see clearly onto a plain of treeless rock cliffs above us, light brown, crystalline boulders, as far as the eye could see, at the end of which was the flattened peak of the mountain. There, up there was the white water, the snow, the eternal ice that covered all of Switzerland.]⁶⁸

The phallic purity represented by the snow-capped mountains contrasts with the primal nature that the androgynous leeches embody. In this description the narrator becomes the successful wielder of the Phallus in an act that both symbolically castrates his comrade and rescues him from a more dangerous castration by androgynous, inhuman creatures. The narrator’s surgical removal of the ‘queer’ element represented by the bisexual, vampiric leeches literalizes the psychic trajectory he has followed throughout the novel in ascending to adult identity. The narrator himself attains manhood without experiencing such a penetration or partial castration. When Brazhinsky attempts to stab the narrator through the heart with an awl he discovers that the heart of his intended victim is not on the left side. Brazhinsky’s reaction of absolute disbelief  – ‘Das kann nicht wahr sein’ [that cannot be true] – mimics the recurrent astonishment of Faserland’s narrator upon witnessing the various scenes of phallic disintegration. In this case, however, the positions are reversed: the narrator remains whole due to an anomaly that makes him unique among human beings. He has avoided the law of castration and submission to the Name of the Father by becoming a fascist hero-god. It thus logically follows that after his escape he confronts ‘das erhabene Bild Dutzender deutscher Luftschiffe, die den Himmel über meinem Kopf füllten’ [the sublime image of dozens of German airships that filled the sky

68 Ich werde hier sein, p. 65. Italics not in original.

Fear of the Queer? On Homosexuality, Masculinity and the Auratic 

 235

above my head].⁶⁹ Though his perception of his political enemies’ war instruments as sublime seems odd, it demonstrates the illusoriness of his new phallic integrity and its basis in a fascistic denial of all its disavowed queer elements. Ironically, the emerging heroic narrator has become a hybrid figure: a blue-eyed, dark-skinned African-born Swiss soldier. The end of the novel stages not only a return to Africa by the narrator, but also his final ascent to heterosexual manhood, sealed through his love for a blond woman ‘deren Haar mir erst furchterregend gelb erschienen war und dann golden’ [whose hair first appeared a frightening yellow and then golden].⁷⁰ The irony of this description emerges when one recalls the narrator’s dismissal of the superficial splendour of the dying homosexual officer. Significantly, the blond woman remains a mere clichéd phantasm with ‘flickering, unreal contours’. That the new hero-god status of the narrator is little more than megalomania becomes apparent in the linking of his personal fate with that of his entire Volk: the African inhabitants of the cities designed by a Swiss architect decide overnight to return to their villages, leaving behind abandoned buildings and the useless trappings of European civilization. The novel thus closes with a contradiction, a final textual illusion that allows both the return to nature and the preservation of phallic integrity. The narrator’s identity, built on a denial of phallic vulnerability, would seem incompatible with the return to a primal stage of humanity that in his psychic imaginary represents queerness and emasculation. From a psychoanalytic perspective it is thus only logical that this imagined idyll rests on a further fantasy of castration inflicted on the Swiss architect: ‘Er hing ein paar Tage, dann assen Hyänen seine Füsse’ [He hung a few days, then hyenas ate his feet].⁷¹

69 Ibid., p. 132. 70 Ibid., p. 146. 71 Ibid., p. 148.

Carrie Smith-Prei

Pop Eats Itself: Crisis Discourse, the Literary Market and Pop Performance in Joachim Lottmann’s Novels Volker Weidermann’s entry for Joachim Lottmann in his 2006 short history of post-war German literature begins as follows: Joachim Lottmann (*1956), son of FDP-founder Joachim Lottmann, genius documentarian of the world, liar, bragger, imposter, inventor of German pop literature, grandfather of German pop literature, lawyer of all grandchildren, photographer and writer of everything, swashbuckler, story thief, upstart start-up, continuer of writing, strange person.¹

This description speaks of competing literary identities, as the documentarian is also the imposter, the inventor also the copycat. In Weidermann’s words these identities merge to suggest a pop-literary performance that takes place on multiple levels: the author positions himself within his texts, inserts himself in their reception and the critic appropriates both positions. This performance describes the narrative voice found in Lottmann’s first three novels of the new millennium. In Die Jugend von heute [The Youth of Today] (2004), Zombie Nation [Zombie Nation] (2006) and Der Geldkomplex [The Money Complex] (2009), Lottmann’s narrator, protagonist and alter-ego Johannes Lohmer (Jolo) self-reflexively observes the authorial self, the writing process, the German literary market and the media landscape in a manner both boastingly inflated and self-deprecatingly critical. Weidermann’s entry speaks to a further aspect of the novels: the narrator’s obsessive and detailed observations produce ‘manically quick, hurried, detail-obsessed notes on life’.² In her nomination of Lottmann for the 2010 Wolfgang-Koeppen-Literaturpreis, author and former prize-winner Sibylle Berg calls him ‘one of the most underrated authors in Germany’, who possesses the ‘talent to observe without embitterment’.³ The observations contained in these three

1 Volker Weidermann, Lichtjahre. Eine kurze Geschichte der deutschen Literatur von 1945 bis heute (Köln: Kiepeneheuer & Witsch, 2006), p. 227. 2 Ibid., p. 227. 3 Universitäts- und Hansestadt Greifswald, ‘Der Wolfgang-Koeppen-Literaturpreis geht 2010 an den Schriftsteller Joachim Lottmann’ (http://www.greifswald.de/pressemitteilungen/ mitteilung-lesen/archive/2010/april/browse/1/select_category/1/article/der-wolfgangkoeppen-literaturpreis-der-universitaets-und-hansestadt-greifswald-geht-2010-an-den-sc. html?tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=1&cHash=b4f5539e56).

238 

 Carrie Smith-Prei

novels create a scrapbook of the Berlin Republic of the first decade of the 2000s by specifically charting the crises that dominated the public sphere post-2000: demographic change, family politics and the global financial collapse respectively. In their literary rendering, the crises become hype-driven events of superficially self-indulgent performance, corresponding to the impulses also behind German pop literature. However, the observations result not in straightforward criticism of the media that perpetuate the political crisis discourse. In his acceptance speech for the Koeppen prize, Lottmann observes of his relationship to politics in the past: ‘I remained disgusted and disengaged’.⁴ He refused, Lottmann explained, to participate in the leftist political discussions during his young adulthood as he saw them to be facilitated by the very same security and freedom of democratic capitalism that was their primary target of critique. True to this political positioning, Lottmann’s novels do not demonstrate any fundamental critique of how these discourses function in society, nor of the manner in which the media – and along with it the literary market  – engages with or perpetuates those discourses, and surely offer no solutions. Instead, the novels remain ironic and disengaged. However, the following essay suggests that when the authorial and literary self-performance collides with the presentation of crisis, a circular criticism appears that can be productively harnessed by the reader. I will pursue precisely this moment in Lottmann’s ‘crisis trilogy’ by charting the manipulation of literary-political relevance through authorial performance key to both German pop and Lottmann’s public persona. The performance of the authorial self and the ‘Literaturbetrieb’ [literary market and associated media] in and beyond these texts provocatively stages pop literature’s critical potential.

Pop Zombies. The Case for Literary Relevance and the Death of Pop Since the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York in 2001 and the beginning of the so-called War on Terror, calls for literary earnestness have appeared in tandem with claims about the death of pop in a variety of media sources. Bernd Kittlaus, self-published cultural critic and debate archivist, understands pop’s death to be a ‘Nebenschauplatz’ [secondary arena] of the

4 Joachim Lottmann, ‘Danksagung’ (http://blogs.taz.de/lottmann/2010/06/24/danksagung2/).

Pop Eats Itself: Crisis Discourse, the Literary Market and Pop Performance 

 239

‘Ende der Spaßgesellschaft’ [end of the fun society].⁵ In the early 2000s, editors, literary critics and authors decried the frivolousness and consumerism associated with 1990s pop literature, asking instead that authors turn to social and political hot-button topics.⁶ In a 2001 interview, for example, Martin Hielscher, fiction editor at Kiepenheuer & Witsch in the 1990s and in part responsible for the publishing house’s central role in the 1990s pop boom, discusses this new earnestness as a style now more appropriate than the breeziness of pop literature.⁷ Claiming that the attacks on New York would make their mark on German literature for a long time to come, he explains: ‘It is about language, it is about the question as to which language can define our view of reality’.⁸ Authors, according to Hielscher, should develop a new language that helps to shape the reader’s understanding of the serious nature of reality. A 2005 debate carried out on the pages of Die Zeit, sparked by Martin R. Dean, Thomas Hettche, Matthias Politycki and Michael Schindhelm, continues this pedagogical twist on authors’ approach to reality. Branding a return to the ‘Mitte des Diskurses’ [middle of discourse], located somewhere between politicized novels of the older generation and the depoliticized novels of the younger generation, they claim authors should become relevant realists who mimetically depict reality in a manner morally responsible to readers. Concurrent to these debates regarding the political and social relevance of literature in the new millennium, Lottmann staged pop’s death. This staging was timed to coincide with his self-removal from the literary market and his 45th

5 Bernd Kittlaus, ‘Das Ende der Spaßgesellschaft. Kulturkämpfe in der Popmoderne’ (http:// www.single-generation.de/kritik/thema_spassgesellschaft.htm). For an extensive collection of links on the death of pop, see: Bernd Kittlaus ‘Die Debatte um das Ende der Popliteratur’ (http:// www.single-generation.de/debatte/debatte_golf.htm#ende); see also his self-published book: Bernd Kittlaus, Die Single-Lüge: Eine Kritik der Argumentationsmuster im Zeitalter der Demografiepolitik (Norderstedt: Books on Demand GmbH, 2006). 6 See here my own discussion of this issue in Carrie Smith-Prei, ‘Kölner Realismus Redux? The Legacy of 1960s Realism in Postunification Literature’, Closing Borders, Bridging Gaps? Deutscher Pop an der Jahrtausendwende, special issue of Literatur für Leser, ed. by Anke Biendarra, 31.2 (2008), pp. 81–93. See also the discussion of literary relevance in Katharina Gerstenberger and Patricia Herminghouse, ‘Introduction. German Literature in a New Century. Trends, Traditions, Transitions, Transformations’, in German Literature in a New Century. Trends, Traditions, Transitions, Transformations, ed. by Katharina Gerstenberger and Patricia Herminghouse (New York: Berghahn, 2008), pp. 1–12. 7 Martin Hielscher and Thomas Hettche interviewed by Wieland Freund, ‘Zurück in die Wirklichkeit’, Die Welt, 24 November 2001 (http://www.welt.de/print-welt/article489029/ Zurueck_in_die_Wirklichkeit.html). 8 Ibid.

240 

 Carrie Smith-Prei

birthday party, which was held at the Berlin nightclub Kurvenstar and at which pop-literary heavyweights Christian Kracht, Thomas Meinecke and Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre were supposed to appear.⁹ True to Lottmann form, none of the promised celebrities showed up.¹⁰ The event provided a concrete example of self-performance’s centrality to pop literature. Moreover, the staging revealed the extent to which event culture drives the ‘Literaturbetrieb’ while at the same time sardonically leveraging this fact. Significantly, Gerhard Schulze’s classic 1992 study Die Erlebnisgesellschaft [The Experience Society], in which he claims that life has become an ‘Erlebnisprojekt’ [experience project], was republished in 2005 in the thick of these debates.¹¹ Schulze argues that audience and self are integral to experience or event culture.¹² The exchange of goods no longer drives the market but instead the exchange of experiences, whereby the person consuming an experience also contributes to its production.¹³ Applying Schulze’s understanding to the literary market of the post-2000 era, pop’s audience, made up of readers and critics, contributes to pop’s production. They do so not only in their power of purchase, but also in the act of reading itself. Lottmann’s specific brand of pop manipulates the reader’s role, making transparent his or her complicity in the pop event. Moreover, the author, too, becomes part of the audience. In the specific case discussed above, by staging a pop happening, Lottmann effectively inserts himself as author and as textual subject into pop’s story. In the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Christopher Schmidt writes: ‘As a pop-author Lottmann is well-versed in the forms of performative journalism that would rather cause the ruckus rather than merely describe it’.¹⁴ Lottmann becomes at once producer and consumer, performer and audience of the event ‘Literaturbetrieb’. Thus, not only authors and texts but also lay and critical reception shape the ‘Literaturbetrieb’ event. In the 2011 essay ‘Das Ende der Popliteratur’ [‘The End

9 It should be noted that Lottmann repeatedly changes his birth year depending on source, citing 1956 on his own blog (http://blogs.taz.de/lottmann/) but 1956, 1958 and 1959 respectively in the novels discussed here. 10 Gerrit Bartels, ‘Die Lachnummer im Hinterzimmer. Trommeln und Lügen: Joachim Lottmann verabschiedete sich im Berliner Kurvenstar feierlich von der Popliteratur’, TAZ, 7 July 2003, p. 16. 11 Gerhard Schulze, Die Erlebnisgesellschaft. Kultursoziologie der Gegenwart (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 1992), p.  13. See Bernd Kittlaus, ‘Gerhard Schulze: Die Erlebnisgesellschaft’ (http:// www.single-generation.de/wissenschaft/gerhard_schulze.htm#neu) as well as Bernd Kittlaus, ‘Das Ende der Spaßgesellschaft. Kulturkämpfe in der Popmoderne’ (http://www.single-generation.de/kritik/thema_spassgesellschaft.htm). 12 Ibid., pp. 24, 52. 13 Ibid., p. 423. 14 Christopher Schmidt, ‘Theater im Visier. Hier kotzt der Kritiker’, sueddeutsche.de, 9 March 2006 (http://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/theater-im-visier-hier-kotzt-der-kritiker-1.431057).

Pop Eats Itself: Crisis Discourse, the Literary Market and Pop Performance 

 241

of Pop Literature’], Eckhard Schumacher writes that when we speak of Popliteratur and its supposed end, we disregard the texts themselves and find ourselves instead in the middle of critical discourse, without which pop literature would not be recognizable as an object.¹⁵ Schumacher identifies an ontological correlation between journalistic and academic literary criticism and the making of pop literature: ‘Literary criticism is responsible for contemporary literature and thus also for pop literature’.¹⁶ Through its criticism, pop as a literary category comes into being. For this reason, when analysing pop literature, he goes on to suggest, scholars must also interrogate its academic critique  – the critical engagement with pop forms pop literature. Furthermore, if pop literature is understood as always discursively communicated, then literary scholars must not only analyse the ‘dead’ pop texts, but also ‘its burial, including the obituaries, that is, the discursive circumstances surrounding that death’.¹⁷ Considering, as suggested above, that the reader participates in the performance of the pop event, Schumacher’s formulation would extend this participation to academic and journalistic endeavours, which implies that the critical engagement with pop as a literary category also has a performative function. Appropriately, Doris Bachmann-Medick writes of the performative turn in humanities disciplines that it affects scholarly and academic discourse itself; performance penetrates the creation of scholarly texts.¹⁸ The analysis of performance must therefore itself also become performative. Applying Bachmann-Medick’s understanding of performance to Schumacher’s claim, the critical consumption of Lottmann’s brand of pop also performs pop’s literary production and, vice versa, the literary production of pop performs in advance its own critique. Schumacher closes his essay with the thought that pop should not to be understood as synonymous with pop literature. Instead, pop constitutes a gesture, one of many approaches that is marked by a tendency ‘to continuously undermine definitions – where appropriate in seemingly opposite directions’.¹⁹ An example of such a gesture would be those brand names typical of 1990s pop that reference consumer culture. The concept of pop as a gesture, defined by its contrarian impulse to go against the grain, provides an excellent point of access

15 Eckhard Schumacher, ‘Das Ende der Popliteratur. Eine Fortsetzungsgeschichte (Teil  2)’, in Poetik der Oberfläche. Die deutschsprachige Popliteratur der 1990er Jahre, ed. by Olaf Grabienski, Till Huber and Jan-Noël Thon (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), pp. 53–70 (pp. 53, 55). 16 Ibid., p. 56. 17 Ibid., p. 55. 18 Doris Bachmann-Medick, Cultural Turns. Neuorientierung in den Kulturwissenschaften (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2009), p. 133. 19 Schumacher, ‘Das Ende der Popliteratur’, p. 65.

242 

 Carrie Smith-Prei

to Lottmann’s novels. Instead of brand names, references to the ‘Literaturbetrieb’, cultural media organs and Berlin-Mitte (in the form of personal names, places or seminal moments) constitute the pop gestures of these novels. These gestures become akin to consumer goods in that the reader experiences the exhilaration of belonging to the pop event through not ownership or purchase, but recognition of journalists, pop authors or media events mentioned throughout the novels. Because these references collide with crisis discourse, Lottmann’s pop gestures reflect, precisely in their sardonic cantankerousness, on the nature of the event in the historical present. In this trilogy, crisis reads as an event played out on pop’s stage. The possibility of seeing critical impulses in Lottmann’s pop rests on an examination of that performance. Each novel takes as its plot device a crisis dominating popular-political discourse at the moment of publication: the generational crisis, the demographic crisis and the financial crisis. Further, the three texts share the same narrator: Johannes Lohmer, or Jolo.²⁰ Although fictional, the narrator functions as Lottmann’s alter ego. Because Jolo’s references to personal experience cast Lottmann’s autobiographical shadow onto the novels, the observations Jolo makes are easily treated as documentary reality even as Lottmann renders them comically overdrawn. Through this exaggeration, Lottmann transforms the call for a return to the ‘Mitte des Diskurses’ discussed above into a pop gesture. As illustrated by the heading of chapter eight in Zombie Nation – ‘In B-Mitte und “Der Pop-Standort,”’ [‘In B-Mitte and “the Site of Pop”’] – Berlin-Mitte is the primary setting for the novels. As pop’s reporter, Jolo observes the respective crises from Berlin-Mitte as the ‘Mitte’ of pop performance. From this position, he exacerbates the demand for the engaged and mimetic representation of reality by obsessively writing it all down, thereby revealing the drive toward literary relevance as also wrought with superficial – or pop – impulses.

Observations from the Mitte. The Crisis Trilogy Die Jugend von heute [The Youth of Today] (2004) begins as Jolo undertakes what he terms field work on youth in Berlin: ‘Die Jugend war Berlin’, or more precisely Berlin-Mitte.²¹ Outside of this Kietz, Germany is, as his nephew Elias describes,

20 Although individual details break this unification, including the narrator’s marital status: in the first his long-time girlfriend from Cologne is named April, in the second novel he has a wife from Cologne named Barbara and in the third his ex-wife from Cologne is named Carla. 21 Joachim Lottmann, Die Jugend von heute (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2004), p. 11.

Pop Eats Itself: Crisis Discourse, the Literary Market and Pop Performance 

 243

‘oll und überaltert, ohne Jugend, wirtschaftlich am Boden’ [shabby and overaged, void of youth, economically at rock bottom].²² To see this fact for himself, Jolo travels with Elias to Berlin-Tempelhof, where they see only ‘verbrannte[…] Existenzen’ [scorched beings], and ‘[ü]berall diese Jogginghosen-Wendeverlierer aus Frankfurt/Oder’ [everywhere these track-suited reunification-losers from Frankfurt on the Oder].²³ Jolo describes these ‘lebende Tote’ [living dead] as desperately holding on to a youth that is not theirs: ‘Wir sahen 60jährige mit langen grauen Haaren, hinten zum Zopf gebunden, daneben gleichaltrige Tussen mit Piercingringen im Ohr und wahrscheinlich Tatoos am welken Körper’ [We saw 60-year-olds with long, grey hair pulled to a ponytail in the back, next to them bimbos of the same age with piercing rings in their ears and probably tattoos on their wilted bodies].²⁴ In order to avoid the zombie hordes of what he calls the ‘Neue Jungen Alten’ (or NJA) [new young elderly], Jolo – who, like Lottmann, is a member of the ’78 generation – remains in Berlin-Mitte and follows his nephew and group of friends as they go to clubs, take drugs and pick-up post-adolescent girls. Of course, Jolo acts no different than the NJA, despite being one generation removed, for he identifies with and emulates the youth he follows around. The narrator’s criticism of the older generation for their hold on youth culture acts also as a self-critique, which in turn complicates any straightforward understanding of the generational crisis as presented by the novel. This opening scene sets the over-the-top tone shared by all three novels, which more than flirts with sexism, racism and ageism. Much like the slipperiness in Lottmann’s identity described by Weidermann above, the tone causes the narrator’s take on each of the crises to remain opaque. The manner in which references to political reality punctuate the fictional discussion of crisis in Die Jugend von heute exacerbates this opacity. For example, Jolo says: ‘[I]ch [konnte] nicht mehr hineinsehen in die dumpfe Zombieherde, in der Heide Simonis, unsere einzige Ministerpräsidentin, wie ein Teenager gewirkt hätte’ [I (could) no longer look at the dull zombie herd in which Heide Simonis, our only female minister president, would have seemed like a teenager].²⁵ Later, when questioning his own age, Jolo claims, ‘unser neuer Bundespräsident Horst Köhler war angeblich sehr jung’ [our new Federal President Horst Köhler was supposedly very young].²⁶ Further, the novel obsessively documents the crisis of the generations

22 Ibid., pp. 20–21. 23 Ibid., p. 21. 24 Ibid., pp. 22–23. 25 Ibid., p. 23. 26 Ibid., p. 262.

244 

 Carrie Smith-Prei

as it appears in the media through indirect references to medial figures. Using a pseudonym for then taz editor Bascha Mika (Effi Miko), he says: ‘Im Fernsehen war sie natürlich immer auf “jugendlich” getrimmt, mit blauer Perücke und künstlichen Zahnlücken und so. Da mußte sie den Punk geben, schon wegen der Leser’ [Of course on television she was always focused on looking ‘youthful’, with a blue wig and artificial gaps in her teeth and such. She had to play the punk for the readers].²⁷ In these examples, the prominent figure, whether directly or indirectly named, also belongs to the ’68 generation. By pairing recognizable political and media figures with a matter-of-fact exacerbation of the already overblown generational discourse, fiction becomes interchangeable with reality and opens the possibility for the reader to participate in the potential critique. Die Jugend von heute only mildly fictionalizes the contextual discussions regarding the generational divide found in a variety of media sources midway through the first decade of 2000. Newspaper editor and conservative cultural critic Frank Schirrmacher’s bestselling book Das Methusalem-Komplott [The Methusalem Plot], like Lottmann’s novel also published in 2004, provides an example of the inflated nature of popular, nonfictional voices in the debate. Schirrmacher writes of the manner in which the baby-boomer generation must rely on a singles generation to fund its retirement. This explosive situation, he suggests, will eventually result in a war of the generations in which the ‘lebende Tote’ [living dead], the aged ’68ers, will win because of sheer numbers.²⁸ Schirrmacher’s book opens with a call to arms: ‘The great mobilization has begun. You are part of the war of the generations’.²⁹ Schirrmacher’s revolution calls for a re-evaluation of the role of ageing and youth in society. He notes that not only are the life expectancies of Germans becoming longer, birth rates are at an all-time low. This discrepancy, according to Schirrmacher, means a reduction in youth purchasing power and the destruction of a genuine youth culture because the baby boomers control both financial and cultural capital.³⁰ The ’68ers persist in living life with ‘erwachsener Infantilismus’ [grown-up infantilism] and ‘Jugendwahn’ [youth mania].³¹ In order to stop the generational war from taking place in the future, ‘[we] must forget the many lessons of the anti-authoritarian, youth-obsessed decades’, that is, essentially grow up and have children, not mimic the

27 Ibid., p. 183. 28 Frank Schirrmacher, Das Methusalem-Komplott (Munich: Heyne, 2005), pp. 9, 14. 29 Ibid., p. 9. 30 Ibid., p. 106. 31 Ibid., pp. 68, 72.

Pop Eats Itself: Crisis Discourse, the Literary Market and Pop Performance 

 245

aging ’68ers and act like children.³² Die Jugend von heute also suggests the impossibility of an autonomous youth culture because of the older generation’s continued dominance of that culture. Moreover, Lottmann’s doomsday tone replicates Schirrmacher’s: Lottmann also uses the phrase ‘lebende Tote’, as well as stronger variants such as ‘Zombieherde’, to describe the ’68 generation. Die Jugend von heute thus acts as a fictional companion to the debates, engaging even intertextually with Schirrmacher’s text toward the end of the novel when Jolo drives out to Schöneweide to talk politics with his friend, ‘FO Wartburg’. Jolo describes him as ‘ungefähr 34 Jahre alt, also für Westverhältnisse im besten Jugendalter, im Osten aber schon steinalt’ [about 34 years old, so in the prime of youth for the West, but for the East already prehistoric].³³ Their conversation turns to Das Methusalem-Komplott: ‘Vom Klassenstandpunkt aus gesehen […],’ formulierte FO Wartburg nun vorsichtig eine erste These gegen den FAZ-Bestseller, ‘müßte man in diesem Krieg die Partei der Jugend ergreifen, da alles Kapital in den Händen der Greise liegt. Wo würdest du stehen, Genosse Schriftsteller?’ [‘From the point of view of the classes (…)’, FO Wartburg began his careful formulation of a thesis against the FAZ bestseller, ‘one must take the side of youth in this war, as the entire capital lies in the hands of the elderly. Where would you stand, Comrade Author?’]³⁴

Lottmann playfully uses GDR-like phrases such as ‘Genosse’ [comrade] to punctuate and deflate Schirrmacher’s apocalyptic predictions, but in a way that also pokes fun at the former East. By calling his friend FO Wartburg and placing into his mouth the former GDR’s communist-coded language (which he would have barely been acquainted with since he was nineteen when the Wall fell), Lottmann also seems to be implicitly critiquing any generalization of the German nation that does not take into account its historical differences. As the passage continues, FO Wartburg asks himself rhetorically: ‘Würde ich Molotow-cocktails gegen Luxus-Altenanlagen werfen? Würde ich an gewaltsamen Befreiungen internierter Jugendlicher teilnehmen? Würde ich den letzten überlebenden Jugendlichen unter Denkmalschutz stellen lassen, später, 2050?’ [Would I throw Molotov cocktails at luxury retirement homes? Would I take part in the violent liberation of interned youth? Would I place the last surviving youth under historical preservation, later, 2050?].³⁵ Jolo replies that Schirrmacher makes this mistake: he sees

32 Ibid., p. 32. 33 Lottmann, Jugend, p. 273. 34 Ibid., pp. 278–79. 35 Ibid., p. 279.

246 

 Carrie Smith-Prei

the war of the generations as a future fight to avoid today’s inequalities. But in the future, there will be no more youth: ‘Dann besteht Deutschland aus 70 Millionen alten Knackern’ [Then Germany will be populated by 70 million old fogeys].³⁶ This moment aptly displays the slipperiness of Lottmann’s political, cultural and literary critique. Even while Jolo seemingly presents a clear-cut critique of Schirrmacher’s simplistic claims, he also appropriates the latter’s language for an overly and intentionally simplistic presentation of the former East. Of course, that the pop literary category maintains a youthful image, and Jolo repeatedly leverages that image, further complicates the presentation of critique, for it is pop – in the form of the novel – that allows for the critique to take place. The circularity of object, form and agent of criticism also drives the second novel of the crisis trilogy, Zombie Nation (2006). The novel begins by thematically continuing the previous one by referencing the demography debate; the word Zombie alludes to the terms ‘lebende Tote’ and ‘Zombieherde’ from the earlier novel and debate.³⁷ Moreover, Jolo continues to describe in great detail events and people found in media and political life. The events surrounding the resignation of Gerhard Schröder (with which Die Jugend von heute ends) and the beginning of Angela Merkel’s chancellorship serve as the novel’s frame. The novel’s contextual reach, however, extends even further than that of Die Jugend von heute; Zombie Nation not only points to specific representatives of the ’68 generation present in media and politics, it is also riddled with full articles written by Lottmann for a variety of newspaper sources, some which appeared in print before and some well after the novel’s publication. Lottmann presents these articles within the novel in only slightly altered form, most notability in their authorship by Jolo.³⁸ Just such an article provides the impetus for the novel’s focus on family. Zombie Nation begins as a newspaper editor, pointing to the fact that UNESCO named 2005 the year of the family, tasks Jolo to write a story on the topic of the family, for ‘ich sei ja der “Vater der deutschen Popliteratur” und der “gute Onkel” in meinem Jugend-Generationen-Buch, aber sicher auch Sohn, Enkel, usw’. [I was of course the ‘father of German pop literature’ and the ‘good uncle’ in my book on youth and generation, and surely also son, grandson, etc.].³⁹ Thus the impetus to write about the family – and ultimately about the demographic

36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., p. 9. 38 For example, we find an article published originally in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on the Echo media awards in Berlin in the novel, only to find it reprinted in his blog for the taz on 4 December 2008: Joachim Lottmann, ‘Und noch eine Preisverleihung’ (http://blogs.taz.de/ lottmann/2008/12/04/und_noch_eine_preisverleihung/). 39 Joachim Lottmann, Zombie Nation (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2006), p. 34.

Pop Eats Itself: Crisis Discourse, the Literary Market and Pop Performance 

 247

crisis – originates in Jolo’s connection to his authorial self, a self that is, in turn, staged; the reader knows that Lottmann, not Jolo, authored Die Jugend von heute. The novel replicates the article in full under the title ‘Meine Familie und ich’ [‘My Family and I’]; this same article appeared under a different title, penned by Lottmann in the FAS in October 2004.⁴⁰ Each chapter of the novel builds on this article and follows Jolo as he attempts to uncover the Lohmer past, from a great aunt in Hamburg to a Foucault-spouting niece living in a squat in Berlin-Friedrichshain. Throughout this research into his familial archive, Jolo returns again and again to his father, FDP-founder and politician in 1960s and 1970s West Germany. Thus Jolo’s family history replicates Lottmann’s own. Johannes Lohmer and Joachim Lohmann meld together in a self-reflexive performance of authorship, as apparent in Jolo’s exclamation following the family article: ‘Ich hatte zum ersten Mal WIRKLICH etwas über mich geschrieben’ [for the first time I REALLY wrote about myself].⁴¹ The ‘WIRKLICH’ and ‘mich’ here are both staged, for Jolo performs as the author Lottmann in the text, even as Lottmann creates the figure of Jolo. Further, Jolo’s family finds its ‘real’ counterpart in Lottmann’s family. Jolo plays up his awareness of his family history’s artificial nature, an awareness that relies on Lottmann’s existence within the text as its author: ‘Wenn ich etwas über meine WAHRE Familiengeschichte erfahren wollte, ja wenn ich den großen, halbdokumentarischen FAMILIENROMAN schreiben wollte, konnte ich das nur als schamloser Betrüger und hemmungsloser Anekdötchenerfinder tun’ [If I wanted to find out about my TRUE family history, yes, if I wanted to write the great, semi-documentary FAMILY NOVEL, I could only do so as a shameless imposter and unscrupulous inventor of little anecdotes].⁴² In a strange critical turn, Jolo’s self-descriptions strikingly mirror those used by Weidermann to describe Lottmann, quoted at the beginning of this article, as well as of other reviewers of Lottmann’s work then and now. For example, Gerrit Bartels writes of Lottmann in Der Tagesspiegel in 2011: ‘Der alte Lügeneimer, der gern Schabernack mit der eigenen Wirklichkeit und der von anderen treibt, ist Lottmann aber geblieben’ [But Lottmann remains the old liar pants who likes to play practical jokes with his own reality and that of oth-

40 Ibid.; Joachim Lottman, ‘Wege zum Sex: Meine Familie, die FDP und der Münchener Harem’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 40 (2004), p. 29. 41 Lottmann, Zombie, p. 41. 42 Ibid., p. 73.

248 

 Carrie Smith-Prei

ers].⁴³ That such wording blurs the line between fiction and review underscores the claim that the reader or reviewer of pop takes part in its performative process. The thematic arc of Zombie Nation mimics the genre of the ‘Familienroman’ [family novel], which at the time was gaining strength in Germany’s established literary circles; Jolo professes to write the first pop ‘Familienroman’ à la Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. The title of the novel Zombie Nation diverges, however, from Jolo’s suggested title, ‘Die Lohmers. Verfall einer Familie’ [‘The Lohmers. The Decline of a Family’].⁴⁴ Moreover, though ostensibly a family novel, including a pictorial representation of the Lohmer/Lottmann family tree, the text picks up on a central concern of the demography debate: the state of the German family. Like the discussions surrounding the generational debate, the demography debate takes place across numerous public platforms, including the political (family minister Ursula von der Leyen), the medial (public figure Eva Hermann), and in feuilleton venues (literary critic and editor Iris Radisch). The discussions in popular non-fictional books such as Das Prinzip Arche Noah: Warum wir die Familie retten müssen [The Noah’s Ark Principle: Why We Must Save the Family], Die Helden der Familie [The Heroes of the Family] and Die Schule der Frauen: Wie wir die Familie neu erfinden [The School of Women: How we Reinvent the Family] and in political venues underscore how falling birth rates combined with the generational gap have produced an increasingly aging and depopulated society.⁴⁵ Schirrmacher’s 2006 bestseller Minimum: Vom Vergehen und Neuentstehen unserer Gemeinschaft [Minimum: On the Decline and Rebirth of our Society] extrapolates from his earlier study and places the generational crisis within the demographic one. Warning that people without familial ties will soon populate Germany, he comments that the social state cannot manage the overwhelming change in traditional familial structures.⁴⁶ Other conservative cultural critics repeat this doom and gloom, reactionary language. Eva Hermann, for example, writes in Das Prinzip Arche Noah: ‘Today it is about survival. Our society is being

43 Gerrit Bartels, ‘Der große Lügeneimer (3)’, tagesspiegel.de, 25 August 2011 (http://www. tagesspiegel.de/kultur/literatur-betrieb-der-grosse-luegeneimer-3/4523224.html) 44 Lottmann, Zombie, p. 64. 45 I dicuss the relevance of this debate for feminism and satire of the 1960s to the contemporary period in ‘Satirizing the Private as Political. 1968 and Postmillennial Family Narratives’, Women in German Yearbook, 25 (2009), 76–99. Here I outline more in depth the expansive nature of the demography debate. 46 Frank Schirrmacher, Minimum. Vom Vergehen und Neuentstehen unserer Gemeinschaft (Munich: Blessing, 2006), p. 122.

Pop Eats Itself: Crisis Discourse, the Literary Market and Pop Performance 

 249

threatened’.⁴⁷ Although these texts have later publication dates than Zombie Nation, they speak to the overblown discourse of the debate itself that provides the atmospheric backdrop for the novel. By the end of the novel, Jolo claims to have failed in his attempt to write the great family novel: ‘Familienromane waren einfach eine Idee, die nicht stimmte. So war die Realität in Deutschland. Die Millionen Familienromane, die gerade geschrieben wurden, logen sich völlig willkürlich liebgewordene Bilder vom Zusammenhalt der Familie zusammen’ [Family novels were just an idea that didn’t work. Such was the reality in Germany. The millions of family novels that were being written were cobbled together of lies about completely random, endearing images of family solidarity].⁴⁸ While writing family politics and demographics into the novel’s structure, Jolo also understands family, and therefore the conception of family in crisis, to be a fantasy. Of course, contrary to Jolo’s claim, precisely this conundrum results in Zombie Nation as a pop family novel. The documentarian approach to all aspects of the family debate produces a novel created out of a sampling of political discourse on the family. Although Jolo complains of German popular culture that everything is merely ‘verramscht und recycelt’ [junked and recycled],⁴⁹ this phrase also describes his own pastiche-like family discourse. Therefore, Zombie Nation, like Die Jugend von heute, produces a critique dependant also on the object of criticism. The recycling of baby-boomer aesthetics in the form of music, clothing and consumer culture serves for Jolo as the root of the demography crisis. The novel also incorporates this aspect of recycled culture into the demographic discourse it represents. When Jolo speaks with Klaus von Dohnanyi, whom he calls uncle Klaus, about the demographic crisis, von Dohnanyi rejects Schirrmacher’s thesis as old news: ‘Demographische Entwicklung? Darüber habe ich schon 1997 in meinem Buch ‘Deutschland in Zahlen,’ erschienen bei dtv, alles geschrieben’ [Demographic development? I already wrote about it all in 1997 in my book ‘Germany in Numbers’, published by dtv].⁵⁰ The crisis discourse dominating this novel reveals itself as never-ending reiterations of past discussions, recycled like the youth culture it condemns. Towards the end of Zombie Nation the figure of Marek Dutschke embodies the collision between the cultural and discursive act of recycling. Appropriately for the media-saturated nature of the demographic crisis, Jolo has been invited to

47 Eva Hermann, Das Prinzip Arche Noah. Warum wir die Familie retten müssen (Munich: Pendo, 2007), p. 13. 48 Lottmann, Zombie, p. 193. 49 Ibid., p. 116. 50 Ibid., p. 227.

250 

 Carrie Smith-Prei

a talk show, during which the children of various prominent baby boomers are pitted against the ‘author’ of Die Jugend von heute. During this televised event, Jolo tells Marek Dutschke that the youth of today have no chance to survive Schirrmacher’s war of the generations, for tomorrow’s elderly are the baby boomers, the generation that never really age because they invented the concept of being young. He continues: Das heißt, die ‘Alten von morgen,’ werden eine ganze Armee, ein riesiger Heuschreckenschwarm an alt gewordenen ewigen Jungen sein, die nichts davon wissen (wollen), daß sie alt sind, so wie Zombies nicht wissen, daß sie tot sind! Und diese Babyboomer-Generationen unterdrücken mit ihrer kulturellen, finanziellen und politischen Hegemonie alles Neue und jede nachkommende Generation noch auf Jahrzehnte hin. Denn dafür haben sie selbst gesorgt, daß nicht genügend Kinder nachkommen. [That means that the ‘elderly of tomorrow’ will be an entire army, a huge locust swarm of aged eternal youths that don’t (want to) know they are old, just like zombies don’t know that they are dead! And this baby-boomer generation with their cultural, financial and political hegemony quash everything new and each future generation for decades to come. Because they have made sure that not enough children will be born.]⁵¹

This diatribe parodies the arguments presented in the demography debate by specifically referencing Schirrmacher, satirizing his arguments through Hollywood-inspired imagery. The parody is heightened by the fact that Jolo/Lottmann proclaims the baby boomers’ responsibility for the dwindling children to Marek Dutschke, son of Rudi Dutschke, the baby boomer synonymous with ’68 in Germany. Moreover, that Marek Dutschke in both the novel and in reality has come to Germany from the United States to join the Green Party leadership comments further on the strangle-hold that the baby boomers have on all areas of German culture and thereby oddly confirms Schirrmacher’s thesis.⁵² The Hollywood-inspired zombie rhetoric seen here also closes the novel. Claiming to have left the last days of the Berlin Republic behind him, the narrator boards a plane to South America. Ads from the ‘Du bist Deutschland’ [You are Germany] campaign punctuate the movie on board, The Land of the Dead.⁵³ ‘Ich fand es ganz rührend zu sehen, daß die Zombies ganze Länder eroberten und

51 Ibid., p. 367. 52 Again, reality converges on the text when we read in the taz: Joachim Lottmann, ‘Kein Platz für Jesus,’ taz, 7696, 22 June 2005 (http://www.taz.de/1/archiv/archiv/?dig=2005/06/22/a0152). 53 Appropriately for the topic of Zombie Nation, the 2007/2008 campaign with the same name was centred around more child friendliness. See: ‘Eine Kampagne für mehr Kinderfreundlichkeit’ (www.du-bist-deutschland.de).

Pop Eats Itself: Crisis Discourse, the Literary Market and Pop Performance 

 251

sogar regierten, jedoch nicht wußten, daß sie schon tot waren’ [I found it touching to see how zombies conquered and even ruled entire countries but didn’t know that they were already dead].⁵⁴ As made clear by the novel’s title and by Jolo’s words to Dutschke above, these zombies represent the ’68 generation. That the campaign intended to inspire national pride in the German public appears during the movie drives home the criticism of the ’68 generation’s media-based formation of national identity. The ’68-zombies continue to lead the country, even from the grave. This commentary also functions as self-criticism, as the novel, too, engages in precisely this rhetoric. Again the circular nature of Lottmann’s critical impulse comes to the fore. Der Geldkomplex [The Money Complex] (2009) turns to the financial crisis that began in the United States in 2008 and spread quickly around the globe. Just as the previous novels clearly utilize the themes of youth and family to point towards the generational and demographic crises respectively, this third novel focuses on money. The global financial crisis seems tangential to the novel from the outset, but due to the novel’s constant focus on money as well as pointed references to the impending financial collapse, the crisis remains present throughout. Divided into three long chapters, the novel follows Jolo as he struggles with near-destitution in a Berlin suffering from European soccer-cup fever, travels to his family home in Grottammare, Italy, and receives a massive advance from his publishing house for his next book by mistake, allowing him to return to Berlin and live well again. But just as he obtains financial security, the economic crisis reaches Germany. A quotation toward the end of the novel clearly lays out the manner in which the financial crisis works within the narrative: Um das Leben zu ertragen, hilft es, jede Dramatik als künstlich zu begreifen. Die große Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrise, die so plötzlich wie sinnlos nun über die gesamte Welt hereingebrochen war, half bei dem Vorsatz, das zu lernen. Ich war nun wieder reich, alle anderen wieder arm, na und? Dramatisch war das nicht. Die Dramatik wurde nur beschworen, von den Medien, von den Freunden. [To make life bearable it is helpful to understand all forms of drama as artificial. The great financial and economic crisis that suddenly and senselessly broke out over the entire world helped in the resolve to learn this. I was now rich again, everyone else poor again, so what? That wasn’t dramatic. Drama was only conjured up by media and friends.]⁵⁵

54 Lottmann, Zombie, p. 398. 55 Joachim Lottmann, Der Geldkomplex (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2009), p. 322.

252 

 Carrie Smith-Prei

The people populating the novel  – Jolo’s friends from media-saturated Berlin-Mitte – create the drama of the crisis. This passage, which comes well after Jolo has found financial salvation, critiques the dramatized and hyped rhetoric of the crisis discourse upon which, in turn, the novel depends. Therefore this passage must be read as self-criticism, not only of Jolo’s own dramatization of financial destitution throughout the novel, but of pop’s engagement in that dramatization. While the discussion of crisis as hype, or to use Schulze’s term as Erlebnis, applies to all three novels discussed here, in Der Geldkomplex this hype links most clearly with pop production and the ‘Literaturbetrieb’. The marketing of the novel itself sets up this relationship by proclaiming on its back cover: Der Geldkomplex is ‘DAS Buch zur Krise!’ [THE book on the crisis!]⁵⁶ The novel interweaves the ‘Literaturbetrieb’ with the crisis-hype through the various events portrayed, beginning with the description of the European Cup. Jolo claims of himself: ‘Von einem Autor der Popliteratur – und eine qualifizierte Minderheit hält mich dafür – erwartet das Publikum, daß er Fußballweltmeisterschaften für den Ort alternativer Geschichtsschreibung hält’ [The audience expects from an author of pop literature – and a qualified minority considers me as such – that he sees football World Cups as the site of alternative historiography].⁵⁷ Discussions of socio-economic and political changes in Germany, such as Hartz IV, also interrupt descriptions of the European Cup.⁵⁸ Through the European Cup, pop literature and economics collide. While this collision functions partly to directly critique politically legislated economic hardship in the face of two media-driven event cultures  – pop and soccer  – Jolo also undermines this critique. When interviewing Melanie Butenschön, the speaker for the New Left Party, on Hartz IV, he cannot listen to her answers because his sexual desire diverts attention from any politically valid argument presented by the speaker.⁵⁹

56 Only a few pages prior, Jolo seems to buy into the hype as presented through Lottmann’s characteristic overdrawn tone: ‘Das Jahr 2008 näherte sich dem Ende, und die Menschheit begriff allmählich, daß diese Zahl 2008 bald und dann für immer synonym sein würde für Wirtschaftszusammenbruch und Zeitenwende, so wie 1933 für Naziherrschaft stand und 1968 für den Terror der Studenten’ [The year 2008 was coming to a close and humanity began to understand that the number 2008 would soon and always be a synonym for economic collapse and transformation, just as 1933 stood for Nazi rule and 1968 for the student terror]. See Geldkomplex, pp. 308–09. By placing 2008 in a lineage with 1933 and 1968, Lottmann nods to a second set of debates that dominated the early part of 2008, which focused on contested cultural memories of 1968 forty years later, such as Götz Aly’s Unser Kampf 1968 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2008). 57 Lottmann, Geldkomplex, p. 69. 58 Ibid., p. 117. 59 Ibid., p. 127.

Pop Eats Itself: Crisis Discourse, the Literary Market and Pop Performance 

 253

As the novel continues, the relationship between the ‘Literaturbetrieb’ and financial crisis deepens. Jolo’s destitution leads him to flee to his family home in Grottammare, Italy, where he experiences a severe crisis of self as author. Precisely at this moment he discovers his newfound riches, a discovery that allows him to question his position within the ‘Literaturbetrieb’. He assumes the money comes from his publishing house, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, because ‘Ich war Johannes Lohmer, Erfinder der deutschen Popliteratur, ein Künstler von Welt, von den Frauen begehrt, von den Mächtigen geschätzt’ [I was Johannes Lohmer, inventor of German pop literature, a worldly artist, desired by women, valued by the powerful].⁶⁰ With this confidence, he pads his jacket with packets of 1000 Euros. Financial health is directly intertwined with the rise and fall of the authorial self. The novel positions itself as a book about the hype of the global financial crisis, but the real crisis occurs around equally hyped pop-literary production. The novel therefore consciously places the reader in the uncomfortable position of consuming an object that demands disengagement with the realities of economic imbalance and poverty. In the final third of the novel, Jolo returns to Germany to transform his life, including replacing his Wartburg Tourist 353, which he drives in all three novels, with a new hybrid. He also begins to write again, this time in the most self-reflexive of all written forms, a diary. He says of his new writing style: ‘Das klang dann meistens ganz rührend lyrisch, etwa so: “Ich kann mich nicht daran erinnern, daß der Himmel über Berlin je so blau gewesen ist wie gerade jetzt in dieser Stunde”’ [It often sounded so touchingly lyrical, something like: ‘I cannot remember the sky over Berlin ever being as blue as it is right now at this hour’].⁶¹ The language of these diary entries diverges radically from the other text passages as well as from the language of the previous novels. In many ways the diary form functions as the natural extension of the novel’s observational mode, although here the observations turn inward, producing even more self-obsession. Because his editor demands product in return for the (mistakenly) large advance, Jolo sends him these diary pages, receiving in return an enthusiastic response, for his editor sees in this new writing style the next big trend for German literature.⁶² At the same time as Jolo’s writing style changes, the global financial crisis reaches Berlin, putting all its cultural and literary elite on anti-depressants.⁶³ The continued interconnection between literary production and international financial events

60 Ibid., p. 248. 61 Ibid., p. 258. 62 Ibid., pp. 278, 295. 63 Ibid., pp. 326–27.

254 

 Carrie Smith-Prei

points to a broader, potential critique of the literary market and media machinery that extends beyond pop. The publisher’s exuberant reaction to Jolo’s rejection of pop in favour of the manufactured authenticity of the diary-form comes together with very real financial hardship for all areas of cultural production in the wake of the banking collapse. Jolo’s reduction of that hardship to the consumption of anti-depressants further underscores his disengagement with the actual crisis itself. The text ends with a further global event, Obama’s swearing-in at the White House, which Jolo watches on television with his estranged wife, Carla, in their former shared apartment in Cologne. Carlas Körper begann zu beben. Sie sagte mit heißem Atem: ‘Ja, wenn alle mitmachen, wenn alle jetzt hören, was er sagt …’ ‘Das tun sie, Schatz! Milliarden hören das jetzt!’ ‘Dann … dann … können wir es doch schaffen!’ Ich hielt sie noch fester, sagte ja. ‘Yes we can,’ sagte sie ironisch und lachte schluchzend. [Carla’s body began to quiver. She said with hot breath: ‘Yes, if everyone joins in, if everyone right now hears what he says …’ ‘They are, darling! Millions are hearing it now!’ ‘Then … then … we can actually make it!’ I held her even tighter, said yes. ‘Yes we can’, she said ironically and hiccupped a laugh.]⁶⁴

As Obama finishes his speech, Carla suggests to Jolo that the two of them start over in Cologne, away from Berlin-Mitte. Unlike the other texts, Der Geldkomplex closes with a finalizing ‘ENDE’ [END].⁶⁵ The closing passages continue the manufactured authenticity of the diary entries, for even as they mimic sincere belief in a new personal beginning, the ironic repetition of Obama’s campaign catchphrase would suggest distancing from that sincerity, allowing its possible undermining. Hope might indeed be shared by Jolo and his wife as they decide to start anew as well as by Obama supporters across the globe; however, the final ‘ENDE’ suggests that this hope for both might be short-lived. Taken together, the three novels observe and describe the debates on the crises dominating the public imaginary in the first decade of 2000, underscoring how the debates’ obsession for narratives of German decline also function as self-reflexive exercises in catering to deep-seated (national) anxieties. Further, the novels observe and describe pop, the literary market and the authorial self. In Der Geldkomplex we find not only interplay and exchange between Jolo’s function within the literary market and the financial crisis, but also witness their interde-

64 Ibid., p. 350. 65 Ibid., p. 351.

Pop Eats Itself: Crisis Discourse, the Literary Market and Pop Performance 

 255

pendency; both are performed and consumed by the narrator and by his readers as a hyped event. Pop and its consumption, whether by readers, critics, the market or academics, fold into one another and remain mutually dependent. The interlocking of these two performative plot threads – national crisis and literary selfhood – forms the critical content of Lottmann’s pop. The potential productivity in critiquing crisis and ‘Literaturbetrieb’ comes via its slippery circularity, for the self-referentiality of the depictions incorporates readers into the performance. The novel’s fiction and the reader’s reality appear as interchangeable. Moreover, the pop gestures referencing the literary market and media landscape manipulate the reader’s sense of participation in an event that reaches beyond the reading act. Throughout Lottmann’s writings, the performative and self-congratulatory nature of the literary market and media landscape, including its products, producers and consumers, remains central. Readers, therefore, can leverage Lottmann’s manipulation of the self-critical features of German pop⁶⁶ to address a larger criticism of literary production and consumption in contemporary Germany.

Pop Gestures. Performing Authorship and Readership As discussed above, the central position of the literary market and the authorial self in the novels’ observation of crisis begins with the recognizable relationship between Lottmann and Lohmer. Jolo has the same publishing house, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, as Lottmann and takes on the very same journalistic assignments.⁶⁷ When Jolo is introduced in the various texts as an author, both narrator and author often share a sense of self-congratulatory self-deprecation. For example, at a party in Zurich the narrator is introduced as ‘Johannes Lohmer, unser neuer Jungautor’ [Johannes Lohmer, our new young author], to which he comments: ‘Ich hörte den Stolz dabei heraus’ [I could hear the pride in it].⁶⁸ Lohmer provides the following description of himself on the first page of Zombie Nation: ‘Eben noch der lächerlichste Teilnehmer des Literaturbetriebs, hatte ich

66 See: Pop seit 1964, ed. by Kerstin Gleba and Eckhard Schumacher (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2007). 67 For example, when Jolo writes an open letter to Angela Merkel as a public figure, pleading with her not to send troops to Afghanistan, this same later – except for the change in signature – appears on Lottmann’s blog. Joachim Lottmann, ‘Offener Brief an Angela Merkel’ (http://blogs. taz.de/lottmann/2008/07/12/offener_brief_an_angela_merkel/). 68 Lottmann, Jugend, p. 208.

256 

 Carrie Smith-Prei

einen Jugendbuch-Klassiker geschrieben und näherte mich nun dem Literaturnobelpreis’ [I had just been the most laughable participant in the literary market and now I had written a young adult classic and was coming closer to the Nobel Prize for literature].⁶⁹ This simultaneously boasting and self-deprecating tone is even stronger in the third novel, producing such self-definitions as, ‘Johannes Lohmer, der große sozialistische Realist des 21. Jahrhunderts, vergessen und verkannt von seiner Zeit’ [Johannes Lohmer, the great socialist realist of the twenty-first century, forgotten and underestimated in his time].⁷⁰ Throughout this third novel Jolo describes himself as important and forgotten, as a central figure of the German literary market and as an utterly laughable failure. Compounding the extreme navel-gazing of this final novel, Die Jugend von heute and Zombie Nation figure prominently in it as a self-reflexive cycle of success and failure.⁷¹ Most telling for this cycle of literary boom and bust is perhaps the end of chapter one in Der Geldkomplex, where a young man asks for Jolo’s autograph, claiming to be familiar with Der Jugend von heute. Jolo remarks that it was this novel that made his publishing house rich.⁷² The claim that Die Jugend von heute helped Kiepenheuer & Witsch become rich is unsubstantiated in reality.⁷³ Moreover, the praise doled out by the young autograph-seeking man is undercut by the opening of chapter two, when Jolo receives a prank phone call: ‘Ist dort … ha, ha, ha, der … der “Erfinder der deutschen Pop-literatur?”’ [Is the … ha, ha, ha, the … ‘the inventor of German pop literature there?’].⁷⁴ These moments of fame and failure in the texts also manipulate the reader: they implicate the reader’s belief in Lottmann/Jolo’s claim to pop-stardom confirmed in the purchase of the books, but they also keep the reader at ironic arm’s length from this very claim. Lottmann’s novels remain entirely transparent in their use of pop’s superficial self-obsession as driving force. Beyond the question of Lottmann/Jolo’s own status as an author, the literary market, including the role of the author or authorship within that market to shape event culture, remains a central theme throughout the crisis trilogy. Der Geldkomplex grounds even its figures’ names in a specific literary event. The first page reads: ‘[S]eit diesem verbotenen Buch von Maxim Biller muß man

69 Lottmann, Zombie, p. 11. 70 Lottmann, Geldkomplex, p. 123. 71 Ibid., pp. 96, 252. 72 Ibid., p. 159. 73 Lottmann himself alludes to this: later, he tries to explain to his money and sex obsessed girlfriend that Zombie Nation sold more copies than Faust II. However the claim falls short as she has never heard of Goethe. Ibid., p. 163. 74 Ibid., p. 162.

Pop Eats Itself: Crisis Discourse, the Literary Market and Pop Performance 

 257

die Figuren ja immer bis zur Unkenntlichkeit verändern’ [Since Maxim Biller’s banned book, one always has to change figures to obscurity].⁷⁵ Lottmann/Jolo does not follow his own proscription and proceeds to name completely a variety of figures, including Lady Bitch Ray, Rainald Goetz, Frank Schirrmacher and Christian Kracht, or ‘Old Kracht’.⁷⁶ These names function much like pop brands, acting therefore as pop meta-gestures, similar to the references to the ‘author’ and his oeuvre discussed above. One figure in particular embodies this gesture: Jens Tuborg, a career student in his mid-30s who terrorizes Jolo with constant questions regarding literary and cultural figures dominating and controlling the German media landscape. While Lottmann makes fun of the hype-, event- and ‘brand’-obsessed literary and cultural scene through Tuborg, he continues his self-criticism by allowing Jolo to suspect Tuborg of writing his dissertation about ‘Johannes Lohmers Borderline-Journalismus und andere Grenzbereiche interdisziplinärer Funktionsweisen in der Tradition Ernst Jandls, der Fluxus-Bewegung und dem Frühwerk Walter Höllerers’ [Johannes Lohmer’s borderline journalism and other border arenas of interdisciplinary modes of operations in the tradition of Ernst Jandl, the Fluxus movement and Walter Höllerer’s early work] in order to procure Tuborg a Chair in Pop Literature.⁷⁷ If, as Schumacher contends, pop literature exists not as a literary category but as an academic, critical or reader-based exercise, then Lottmann’s texts offer readers a starting point for questioning the impulse behind that exercise, even as its humour feeds off of the impulse’s very existence. Lottmann’s blog ‘Auf der Borderline nachts um halb eins’ [On the Borderline at 12:30 am], which doubles as a practicing ground for a text published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in 2011, exacerbates the circularity of the que (critique) outlined above. The description reads: ‘Joachim Lottmanns Leben als Deutschlandreporter. Frauen, Sex, Joyce. Frühling der Gefühle. Die Arbeit am gleichnamigen Buch, das im August bei KiWi erscheint. Work in progress. Der Anti-Goetz’ [Joachim Lottmann’s life as Germany’s reporter. Women, sex, Joyce. Springtime of feelings. Work on book of the same title that will be published by KiWi in August.

75 Ibid., p. 7. He refers here to the scandal surrounding the publication of Biller’s Esra. 76 Ibid., p. 236. In a public reading from Der Geldkomplex, Lottmann asked the ‘real’ figures to read from the novel, including Maxim Biller and Sascha Lobo, and in particular those passages that have to do with them. This takes the focus on the ‘Literaturbetrieb’ to performative heights. See: Gerrit Bartels, ‘Der große Lügeneimer (2)’, tagesspiegel.de, 14 February 2010 (http://www. tagesspiegel.de/kultur/literatur/literatur-betrieb-der-grosse-luegeneimer-2/1682638.html). 77  Lottmann, Geldkomplex, p. 205.

258 

 Carrie Smith-Prei

Work in progress. Anti-Goetz].⁷⁸ Not surprisingly, Lottmann’s positioning of self as author at the very forefront of the entries drives the blog. In her analysis of the interplay between web-based platforms and the literary self, Anke Biendarra sees a change in the concepts of literary authorship spurred on not the least by a multi-medial literary market and an electronic, media-influenced literary public, as well as the tendency toward uniformity in the reception of global popular culture.⁷⁹ These changes also directly correlate to the way in which authorship is understood and constructed in the cultural imaginary, particularly with relation to the ‘visuellen Autorinszenierung’ [visual performance of the author], popular literature and literary criticism.⁸⁰ Biendarra studies what she calls epitexts, or the personal websites of authors, as ‘performative Inszenierungsformen’ [performative forms of staging] and questions how they might lead to a changing understanding of authorship.⁸¹ She appropriately notes that other factors, beyond the texts themselves, drive the market and speaks of the real and symbolic capital of the publishing houses that influence the real and symbolic capital of the author: Suhrkamp, she explains, stands for literary high culture while Kiepenheuer & Witsch is associated with innovation and subversion.⁸² The performance of the author as self adds to this capital.⁸³ In Germany, Biendarra sees two trends: the creation of online texts that then are published in book form and subsequently disappear from the web, or the creation of texts solely published on the web. In this sense, the medium in its Web 1.0, or standard self-contained form, essentially replicates publishing expectations. However, she identifies a third function, the use of the web as self-representation.⁸⁴ Such websites contain many aspects, including photos and texts that lead to a sense of authenticity surrounding a person and work.⁸⁵ In her analysis of the online presence of U.S. authors such as Stephenie Meyer, Biendarra identifies the manipulation of communicative and interactive possibilities of Web 2.0 (which includes such forms as social network-

78 Joachim Lottmann, ‘Auf der Borderline nachts um halb eins’ (http://blogs.taz.de/lottmann/ bio/). He is referencing Goetz’s blog for the German Vanity Fair, published in book form: Rainald Goetz, Abfall für Alle. Roman eines Jahres (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999). 79 Anke S. Biendarra, ‘Autorschaft 2.0: Mediale Selbstinszenierungen im Internet (Deutschland/ U.S.)’, in Globaliserung und Gegenwartsliteratur. Konstellationen – Konzepte – Perspektiven, ed. by Wilhelm Amann, Georg Mein and Rolf Parr (Heidelberg: Synchron, 2010), pp. 259–80 (p. 259). 80 Ibid., p. 259. 81 Ibid., p. 260. 82 Ibid., p. 261. 83 Ibid., p. 263. 84 Ibid., p. 265. 85 Ibid., p. 269.

Pop Eats Itself: Crisis Discourse, the Literary Market and Pop Performance 

 259

ing platforms, Wikis and blogs), and thus a further communal space for marketing the authorial self and work. Lottmann’s blog falls somewhere between Biendarra’s analyses of 1.0 and 2.0 Web-based self-projection. It functions very much like a pop archive of daily life.⁸⁶ On the blog, we find texts documenting all manner of personal and public thoughts and events, accompanied by photographs of Lottmann, friends and family. In this sense, the blog seems self-contained and replicates other written media. However, it also opens up to extend to other Web-based platforms, such as YouTube.⁸⁷ Moreover, like the novels, the blog includes texts published elsewhere before (in newspapers) or after (in the novels). It also makes reference to events in written and photographic form that have their source in his novels. Not only are long passages, such as the open letter to Merkel, printed in both Der Geldkomplex and on the blog, but the latter also reflects the narrator’s movements directly. When in chapter two of Der Geldkomplex Jolo goes to Italy, for example, we find Lottmann on the blog in July 2008 also in his family’s Italian home in Grottammare, complete with photographs that could also be Jolo’s own.⁸⁸ The performance of the author and literary production in the novels ultimately, despite their mild fictionalization, augment Lottmann’s self-created status in the media and publishing world in Germany since 2000. Furthermore, due to their function as scrapbooks of present-day culture in Lottmann’s drive to write everything down, they ultimately seem no different than the diary-form that Jolo turns to at the end of Der Geldkomplex, and in this sense the novels mirror the blog in form. While the blog displays striking similarities with Lottmann’s other writings in theme and in the blending of fiction with reality, when the blog and novels are examined together they expose a critical self-reflexivity with regard to writing, publishing and the reading act.⁸⁹

86 See Moritz Basler, Der deutsche Pop-Roman. Die neuen Archivisten (Munich: Beck, 2002). 87 See the entry for 3 February 2012, which, in keeping with the self-congratulatory self-deprecation familiar already from the novels, Lottmann presents a four and a half minute camera-phone video of him at a party in Vienna as a documentary film (http://blogs.taz.de/lottmann/2012/02/03/abdancen/); (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v =R3sl14bdyFw&noredirect=1). 88 Joachim Lottmann, ‘Große Sommerferien’ (http://blogs.taz.de/lottmann/2008/07/16/beauty _is_my_boy/). The entry for 8 October 2008, the ‘Tag des Weltuntergangs,’ is worth mentioning here, which talks of the day the financial crisis began as being sandwiched between events that include Rainald Goetz and Martin Walser. As is the case with the novel, the blog shows the interwoven aspects of crisis and the literary-cultural scene. 89 Thomas Ernst, ‘Weblogs. Ein globales Medienformat’, in Amann, Mein and Parr, pp. 281–302 (p. 292). On the topic of blogs, or weblogs and German literature in general, see Ernst, ‘Weblogs’. Interesting to note here is also the manner in which Holm Friebe, integral to the blog (http://

260 

 Carrie Smith-Prei

Conclusion ‘Heute kann ich nur sagen, daß es wahrscheinlich noch nie einen für den Wolfgang Koeppen Preis Ausgezeichneten gegeben hat, der zu dieser Auszeichnung so gepaßt hat und der sie so verdient hat wie ich’ [Today I can only say that probably no one else has been more fitting nor deserving of the Wolfgang Koeppen Prize than I].⁹⁰ These closing words of Lottmann’s acceptance speech show the self-awareness and posturing typical also of his writing in blog-form and novels. The performance of the authorial self and the ‘Literaturbetrieb’ in Lottmann’s novels depicting early 2000s’ crisis discourse reflects back on the nature of crisis and of pop as event. The observed reality, or the obsessive drive to write it all down mentioned both by Weidermann and Berg at the opening of this essay, remains central across all forms of Lottmann’s writing not only to the understanding of crisis discourse but also to the documentation of the self.⁹¹ Further, self reaches beyond merely the author to include pop literature as a category, the literary market and the media landscape, as well as the reader. I have suggested above that the circular nature of Lottmann’s pop produces its potential critical moment in that it engages the reader’s recognition of his or her own performative participation in event culture, a culture that superficially masks deeper anxieties related to political crises. The interconnectedness and circularity of Lottmann’s own texts, not only his incorporating discursive or literary market reality into those texts, however, runs the risk of turning back on itself in an insular and masturbatory fashion. As literary critic Bartels notes, Lottmann is a fetishist of contemporary reality all his own: ‘Lottmann schreibt eben nur

www.zentrale-intelligenz-agentur.de/) is a primary figure in all three of the novels, but most specifically in the final novel. See Ernst, ‘Weblogs’, p. 297 on the importance of this blog within the landscape. 90 Joachim Lottmann, ‘Danksagung’ (http://blogs.taz.de/lottmann/2010/06/24/danksagung2/). 91 Due to the tight interlocking of self and text across all of Lottmann’s works it is maybe no surprise, then, that when we turn to the critical reviews of Lottmann’s texts, we find also reviews of the author, leading journalists to engage in descriptive word play such as ‘verlottmannt’ [lottmanned], ‘Schwanzus Lottus’ [dickus Lottus] or ‘lottmannhaft kaputt’ [Lottmann-like kaput]. See Jochen Förster, ‘Dem Leben den Hintern zeigen’, Die Welt, 26 July 2003. Lottmann documents reviews of his work on his blog as well: Joachim Lottmann, ‘Journalistisches Zwischenhoch’ (http://blogs.taz.de/lottmann/2008/01/29/journalistisches-zwischenhoch/).

Pop Eats Itself: Crisis Discourse, the Literary Market and Pop Performance 

 261

echte Lottmann-Literatur’ [Lottmann only writes genuine Lottmann literature].⁹² Lottmann’s pop holds up a mirror to a variety of post-millennial public spheres in Germany – the national, the political, the medial, the cultural and the literary public sphere. When looking in this mirror, however, the reader critically reflects not only on these spheres, but also on Lottmann’s figure peering back. But in blog form, the direct references to the market and to the self, the acts of writing, publishing and reading become not only performative but also immediate and, due to the comment function, interactive. The online format no longer merely implicates, but demands reader participation, thereby perhaps offering a productive way out of the circularity.

92 This is echoed by others, who see half-truths and half-lies in all of Lottmann’s texts. Gerrit Bartels, ‘Auf dem Antiheldenplatz’, zeit.de, 10 January 2012 (http://www.zeit.de/kultur/2012–01/ joachim-lottmann-roman); also Joachim Lottmann, ‘Pornographisierung von Staat und Gesellschaft, neue Rezensionen’, 26 January 2012 (http://blogs.taz.de/lottmann/2012/01/26/ pornographisierung-von-staat-und-gesellschaft-neue-rezensionen/).

Thomas Ernst

Pop vs. Plagiarism: Popliterary Intertextuality, Author Performance and the Disappearance of Originality in Helene Hegemann On 15 March 2010, three days before the €15,000 Leipzig Book Prize was awarded, eighteen people stepped up as the first signatories to the ‘Leipziger Erklärung zum Schutz geistigen Eigentums’ [Leipzig Declaration for the Protection of Intellectual Property], among them Noble Prize winner Günter Grass and the famous East German writer, Christa Wolf, two icons of post-WWII German literature. As representatives of the ‘Verband deutscher Schriftsteller’ [Association of German Authors], they proclaimed: When plagiarism is considered prize-worthy, when intellectual theft and forgery are accepted as art, this attitude demonstrates a careless acceptance of copyright infringement in the literary establishment. Every literary work is an original work of art. That is true of all forms of text production, even of literary collages […]. Copying without permission of and acknowledgment of the intellectual creator is casually seen as a peccadillo by the younger generation, at times out of ignorance regarding the value of creative work. However, it is an offence – as is supporting such an understanding of art.¹

While it did not mention her by name, the declaration obviously referred to the eighteen-year-old author Helene Hegemann, whose debut novel Axolotl Roadkill (2010) earned her a place among the nominees, though the prize ultimately went to Georg Klein for Roman unserer Kindheit [Novel of Our Childhood] (2010). The declaration intensified debate about her text, which in January 2010 had been widely and enthusiastically praised by literary critics until, after a scoop by blogger Deef Pirmasens on 5 February 2010, it was scandalized as plagiarism.² The signers of the declaration implicitly attacked a ‘younger generation’, succinctly sketching out different poetic concepts: words like art and work, creativity and originality, are put in opposition to the internet, intellectual theft, falsification

1 See ‘Leipziger Erklärung zum Schutz geistigen Eigentums’ (https://vs.verdi.de/urheberrecht/ aktuelles/leipziger-erklaerung). 2 See Deef Pirmasens: ‘Axotlotl Roadkill. Alles nur geklaut?’ (http://www.gefuehlskonserve.de/ axolotl-roadkill-alles-nur-geklaut-05022010.html).

264 

 Thomas Ernst

and plagiarism. Indeed the ‘Leipzig Declaration’ marks a generational conflict, since most of the signers (all between sixty-one and eighty-four years old, except for three authors over fifty) could be Hegemann’s parents, if not her grandparents. And yet, there is a contradiction in the declaration: even literary collages are named as works of art. But the term original is reserved for the first time occurrence, while the literary technique of collage describes the artistic combination of previously existing elements (the French ‘coller’ means to glue). While one could argue that even a collage, the act of putting existing elements together in a new way, can be artistically original, one would have to define the border, where an ‘original collage’ of textual elements turns into ‘plagiarism’ of the same. Using this dilemma as a point of departure, this essay will show how Axolotl Roadkill is not really a form of plagiarism, but rather an example of a partially intertextual book with pop literary self-reflexivity, compounded by a problematic authorial performance. Through its techniques, the novel – which also deals with pop culture themes – continues a pop literary tradition forty years after it emerged in contradistinction to the littérature engagée of authors like Günter Grass and Christa Wolf. One cannot prove this claim without first digressing into the seminal concepts of ‘originality’ and ‘genius’ as they came to dominate the literary discourse starting in the eighteenth century. The general, modern concept of ‘intellectual property’ still provides the basis for the distinction between ‘original creation’ on the one hand and ‘literary plagiarism’ on the other. Since the 1960s, however, literary theory has become increasingly open to approaches like Michel Foucault’s discourse analysis and theories of intertextuality which have questioned traditional conceptions of authorship, originality and intellectual property. Postmodern media culture seems destined to subvert the categories of literary originality and genius, especially in pop literature – in the aesthetic play with techniques like collage, and on the level of author performance, literary self-presentation. Renowned, indeed prize-winning authors, like Elfriede Jelinek, Thomas Meinecke or René Pollesch could serve as examples for this development. However, by way of examining the beginning of Helene Hegemann’s novel Axolotl Roadkill from inside a pop theoretical perspective I aim to show that this novel wears its intertextual character and the staging of autobiography on its sleeve. I also hope to show, pace the verdict of the ‘Leipzig Declaration’, that a different kind of ‘value of creative work’ presents itself in pop literary discourse, whose interest is aesthetic rather than criminal.

Pop vs. Plagiarism 

 265

From Author-as-Genius via Intellectual Property and Plagiarism to Theories of Intertextuality: Theoretical Remarks In his history of the genius concept Jochen Schmidt has traced how the Sturm und Drang period, wrestling with the polarity of imitation and originality, gave rise to a Genieästhetik in which ‘the concept of imitating nature transitioned into that of creation; mimesis became creation’,³ and literary creativity was understood along the lines of the divine creation of nature. Authors like Goethe or Hölderlin appear to be prototypes of the ‘author-as-genius’ whose works were canonized as exceptional and original, thus not simply imitative. Arising in the 1760s, the Genieästhetik replaces the previously dominant paradigms ‘mimesis’ and ‘poetics’ as a new programme which demands that texts be ‘unique,’ as Gerhard Plumpe has shown.⁴ He points to the example of Immanuel Kant who proposed to Germanize the French loan word ‘Génie’: ‘How about expressing the French word Génie with the German ‘unique spirit [eigentümlicher Geist]’?⁵ Both concepts, however, come to be used side by side in the course of the nineteenth century, with the ‘genius’ describing the original creator of literature, that is a specific form of authorship, and the ‘unique’ being subsumed under the concept of ‘intellectual property’ which establishes a legal relation of ownership between the author and his or her literary creation, theoretically justified by, among others, Johann Gottlieb Fichte in 1793. Leaning on his philosophy of the subject, Fichte presumes that it is physically impossible and otherwise improbable that the creator of a literary text and his reader can possess the forms of thought, the connections between ideas and their signification in a particular work in exactly the same manner. On the contrary, the reader would have to appropriate, on reading, the author’s thoughts in his own, modified way ‘because no one can make [the author’s] thoughts his own without altering them. The thoughts thus remain his exclusive property for-

3 Jochen Schmidt, Die Geschichte des Genie-Gedankens 1750–1945. Volume 1. Von der Aufklärung bis zum Idealismus (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985), p. 13. 4 Gerhard Plumpe, ‘Eigentum – Eigentümlichkeit. Über den Zusammenhang ästhetischer und juristischer Begriffe im 18.  Jahrhundert’, Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte, 23 (1976), pp.  175–96 (pp. 195, 187). 5 Immanuel Kant, ‘Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht’, in Schriften zur Anthropologie, Geschichtsphilosophie, Politik und Pädagogik 2. Werkausgabe Band XII, ed. by Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt a. M: Suhrkamp, 2000), pp. 395–690 (p. 544).

266 

 Thomas Ernst

ever.’⁶ Though a book as a physical object can change its owner, the ‘thought property’ that it contains can only be appropriated into a new form; the original form of thoughts will always remain irrevocably with the author. Now Fichte can easily justify that the author’s entire text must not be reprinted without permission because the author retains control of the original and complete structure of thoughts. What remains more complicated, however, is the question if or how individual quotations from literary texts might be inserted by other authors into their own texts. Fichte is indifferent to this question. He first points to the rule of clearly marking quotations from literary texts with inverted commas, then he speaks of how one must distinguish between quoting small or large passages, speaking of various ‘gradations’. Additionally, imitations are a different matter if they involve a media switch: ‘copper engravings of paintings are not simply copies; they change the form’.⁷ Since the nineteenth century the debate about the boundary between permitted and illegal quotations from other texts has been characterized by the concept of ‘plagiarism’, that is ‘the conscious appropriation of another’s intellectual property by presuming authorship’ which is foremost defined judicially.⁸ Of course literary theory is aware that determining plagiarism is not always straightforward. The cultural situation, the interaction between the urtext, presumed plagiarism, notions of authorship and the literary public sphere may influence the verdict. Philip Theisohn recently stated in his ‘unoriginal’ literary history of plagiarism: ‘The societal rules for the use of intellectual property are always in flux; they can be very rigid, but at times they can actually force plagiarism’.⁹ In addition it may be a programmatic task of literature to push the envelope, thus ‘(re)defining what is a legitimate use of another text and what is not.’¹⁰ Theisohn’s broad study of plagiarism, which covers examples from ancient Greece to the present, reflects on the writing strategies of canonized authors like Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Jean Paul, Karl Philipp Moritz, Christoph Martin Wieland, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich Heine, Theodor Fontane, Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, Claire Goll, Paul Celan, Wolfgang Koeppen and Max Frisch.

6 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, ‘Beweis der Unrechtmässigkeit des Büchernachdrucks. Ein Räsonnement und eine Parabel’, in Sämmtliche Werke (Berlin: Veit & Comp, 1846), VIII, pp. 223–44 (p. 228). 7 Fichte, ‘Beweis’, pp. 230, 236  f. 8 Florian Fischer, Das Literaturplagiat. Tatbestand und Rechtsfolgen (Frankfurt a. M.: Lang, 1996), p. 3. 9 Philipp Theisohn, Plagiat. Eine unoriginelle Literaturgeschichte (Stuttgart: Kröner, 2009), p. 29. 10 Ibid., p. 28.

Pop vs. Plagiarism 

 267

During the 1960s, in the aftermath of literary modernism and the historical avant-garde, and parallel to early pop literature, new theoretical approaches developed which radically questioned the interpretive fixation on ‘authorial genius’, the ‘self-contained work’ and ‘originality’ as an aesthetic category. In 1969 Michel Foucault characterized the idea of an author’s intellectual ownership of their texts as ‘odd’ and recalled epochs before this notion was established, when ‘the texts that we call ‘literary’ today (reports, stories, epics, tragedies, comedies) used to be spread and consumed without ever asking about authorship: … their actual and presumed age would legitimate them’.¹¹ Ultimately Foucault calls for distinguishing various, discursively produced ‘author functions’ on the one hand and the literary texts on the other, before borrowing a question from Beckett: ‘What matter who’s speaking?’¹² It seems like a variation on the theme when the issue is taken up by theories of intertextuality. Leaning on Michail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva developed her broad conception of intertextuality in 1967: ‘Every text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations, any text is the absorption and transformation of another’.¹³ In this understanding literature is seen from a poststructuralist perspective, as part of a universal culture of references that is inescapable. Later theorists have transformed this broad concept of intertextuality into various more differentiated versions, giving us more precise tools for analysis. In Palimpsestes. La littérature au second degré [Palimpsests] (1982), Gérard Genette distinguishes five different types of transtextuality, which he describes as forms that bring one text ‘in a manifest or concealed relationship to other texts’, from the most concrete intertextuality, that is direct references to another text, to hypertextuality, characterized by more general allusions to another text.¹⁴ Working with numerous examples from world literature, he describes distinct forms of transtextuality: quotation or plagiarism in the case of intertextuality, parody, travesty or pastiche in the case of hypertextuality. Genette’s work has found a following in Germany too. Ulrich Broich, Manfred Pfister and others have described different ways of marking intertextuality and propose a scale of intertextuality as well as an analysis of single-text and sys-

11 Michel Foucault, ‘Was ist ein Autor?’, in Schriften zur Literatur, by Michel Foucault (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1988), pp. 7–31 (pp. 18–19). 12 Ibid., p. 31. 13 Julia Kristeva, ‘Bachtin, das Wort, der Dialog und der Roman’, in Texte zur Literaturtheorie der Gegenwart, ed. by Dorothee Kimmich, Rolf Günter Renner and Bernd Stiegler (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1996), pp. 334–48 (p. 337). 14 Gérard Genette, Palimpseste. Die Literatur auf zweiter Stufe (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 1993), p. 9.

268 

 Thomas Ernst

tematic references; they also describe forms of intertextuality in the context of linguistic, genre and media transformations. Like Genette, they are after a ‘more narrowly defined concept that makes it possible to distinguish intertextuality from non-intertextuality and to separate historically and typologically different forms of intertextuality’.¹⁵ Whether you adopt the broad, poststructuralist concept of intertextuality or prefer to use a more intricate model to differentiate intertextual from non-intertextual elements (as I will do in my Hegemann analysis), either way you will presuppose that the construct of the original, inventive literary creation is questionable. A further consideration, however, will be to examine how pop literature makes specific uses of intertextual and intermedial processes.

Intermedial Author Performance and the Cultures of Quotation: Regarding a Theory of Pop Literature Since it was introduced in German speaking countries in the 1960s by Hans Carl Artmann and Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, pop literature has often been marked by an experimental poetics of quotation and intermedial games of authorial staging. Even today these are treated suspiciously by a tradition of criticism and scholarship that had, at least initially, been among the targets. Early pop literary texts are inspired by Pop Art, the American Beat Generation in literature, and musical trends that start out as counterculture before they enter the mainstream of a postmodern media society in the subsequent decades.¹⁶ Thomas Hecken looks at Anglo-American and German documents with programmatic and self-reflective contents between 1966 and 1973 that try to answer the question ‘what is pop?’, and he lists a whole range of – partly contradictory – characteristics of the new movement. Hecken understands pop as opposition to a bourgeois, high culture aesthetic that sees literature as a leading societal medium, does not ironize authorship and

15 Ulrich Broich and Manfred Pfister, ‘Vorwort der Herausgeber’, in Intertextualität. Formen, Funktionen, anglistische Fallstudien, ed. by Ulrich Broich and Manfred Pfister (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1985), pp. IX–XII (p. X). 16 See Andreas Huyssen, ‘The Cultural Politics of Pop: Reception and Critique of U.S. Pop Art in the Federal Republic of Germany’, New German Critique, 4 (1975), 77–97. Parts of this chapter are a condensed version of Thomas Ernst, Literatur und Subversion. Politisches Schreiben in der Gegenwart (Berlin: transcript, 2013), pp. 185–202.

Pop vs. Plagiarism 

 269

prefers to treat literary texts as the original creation of a natural consciousness with moral authority. By contrast pop culture defines itself through its interest in technology and media, its ‘aesthetic (and sometimes moral) inferiority’, ‘the devaluation of (supposed) authenticity and realness’, processes of ‘posing and self-styling’ and the feature he names first: an ‘aesthetics of superficiality’.¹⁷ All of those provoke bourgeois morals and the traditional sense of order. This affront of a pop cultural aesthetic to bourgeois high culture has persisted, which Hegemann’s example will show. The literary discourse on pop literature has tried to elucidate such constitutive characteristics of popular culture, although we should concede right away that, along with the catch-all term ‘pop’, the concept of pop literature is so vague that its analytic quality seems questionable. This has led Eckhard Schumacher to call it ‘expendable’ and ‘heuristically inconclusive’.¹⁸ Likewise, Frank Degler and Ute Paulokat declared the year 2001 the ‘end of German pop literature’ in their work Neue Deutsche Popliteratur.¹⁹ I still assume that the concept, however open it may be, remains meaningful in relation to specific aesthetic processes that have historically been effective in pop literary texts. In 2001, as the Germanist discourse about pop literature began to intensify, Johannes Ullmaier brought things down to the loose formulation that ‘pop literature is everything that Martin Walser is not’, before he went on to add a twenty-four part catalogue of characteristics to define pop literary texts.²⁰ My own contribution to the debate at the time used a deliberately broad understanding of pop literature in a first attempt to place it historically in a German-speaking context.²¹ In the meantime a lot of monographs and anthologies have appeared that offer an abundant range of definitions for pop literature, with treatments of particular texts or authors in specific historical, cultural or medial contexts with regard to the pop literary field. To name only the examples that relate to my present discussion: pop literature is directly linked to intertextuality or processes of copying, serving as a ‘method of writing the present’ by way of ‘quoting, tran-

17 Thomas Hecken, Pop. Geschichte eines Konzepts 1955–2009 (Bielefeld: transcript, 2009), pp. 286–90, 278, 293, 298, 265. 18 See Eckhard Schumacher, ‘Das Ende der Popliteratur. Eine Fortsetzungsgeschichte (Teil 2)’, in Poetik der Oberfläche. Die deutschsprachige Popliteratur der 1990er Jahre, ed. by Olaf Grabienski, Till Huber and Jan-Noël Thon (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011), pp. 53–67 (p. 65). 19 Frank Degler and Ute Paulokat, Neue Deutsche Popliteratur (Paderborn: Fink, 2008), p. 114  f. 20 Johannes Ullmaier, Von Acid nach Adlon und zurück. Eine Reise durch die deutschsprachige Popliteratur (Mainz: Ventil, 2001), p. 12. 21 See Thomas Ernst, Popliteratur (Hamburg: Rotbuch, 2001).

270 

 Thomas Ernst

scribing, copying, cataloguing’ (Eckhard Schumacher);²² as a ‘new archivism’ or a ‘literature of secondary words that works with a language of things already said’ (Moritz Baßler);²³ as a kind of writing that is aware of a tradition which it transfers intertextually into the realm of the popular (Frank Degler and Ute Paulokat).²⁴ Johannes Ullmaier has noted, however, that ‘beneath the stream of pop’ and its fundamental intertextuality of medial copying there is a ‘counter flow’: this is the radical literary montage of the ‘cut-up’ which he sees emanating from William S. Burroughs, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and Jürgen Ploog. Like pop literary methods, it uses medial copying. But where pop literature ‘makes another copy’, the cut-up is more interested in the margin of surface images and the formalism of the montage. Apart from asking what kind of knowledge archive is being quoted (high or subculture), one can also distinguish techniques of literary montage, along with their different effects.²⁵ In addition, scholars of pop literature like to point out that pop authors have a penchant for performances: they confidently play with (multi-)medial performances of authorship in which they appear as ‘pop stars’.²⁶ Using von Stuckrad-Barre’s Transcript (2001) as an example, Rolf Parr has described the specific connection between the textual and the performative staging of authorship, characterizing them as ‘forms of literary media-simulation’. He argues that the intermedial character of pop literary texts with a specific kind of author-performance in the medial public sphere makes the presumed unity of the author subject with itself impossible. We are dealing with a kind of writing ‘that continually stages itself as literary (media) life and in doing so already anticipates its own mediation in the public sphere’. However, this second act is not played by the sovereign author, privy to specific knowledge about the text. Rather, it is the ‘publicly interpreting mediator of texts that belong to the previously active author function named Stuckrad-Barre’.²⁷ The argument is that pop literature is marked by the aesthetic play of differences with, on the one hand, ‘ego plurality’ in writing and

22 Eckhard Schumacher, Gerade Eben Jetzt. Schreibweisen der Gegenwart (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2003), p. 13. 23 Moritz Baßler, Der deutsche Pop-Roman. Die neuen Archivisten (Munich: Beck, 2002), pp. 184–85. 24 See Degler and Paulokat, Neue Deutsche Popliteratur, pp. 85–96. 25 Johannes Ullmaier, ‘Cut-up. Über ein Gegenrinnsal unterhalb des Popstroms’, in Pop-Literatur, ed. by Heinz Ludwig Arnold and Jörgen Schäfer (Text + Kritik, Sonderband [2003]), pp. 133– 48 (pp. 145–146). 26 Degler and Paulokat, Neue Deutsche Popliteratur, pp. 15–24. 27 Rolf Parr, ‘Literatur als literarisches (Medien-)Leben. Biografisches Erzählen in der neuen deutschen Pop-Literatur’, in Deutschsprachige Gegenwartsliteratur seit 1989. Zwischenbilanzen –

Pop vs. Plagiarism 

 271

author performances in various public spheres on the other, all played masterfully on different medial stages. A fitting metaphor for the multilayered connections between text and author is the image of the ‘DJ author’ who samples text material and, like a DJ, compiles it to make a new song or text. Gerald Fiebig may have been the first to reflect on and question this image in the German-speaking discourse about pop literature. In 1999 he pointed out that ‘upon closer inspection … every novel’ reveals itself as having ‘many tracks’ or being a ‘text with many voices’.²⁸ This metaphor has been used repeatedly by scholars, especially in discussions of author, DJ and musician Thomas Meinecke. However, Katharina Picandet has shown convincingly – with regard to Meinecke, no less – that this image is only partially applicable to literary authorship: it can describe quoting techniques that already existed before the technology of sampling came about, but not a specific kind of musical quality that feeds into literary intertextuality.²⁹ Next to Meinecke’s intertextual pop novels, the plays of Rene Pollesch, a former director of the theatre “Volksbühne im Prater” in Berlin, provide a good example of intertextual pop literature. Pollesch mixes philosophical and sociological theories into his texts, along with fragments from various media formats, marketing and political slogans as well as everyday phrases to create a self-reflexive ‘discourse theatre’. In his play Stadt als Beute [City as Prey] (2001), part of the Prater Trilogy, Pollesch refers to a sociological study with the same title in order to reflect on changing urban spaces.³⁰ Pollesch himself has declared, in an obvious antithesis to a tradition of author- or text-centred theatre: ‘I am not going to pass myself off as an individual producer of texts who sits at his desk producing works of genius […] That is […] the result of the fact that my texts develop during rehearsals. If there is a text at the end, it contains the work of rehearsals.

Analysen – Vermittlungsperspektiven, ed. by Clemens Kammler and Torsten Pflugmacher (Heidelberg: Synchron, 2004), pp. 183–200 (pp. 185, 187). 28 Gerald Fiebig, ‘Jäger und Sampler’, testcard. Beiträge zur Popgeschichte, 7 (1999), 232–39 (p. 233). 29 For a positive view of the metaphor of the ‘DJ author’ see Florence Feiereisen, Der Text als Soundtrack  – der Autor als DJ. Postmoderne und postkoloniale Samples bei Thomas Meinecke (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2011); and for its problematizing see Katharina Picandet, ‘Der Autor als Disk(urs)-Jockey. Zitat-Pop am Beispiel von Thomas Meineckes Roman Hellblau’, in Grabienski, Huber and Thon, Poetik der Oberfläche, pp. 125–41. 30 See Klaus Ronneberger, Stephan Lanz, and Walther Jahn, Die Stadt als Beute (Bonn: Dietz, 1999).

272 

 Thomas Ernst

No-one can determine that’.³¹ From 2001 to 2006 Pollesch collaborated at the Berlin Volksbühne with the dramaturge Carl Hegemann, whose daughter Helene became an object of controversy in 2010 when the bourgeois tradition of literary creativity and authorial image clashed with the practices of the pop generation.

Neither a Wunderkind nor a Plagiarist: Helene Hegemann’s Axolotl Roadkill as an Example of a Popliterary Novel with Intertextual Elements Born in 1992, Helene Hegemann tasted success early, both as director and writer: her radio play Ariel 15  – oder die Grundlagen der Verlorenheit [Ariel 15  – or the Foundations of Forlornness] was chosen as a ‘Radio Play of the Month’ in 2008. Her film Torpedo earned her the Max Ophüls Prize in 2009. Literary critics were full of anticipation when her debut novel Axolotl Roadkill was published by Ullstein in 2010, and initial reactions were enthusiastic. Her novel was described as ‘a sensation’ by the FAZ³² and the Süddeutsche Zeitung,³³ and the young author was hailed as a ‘literary ball of lightning’ (Die Zeit),³⁴ ‘a wunderkind of the Berlin alternative scene’ (Der Spiegel),³⁵ or ‘a wunderkind of literature’ (Focus),³⁶ to quote only some of the exemplary praise from important newspapers and magazines. All these very positive responses emphasize three elements: the author’s young age, her socialization in the theatre scene of Berlin’s Volksbühne and the extraordinary power of her novel’s language. And yet it is conspicuous that the novel is rarely considered ‘completely authentic’ even if parallels between the

31 René Pollesch, ‘Ich bin Heidi Hoh. René Pollesch im Gespräch mit Jürgen Berger’, in www-slums, ed. by Corinna Brocher (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2003), pp.  341–48 (pp. 346 –47). 32 Maxim Biller, ‘Glauben, lieben, hassen. Helene Hegemanns Axolotl Roadkill’ (http://www. faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/helene-hegemanns-axolotl-roadkill-glauben-lieben-hassen-1911200.html). 33 Georg Diez, ‘Zum Glück. Helene Hegemann wird im Februar 18 und hat ein sehr erstaunliches Buch geschrieben’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 23./24. 1. 2010. 34 Ursula März, ‘Literarischer Kugelblitz. Im Koksnebel: Helene Hegemanns heftiges Romandebüt’ (http://www.zeit.de/2010/04/L-B-Hegemann). 35 Tobias Rapp, ‘Das Wunderkind der Boheme’ (http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/a-672725.html). 36 Anonymus, ‘Wildes Wunderkind’, Focus, 1. 2. 2010.

Pop vs. Plagiarism 

 273

author’s biography and her protagonist Mifti are undeniable. Tobias Rapp writes in Der Spiegel that the novel has ‘something to do with Hegemann’s life – but in a limited way’.³⁷ Nadine Lange writes in the Tagesspiegel that the novel is intertextual and ‘extends beyond an autobiography. Hegemann’s highly artificial language is peppered with references to Christoph Schlingensief or the radical U.S. author Kathy Acker. In addition there are references to pop music with a pronounced retro feel’.³⁸ Axolotl Roadkill tells the story of the sixteen-year-old drop-out, Mifti, who lives in a kind of commune with her siblings Annika and Edmond. Her mother has passed away, having largely neglected her children. Her father works in the Berlin cultural scene and lives with his younger girlfriend. The novel describes Mifti’s radical self-doubt and her unsuccessful attempts to give her life meaning through excessive behaviour at parties with drugs and sex, including with her older best friend Ophelia. In her diary and in an email conversation with Ophelia, she reflects on her continual failures. She acquires an axolotl in order to represent her inertia – a ‘nocturnal salamander’ that ‘just won’t grow up’.³⁹ It appears, according to Hannelore Schlaffer, simultaneously as a ‘totem of contemporary youth and in the title of the work as a symbol of refusal’.⁴⁰ The first person narrative of fifteen-year-old Mifti begins with the words ‘O.k., die Nacht, wieder mal so ein Ringen mit dem Tod, die Fetzen angstgequälten Schlafes’ [OK, the night, once again a struggle with death, the shreds of sleep tortured with anxiety]. The novel ends with a letter from her late mother who rebukes Mifti: ‘Es macht mich wirklich krank, wenn ich all die Scheiße höre, die du von dir gibst. In der Hölle ist für dich ein Platz’ [It really makes me sick when I listen to all the shit you give off. In hell there’s a spot reserved for you].⁴¹ The themes alone place the novel in the pop literature rubric: it focuses on a youthful protagonist who rebels against bourgeois values; her party life, sexuality, and drug use are openly described, and the text also covers various media, from television to music and the Internet, including ‘Edmonds iTunes-Bibliothek’ [Edmond’s iTunes-Library].⁴² In addition, the para-textual elements and

37 Rapp, ‘Das Wunderkind der Boheme’. 38 Nadine Lange, ‘Torpedo Girl. Ich ist ein Drogentrip: Axolotl Roadkill, das erstaunliche Romandebüt der 17-jährigen Helene Hegemann’ (http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/literatur/ rezension-axolotl-roadkill-ich-ist-ein-drogentrip/1669326.html) 39 Helene Hegemann, Axolotl Roadkill (Berlin: Ullstein, 2010), p. 138. 40 Hannelore Schlaffer, ‘Die Göre  – Karriere einer literarischen Figur’, Merkur, 65 (2011), pp. 274–79 (p. 276). 41 Hegemann, Axolotl Roadkill, pp. 9, 204. 42 Ibid., p. 18.

274 

 Thomas Ernst

the titles of sections signify the novel’s intertextual and intermedial strategies: it opens with the motto of a private television channel (‘We love to entertain you’ from Pro 7).⁴³ In her concluding acknowledgments Hegemann thanks writer/ director Rene Pollesch and, prominently, avant-garde author Kathy Acker, known as an anti-copyright activist.⁴⁴ Chapter titles are predominantly marked quotations from bands – from Pink Floyd to Portishead – or from popular ‘stars’ like Franz Beckenbauer and ‘Sexy Julia’, or from authors like David Foster Wallace. A typical chapter title with a marked intertextual reference is: ‘Frustrated Women (I mean, they’re frustrated) (The Standells)’.⁴⁵ It is not only in its para-texts and chapter titles where the text – already characterized as pop thematically – uses different intertextual processes and archives; the text itself is littered with many marked quotations from popular culture. Mifti once quotes Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz when she says: ‘Toto, I’ve a feeling we are not in Kansas anymore’. Ophelia reports on her intertextual and intermedial artistic activities: ‘Ich habe mit zwölf einen ganzen Roman geschrieben, der nur aus Songtexten von Nick Cave zusammengeflickt war. “Next to me lies the print of your body plan like the map of a forbidden island.”’ [At twelve I wrote a whole novel cobbled together with song lyrics by Nick Cave. ‘Next to me lies the print of your body plan like the map of a forbidden island’].⁴⁶ The description of the figures via pop cultural coordinates, which Rolf Parr has described as constitutive for pop literary texts, in opposition to a bourgeois subject philosophy of internalized values, is illustrated in the novel’s very first pages.⁴⁷ Mifti’s father is called an old-time, left-wing culture worker whose character is solely explained in external, pop cultural fashion via ‘depressive Musik’ [depressing music], namely ‘Melvins, Julie Driscoll, Neil Young’.⁴⁸ An accidental acquaintance of Mifti is described as follows: ‘O-Ton heterosexuelle Kommunikationsdesignerin in blaugraugestreifter Strickjacke’ [Direct quote, heterosexual communication designer in a blue-grey striped knit jacket];⁴⁹ her older brother Edmond is, among other things, ‘eine Mischung aus Marlon Brando und äh, wem denn noch, keine Ahnung, er besitzt eins der weltweit nur fünfhundertmal existierenden Paare goldener Pro Bowl 2007 Air Force 1 von Nike […] Fan von Ray Davis’ [a mix of Marlon Brando and eh, whatshisname, no idea, he owns

43 Ibid., p. 7. 44 Ibid., p. 207. 45 Ibid., p. 132. 46 Ibid., p. 43, p. 159. 47 See Rolf Parr, ‘Literatur als literarisches (Medien-)Leben’. 48 Hegemann, Axolotl Roadkill, p. 13. 49 Ibid.

Pop vs. Plagiarism 

 275

one of only 500 existing pairs of golden Pro Bowl 2007 Air Force 1 by Nike (…) a fan of Ray Davis].⁵⁰ Pop cultural references like musical taste, clothing style or consumer choices serve as primary or partial means of characterization. That the text seeks the company of pop literature is also signalled at the beginning: the fourth page of the actual narrative cites a ‘pop culture text’ regarding the question ‘weshalb die Avantgarde TROTZDEM bauchtanzt’ [why the avant-garde NEVERTHELESS does belly dancing]. Page seven features a quotation from Ulf Poschardt’s ‘sagenumwobene[m] Sachtext über die Praxis der DJ-CULTURE’ [legendary monograph on the practice of DJ-CULTURE].⁵¹ The novel acknowledges its references to pop cultural archives and theories early. In addition, meta-reflections on literary or linguistic processes for montage of available elements permeate the text. On the one hand, these reinforce its literary quality; on the other hand, they serve as a signpost that radically questions the category of ‘originality’. In the first paragraph Mifti observes: ‘Früher war das alles so schön pubertär hingerotzt und jetzt ist es angestrengte Literatur’ [It used to be like everything was like spewed out in a cool puberal way, and now it’s literature].⁵² I would paraphrase this sentence as follows: ‘I, the narrator, used to write ingenious texts in one fell swoop; now I write real literature, which is clearly not characterized by any genius creative processes but rather by intensive interaction with a canon beyond the narrative of originality, which takes a conscious effort.’ In the second paragraph of the novel, Mifti, having just woken up from an afternoon nap, notices that ‘so viele Gedanken da sind, dass man seine eigenen Gedanken nicht mehr von den fremden unterscheiden kann’ [there are so many thoughts that you can’t separate your own thoughts from the others].⁵³ This merging of one’s own and others’ elements is revisited metaphorically two pages later. Mifti reflects on two ‘vollgekotzte[ ] Kleidungsstücke’ [pieces of clothing with puke all over them]: ‘Ist das die Kotze eines Wildfremden, der mich in einer stark frequentierten Unisextoilette überrascht hat? Ist das meine Kotze? Bringt mich das mir jetzt irgendwie näher? Ich fange offenbar echt an, die wichtigsten Details zu vergessen’ [Is this puke from a complete stranger who surprised me in an over-frequented unisex bathroom? Is this my puke? Does this bring me closer to myself somehow? I really seem to start losing the most important details]. And a few sentences later she observes: ‘Ich habe meine […] Patchworkgeschichte ver-

50 Hegemann, Axolotl Roadkill, p. 14. 51 Ibid., pp. 12, 15. See also Ulf Poschardt, DJ Culture. Diskjockeys und Popkultur (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1997). 52 Hegemann, Axolotl Roadkill, p. 9. 53 Ibid., pp. 9–10.

276 

 Thomas Ernst

loren’ [I have lost my (…) patchwork story]’.⁵⁴ The motifs are very similar: her own and others’ thoughts (or ‘elements’) merge in the protagonist’s world. But it is neither useful nor possible to try and separate the various elements. These examples culminate on page seven of the actual novel in a dialog between Mifti and Edmond which assumes the character of a manifesto. Edmond starts: – Is it mixed by you? It’s mixed like shit! Berlin is here to mix everything with everything, Alter! – Ist das von dir? – Berlin is here to mix everything with everything, Alter? Ich bediene mich überall, wo ich Inspiration finde und beflügelt werde, Mifti. Filme, Musik, Bücher, Gemälde, Wurstlyrik, Fotos, Gespräche, Träume… – Straßenschilder, Wolken… – …Licht und Schatten, genau, weil meine Arbeit und mein Diebstahl authentisch werden, sobald etwas meine Seele berührt. Es ist egal, woher ich die Dinge nehme, wichtig ist, wohin ich sie trage. – Es ist also nicht von dir? – Nein. Von so’nem Blogger. [– Is it mixed by you? It’s mixed like shit! Berlin is here to mix everything with everything. Dude!

– Is that yours? – Berlin is here to mix everything with everything, dude? I help myself wherever I find inspiration and take wing, Mifti. Films, music, books, paintings, sausage poetry, photos, conversations, dreams… – Street signs, clouds… – … light and shadow, exactly, because my work and my theft become authentic as soon as something touches my soul. It doesn’t matter where I get things from, it’s important where I take them. – So it’s not yours? – No, from some blogger].⁵⁵

54 Ibid., p. 12. 55 Ibid., p. 15.

Pop vs. Plagiarism 

 277

Even the reflections on the ‘mixing principle’ are taken from another source (and from another medium): a blogger.⁵⁶ The novel thus confesses its literary technique here in that the narrator Mifti is inspired by a slightly older male named Edmond who reports on being inspired by another source. It is a meta-fictional moment which declares that a ‘mixed work’ becomes ‘authentic’ precisely as thievery if it is assembled in aesthetically persuasive form. Michael Peter Hehl considers this passage an adaptation of Kathy Acker’s poetics, whom Hegemann explicitly credits in her acknowledgments.⁵⁷ The novel thus features numerous marked quotations from popular and canonical sources. The text signals at the very beginning that its protagonist repeatedly mixes various ‘foreign’ elements in her life (and consequently in the remainder of the book as the reader may surmise) in the same way it denotes the text’s writing strategy as intertextual. The scandal about the text’s presumed plagiarisms began on 5 February 2010 and focused on the many unacknowledged sources that Hegemann used. However, in light of my previous discussion it seems questionable whether her intertextual approach can still be described with terms like ‘unacknowledged’ or, following Theisohn’s definition of plagiarism, ‘conscious appropriation of another’s ideas with the presumption of authorship’.⁵⁸ It is also obvious that in Deef Pirmasens we find a blogger who has landed a scoop because his pop literary knowledge extends beyond the high culture seismograph of newspapers’ arts and leisure sections. On his blog, die gefühlskonserve. deef pirmasens as seen in real life [can of feelings. Deef pirmasens as seen in real life], he initially uses only six examples under the heading ‘Axolotl Roadkill: all just ripped?’ in order to show how close some descriptions from the novel are to Airen’s wordpress blog, particularly descriptions of party nights in the Berlin club Berghain.⁵⁹ Over the next two days Pirmasens added further examples to the list of cross-references and showed that the final letter from Mifti’s dead mother is in good part a translation of the song ‘Fuck U’ by the English band Archive. A typical

56 See Pirmasens, ‘Axolotl Roadkill’. Pirmasens links in his post the sentence ‘Berlin is here to mix everything with everything’ with Airen’s blog, but this entry from 28 June 2008 is, however, no longer available on Airen’s blog. (See http://airen.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/berlin-is-hereto-mix-everything-with-everything/). 57 See Michael Peter Hehl, ‘Digitale Bohème vs. Bildungsbürgertum. Kultursoziologische Perspektiven auf Helene Hegemanns Axolotl Roadkill’, in Das erste Jahrzehnt. Narrative und Polemiken des 21. Jahrhunderts, ed. by Johanna Bohley and Julia Schöll (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2011), pp. 259–78 (pp. 269–70). 58 Fischer, Das Literaturplagiat, p. 3. 59 See also Airen, Strobo (Berlin: SuKuLTuR, 2009).

278 

 Thomas Ernst

example of Pirmasens’ juxtaposition of a Hegemann passage and Airen’s original sources looks like this: Axolotl Roadkill, p. 11: ‘Meine Existenz setzt sich momentan nur noch aus Schwindelanfällen und der Tatsache zusammen, dass sie von einer hyperrealen, aber durch Rohypnol etwas schlecht aufgelösten Vaselintitten-Installation halb zerfleischt wurde’ [Right now my existence consists only of dizzy spells and of the fact that it’s been half mangled by a hyper-real but, due to Rohypnol, low-res installation of vaseline tits].

Compared to Airens’ blog posting Einerseits [On the One Hand] on May 28, 2009: ‘[…] für Erwachsene, mit farbigem Schattenspiel auf hyperrealen aber durch Rohypnol etwas schlecht aufgelösten Vaselintitten [...]’ [(…) for adults, with a colourful play of shadows on hyper-real but, due to Rohypnol, somewhat low-res vaseline tits (…)].⁶⁰

Pirmasens connected these discoveries, which were later picked up by the print-media and turned into the scandal, with two theses. The first is his accusation of plagiarism against Hegemann, because ‘instead of simply letting herself be inspired by others and quote them she copied them’.⁶¹ However, he made distinctions that were largely ignored in the subsequent debate: there is a marked quotation from David Foster Wallace on the one hand, and there are unacknowledged quotations from Airen on the other.⁶² In my reading this is representative of Hegemann’s intertextual approach. Pirmasens’ second thesis addresses the newspaper critics: given the self-reflexive hints at a collage principle outlined above, they should have recognized the necessity of looking further: ‘A Google search would have led to Airen’s blog and with it to his novel’.⁶³ Indeed, most of the reviews emphasized the connection between Mifti and Hegemann which was also pushed by the publisher Ullstein. The condensed message on the back cover reads: ‘Ich bin sechzehn Jahre alt […]. Ich bin in Berlin. Es geht um meine Wahnvorstellungen’ [I am sixteen years old (…). I am in Berlin. I’m talking about my delusions].⁶⁴

60 Pirmasens, ‘Axolotl Roadkill’. 61 Ibid. 62 See Hegemann, Axolotl Roadkill, pp. 4, 193. 63 Pirmasens, ‘Axolotl Roadkill’. 64 Hegemann, Axolotl Roadkill, back cover. Doris Moser has analyzed these effects of authenticity caused by the media communication of Helene Hegemann in detail: Doris Moser: ‘Frame and Fame. Literaturvermittlung als Medienkommunikation am Beispiel von Helene Hegemann und

Pop vs. Plagiarism 

 279

The print-media critique suddenly found itself in a bind: it had presumed authenticity but was now faced with unacknowledged intertextuality. Some reactions seemed downright furious and accused the text and its author of deliberate deception for economic reasons. Andreas Kilb, for example, observed in the FAZ that the novel ‘would not even have done half as well on the market or in reviews if it [had not been staged] as the cry for help by a very young original genius’.⁶⁵ In the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Bernd Graff sounded even more direct with the charge that Hegemann’s unmarked quotations undermine the elementary principles of the literary market, which basically aligns him with the ‘Leipziger Erklärung’. Graff demands a ‘genuine authorship’, which he regards as a prerequisite for literary prizes, authors’ royalties, and the appearance of authors on talk shows. Hegemann’s particular form of unmarked intertextuality would have to be ‘understood as product piracy, and the literary industry cannot afford this. It would be destroyed’.⁶⁶ An extension of the print-media’s invective can be found in scholarly responses. While Philip Theisohn’s book Literarisches Eigentum. Zur Ethik geistiger Arbeit im digitalen Zeitalter [Literary Property, subtitled An Essay on the Ethics of Intellectual Work in the Digital Age] (2012), has a slightly different concern, it is nonetheless instructive in this context. Theisohn addresses the pop culture elements through which I have been reading Hegemann’s text. His 124-page essay makes the claim that in the digital age there is no more working on coherent texts and no literary memory is being constructed. In other words: ‘[B]ecause we no longer appropriate [aneignen], we are no longer willing or able to make anything our own [zu eigen haben]’. Theisohn’s basis is the bourgeois understanding of individuality, work, property as well as education in the service of subjectivity, against which pop artists of the 1960s positioned themselves. Theisohn thus finds in Hegemann ‘presumed contexts and intertexts’ which are ‘grafted, but nothing of it is actually understood, conceptually examined, comprehended’.⁶⁷ In other words: in the drop-out Mifti, the novel features a young woman ‘who

Axolotl Roadkill’, in Doing Contemporary Literature. Praktiken, Wertungen, Automatismen, ed. by Maik Bierwirth, Anja Johannsen and Mirna Zeman (München: Fink, 2012), pp. 191–216. 65 Andreas Kilb, ‘Entriegelung der Sinne. Vom “poète maudit” zur verfluchten Poetin: Die junge Autorin Helene Hegemann hat sich von dem Roman Strobo des Bloggers Airen inspirieren lassen. Was taugt die Vorlage?’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 9. 2. 2010. 66 Bernd Graff, ‘Paradies der falschen Vögel. Von Bricolage bis Mashup – der Streit um Hegemanns Kulturtechnik des Zitats’, (http://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/streit-um-hegemannparadies-der-falschen-voegel-1.63810). 67 Philipp Theisohn, Literarisches Eigentum. Zur Ethik geistiger Arbeit im digitalen Zeitalter. Essay (Stuttgart: Kröner, 2012), p. 124.

280 

 Thomas Ernst

can never attain something like education, self-fulfilment, reflectiveness, her own style’. Theisohn hardly takes time to reflect on the pop cultural challenge to this concept. Instead he reaches the verdict: ‘Perhaps it isn’t very good literature, maybe it isn’t literature at all’.⁶⁸ This leads to the more basic question of literary value, which gets different answers from ‘bourgeois literature’ and ‘pop literature’ respectively, particularly in relation to ‘character’, which intertextual strategies are used and if an author can be understood as the original creator of innovative ideas. Michael Peter Hehl takes a contrary position in his analysis of the novel and the plagiarism scandal. He looks at the events from a cultural sociology perspective as a conflict between the ‘digital Bohemian’ on the one hand and an educated middle-class public on the other. Hehl shows in his analysis that the figure of the drop-out Mifti is shaped in reaction to concepts of subjectivity inside a bourgeois modernity. As a reaction to this backdrop, Mifti tries out different versions of ‘subjectivity in the creative milieu of postmodernity’, among which one finds ‘intertextual processes that connote something counter-cultural and that transgress the boundaries of copyright’.⁶⁹ The conflict between the bourgeois biblio culture and the use of digital media within the postmodern creative milieu becomes increasingly pronounced, according to Hehl. The debate around Hegemann is thus simply a particularly typical symptom; first, in her author performance alone, the ‘plagiarizer’ and the prodigy – that outgrowth of the literature industry’s genius in bourgeois modernity – come apart;⁷⁰ second, Hegemann lacks critical distance on societal processes because her novel questions the very possibility of distance – as all of pop culture traditionally does. This leads Hehl to see the public debate on Axolotl Roadkill as ‘a continuation of the novel’ that ‘dramatizes central aporias of contemporary culture’.⁷¹ If one views Hegemann’s novel as representative of pop literary writing as it is practiced and understood in contemporary postmodern, creative milieus, one discovers, however, problems and aporias different from the bourgeois critique which is suspicious of the entire concept. First, there is the problem that in the 1960s the pop cultural revolt against bourgeois notions of subjectivity could be

68 Theisohn, Literarisches Eigentum, p. 57. 69 Hehl, ‘Digitale Bohème’, pp. 268–69. 70 Ibid., p. 274. 71 Ibid., p. 275. Jan Süselbeck follows also the thesis that Axolotol Roadkill ‘is not a document of a fraud but a poetological principle of copying which is demonstrated by the text itself’. Jan Süselbeck, ‘Zwischen Intertextualität und Plagiarismus. Literarische Antworten auf Fragen der Originalität seit 1990’, in Literatur und Theorie seit der Postmoderne, ed. by Klaus Birnstiel and Erik Schilling (Stuttgart: Hirzel, 2012), pp. 121–36 (pp. 132–33).

Pop vs. Plagiarism 

 281

understood as a counter-discourse or a subversive act, but in this day and age a ‘universalized youthfulness’ appears as a ‘hegemonic subjectivity model of the present’.⁷² While it was possible in the 1960s to conceive of flat hierarchies, autonomy and creativity as aspects of political resistance, a more flexible capitalism with its continually growing service sector has incorporated these forms of work. In his description of the ‘New Capitalism’, Richard Sennett asserts that ‘in the attack on routine a new freedom of time appears, but its appearance is deceptive […] The age of flexibility is the age of a new power’.⁷³ Second, it is striking that in her novel Hegemann draws on youthful, alternative cultures and digital forms of writing, but in doing so is not aesthetically consistent. Linguist Michael Szurawitzki has shown for example that the emails between Mifti and Ophelia appear progressive in medial terms but the language used actually belongs to an age of letter-writing. In this sense Hegemann’s is an ‘analogue digital literature’.⁷⁴ Finally, one must ask why Hegemann chose to conform partially with the rules of the biblio culture when writing a pop literary text, with its incorporation of email communications and the intertextual reference to a blog. In the face of numerous acknowledged quotations – for the Wallace excerpt rights were actually obtained and acknowledged in the first editions – the inconsistent behaviour on the part of writer and publisher seems odd (despite the many self-reflexive remarks at the beginning of the novel).⁷⁵ This contradictory stance was amplified after Pirmasens’ scoop when Hegemann defended her method nonchalantly. Once again she explained her intertextual process: she ‘couldn’t care less where people get their whole experimental set up. What matters is where they take it’. Her novel would formally reflect the ‘detachment from all the copyright excess towards the right to copy and transform’. In the end she denounces herself as ‘totally thoughtless and egotistical’ and apologizes to the authors whose texts she used. On the other hand her publisher Siv Bublitz stated that the position of Ullstein is ‘unequivocal’: sources have to be named and their use must be permit-

72 Ibid., p. 263. 73 Richard Sennett, Der flexible Mensch. Die Kultur des neuen Kapitalismus (Berlin: Siedler, 2000), p.  75. In Germany Holm Friebe and Sascha Lobo have tried to describe the more flexible and immaterial younger workers as a ‘digital bohème’; Ulrich Bröckling, in recourse to Foucauldian technologies of the self, has approached those commercialized forms of subjectivity sociologically; see Holm Fiebe and Sascha Lobo, Wir nennen es Arbeit. Die digitale Bohème oder: intelligentes Leben jenseits der Festanstellung (Munich: Heyne 2006); Ulrich Bröckling, Das unternehmerische Selbst. Soziologie einer Subjektivierungsform (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2007). 74 Michael Szurawitzki, ‘Zur E-Mail-Kommunikation in Helene Hegemanns Roman Axolotl Roadkill ’, Muttersprache, 121.2 (2011), pp. 118–32 (p. 130). 75 Hegemann, Axolotl Roadkill, p. 4.

282 

 Thomas Ernst

ted by the author.⁷⁶ By the fourth addition, and after clarifying legal issues, specifically with the small publisher SuKuLTuR, Axolotl Roadkill appeared with an appendix titled ‘Sources and Acknowledgments’.⁷⁷ It meticulously lists twenty of the novel’s references to Airen’s weblog along with many others such as texts by Kathy Acker, Rainald Goetz, Jim Jarmusch, Malcolm Lowry or Valérie Valère. This belated paratext factually transforms the unmarked quotations in the novel into citations.

Precious ‘Plagiarism’? Helene Hegemann’s Axolotl Roadkill, the Conflict between Bourgeois and Pop Literary Aesthetics and the Copyright Debate My close reading of Helene Hegemann’s Axolotl Roadkill has shown that newspaper reviewers saw their standards of authenticity violated, although the novel – in its paratexts, its chapter titles, and its actual text (by way of marked quotations and meta-reflections) – makes no real secret of its intertextual approach. Given that those schooled in the blogosphere will find the reference to Airen’s blog easy to decode, the text itself addresses the inescapable merging of one’s own thoughts with the foreign as a method for developing any complex identity, and it states that an aesthetically successful mix constitutes a form of authenticity, a claim which Hegemann repeated in her apology. The true defendant would thus be the print media critics themselves, as Jürgen Kaube wrote in the FAZ regarding the ‘Hegemann case’: the ‘cultural establishment’ had imagined a ‘wunderkind’ and had ‘possibly brought an actual child sacrifice to their phantasmagoria’.⁷⁸

76 ‘Axolotl Roadkill: Helene Hegemann und Ullstein Verlegerin Dr.  Siv Bublitz antworten auf Plagiatsvorwurf’ (http://www.buchmarkt.de/content/41393-axolotl-roadkill-helene-hegemannund-ullstein-verlegerin-dr-siv-bublitz-antworten-auf-plagiatsvorwurf.htm). 77 Hegemann, Axolotl Roadkill, p. 203. 78 Jürgen Kaube, ‘Germany’s Next Autoren-Topmodel. Hat Helene Hegemann selbst geschrieben oder nur abgeschrieben? Ihr Roman Axolotl Roadkill dokumentiert weit über Plagiatsfragen hinaus die Verkommenheit des Betriebs, der sie feiert’, (http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/ buecher/plagiatsfall-helene-hegemann-germany-s-next-autoren-topmodel-1943229.html). What the ‘Hegemann case’ made stingingly clear to print media critics is that they have to open themselves up to pop and subcultural, as well as digital knowledge archives. See my argument in Thomas Ernst, ‘Wer hat Angst vor Goethes Pagerank? Bewertungsprozesse von Literatur und Aufmerksamkeitsökonomien im Internet’, in Kanon, Wertung und Vermittlung. Literatur in der

Pop vs. Plagiarism 

 283

From a pop literary perspective, which probes the novel for its knowledge archives, montage techniques and author performance, other problems and aporias are more interesting than the plagiarism charge. There is the prominent paradox of a kind of writing that embraces the new media but conforms to the regulations of the literary industry. There is the mixed message of an unintended kind: the publisher marketed the author as a ‘young authentic voice’ (for instance on the back cover) in spite of her intertextual process and meta reflections on an irreversible remix of her own thoughts and outside sources in both personality and writing. The paradox continued in their respective responses to the public accusations: the author justified her poetics, but eventually called herself egotistical and apologized; the publisher spoke of illegality, then made retroactive deals and printed a substantially revised edition. One cannot call this a confident pop literary play with intertextual processes, mining of different knowledge archives and clever intermedial author performances. This is especially because the history of plagiarism has established a big difference ‘between, on the one hand, a writer who insists on the aesthetic necessity of his plagiarism in a poetic manifesto of sorts, and the poet who is accused of plagiarism from the outside, in public’.⁷⁹ In this sense it appears that Hegemann allowed others to define her author performance when she made her (indifferent) public apology. In her use of pop literary strategies of intertextuality and author performance, Hegemann exposes the wide gap between the bourgeois tradition of literature and its pop cultural challenger. She does not quite reach the levels of Thomas Meinecke, René Pollesch, or Elfriede Jelinek, whose techniques are more complex and more confident. It is not justified from a pop aesthetic that she quotes well known sources ‘properly’ while those from subculture or digital sources remain unmarked. Airen, whose work may not be impressive linguistically, looks more masterful in this debate: his second book I am Airen Man (2010) concludes with the ‘EDITORISCHE NOTIZ: Airen hat für den vorliegenden Roman Texte aus seinem Blog www.airen.wordpress.com verwendet und sich dies selbst genehmigt’ [‘NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER: Airen has used texts from his blog www.airen.wordpress.com with his own permission’].⁸⁰

Wissensgesellschaft, ed. by Matthias Beilein, Claudia Stockinger, Simone Winko (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012), pp. 305–20 (pp. 316–18). 79 Anne-Kathrin Reulecke, ‘Ohne Anführungszeichen. Literatur und Plagiat’, in Fälschungen. Zu Autorschaft und Beweis in Wissenschaft und Künsten, ed. by Anne-Kathrin Reulecke (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2006), pp. 265–90 (p. 285). 80 Airen, I am Airen Man (Munich: Blumenbar, 2010), p. 174.

284 

 Thomas Ernst

Hegemann can be faulted for inconsistency, but the relentless broadsides from print media reviewers, scholars and senior authors (as in the ‘Leipzig Declaration’) show that certain pop literary approaches are still not afforded the status of true literature. Digital copying currently calls into question how the ‘Gutenberg galaxy’ handles the production, distribution and reception of literary texts, though neither copyright reforms nor literary and medial discourses on work and authorship have really dealt with this. As early as the 1990s Martha Woodmansee noted that ‘the law has yet to be affected by the “critique of authorship” initiated by Foucault’.⁸¹ Richard A. Posner likewise demands that we depart from the seemingly clear distinction between the original creation and the intertextual plagiarism. He finds the latter vague and calls for analyzing the ‘gray area […] in which creative imitation produces value that should undercut a judgment of plagiarism – indeed an imitator may produce greater value than an originator’.⁸² Despite its shortcomings, Axolotl Roadkill may well turn out to be an inspiration to such a project of productive copying. Translated by Joachim Ghislain and Margaret McCarthy

81 Martha Woodmansee, ‘On the Author Effect: Recovering Collectivity’, in The Construction of Authorship. Textual Approbiation in Law and Literature, ed. by Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (Duke: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 15–28 (p. 28). 82 Richard A. Posner, The Little Book of Plagiarism (New York: Pantheon, 2007), p. 108.

Pop Literature: A Bibliography Primary Works Berg, Sybille, Ein paar Leute suchen das Glück und lachen sich tot (Leipzig: Reclam, 1997). Berg, Sybille, Sex II (Leipzig: Reclam, 1998). Bessing, Joachim, Christian Kracht, Eckhart Nickel, Alexander von Schönburg and Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre, Tristesse Royale. Das popkulturelle Quintett (Berlin: Ullstein, 1999). Biller, Maxim, Harlem Holocaust. Kurzroman (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1998). Brinkmann, Rolf-Dieter, Standphotos. Gedichte 1962–1970 (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1980). Brinkmann, Rolf-Dieter and Ralf-Rainer Rygulla, ACID. Neue amerikanische Szene (Darmstadt: März, 1969). Brinkmann, Rolf-Dieter, Silver Screen. Neue amerikanische Lyrik (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1969). Brussig, Thomas, Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee (Berlin: Volk und Welt, 1999). Brussig, Thomas, Helden wie wir (Berlin: Volk und Welt, 1995). Casati, Rebecca, Hey Hey Hey (Munich: Diana, 2001). Eismann, Sonja, ed., Hot Topic: Popfeminismus heute (Mainz: Ventil, 2007). Fauser, Jörg, Aqualunge. Ein Report (Göttingen: Breger, 1971). Fauser, Jörg, Tophane (Gersthofen: Maro, 1972). Fauser, Jörg, Die Harry Gelb Story (Gersthofen: Maro, 1973). Fauser, Jörg, Marlon Brando (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978). Fauser, Jörg, Der Schneemann (Munich: Rogner & Bernhard, 1981). Fauser, Jörg, Das Schlangenmaul (Frankfurt a. M.: Ullstein, 1985). Fichte, Hubert, Die Palette (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1968). Goetz, Rainald, Irre (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1983). Goetz, Rainald, Krieg. Hirn (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1986). Goetz, Rainald, Kontrolliert (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1988). Goetz, Rainald, Festung (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1993). Goetz, Rainald, Heute Morgen (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1998–2000). Goetz, Rainald, Jahrzehnt der schönen Frauen (Berlin: Merve, 2001). Goetz, Rainald, Abfall für alle. Roman eines Jahres (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2003). Goetz, Rainald, Schlucht (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2007–12). Grether, Kerstin, Zuckerbabys (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2006). Grether, Kerstin, Zungenkuss: Du nennst es Kosmetik, ich nenn es Rock ‘n’ Roll. Musikgeschichten 1990 bis heute (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2007). Haaf, Meredith, Susanne Klingner and Barbara Streidl, Wir Alpha-Mädchen. Warum Feminismus das Leben schöner macht (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 2008). Handke, Peter, Die Innenwelt der Außenwelt der Innenwelt (Frankfurt a. M: Suhrkamp, 1969). Haußmann, Leander, NVA (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2005). Hegemann, Helene, Axolotl Roadkill (Berlin: Ullstein, 2010). Hegemann, Helene, Jage zwei Tiger (Berlin: Hanser, 2013). Hennig von Lange, Alexa, Relax (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1999). Hennig von Lange, Alexa, Ich bin’s (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2000).

286 

 Pop Literature: A Bibliography

Hennig von Lange, Alexa, Woher ich komme (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2003). Hennig von Lange, Alexa, Warum so traurig? (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2005). Hennig von Lange, Alexa, Risiko (Cologne: Dumont, 2007). Hennig von Lange, Alexa, Peace (Cologne: Dumont, 2009). Hennig von Lange, Alexa, Leichte Turbulenzen (Munich: Bertelsmann, 2011). Hennig von Lange, Alexa, Je länger, je lieber (Munich: Bertelsmann, 2013). Hensel, Jana, Zonenkinder (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2002). Hensel, Jana and Elisabeth Raether, Neue deutsche Mädchen (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2008). Hermann, Judith, Sommerhaus, später (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1998). Hübsch, Paul Gerhard, mach was du willst. gedichte (Berlin: Luchterhand, 1969). Hübsch, Hadayatullah, Keine Zeit für Trips. Autobiographischer Bericht (Frankfurt a. M.: Koren & Debes, 1991). Hübsch, Hadayatullah, Macht den Weg frei (Bad Honnef: Harlemann, 1998). Illies, Florian, Anleitung zum Unschuldigsein. Das Übungsbuch für ein schlechtes Gewissen (Berlin: Argon, 2001). Illies, Florian, Generation Golf. Eine Inspektion (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2001). Illies, Florian, Generation Golf zwei (Munich: Blessing, 2003). Jelinek, Elfriede, wir sind lockvögel baby! (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1970). Kanak Attak [Massimo Perinelli], Strategia Kanak – Recht auf Rechte global, in Kanak Attak: aktuell (http://www.kanak-attak.de/ka/aktuell/wissen.html). Kracht, Christian, Faserland (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1995). Kracht, Christian, ed., Mesopotamia. Ein Avant-Pop-Reader (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999). Kracht, Christian, Der gelbe Bleistift (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2000). Kracht, Christian, 1979 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2003). Kracht, Christian, Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2008). Kracht, Christian, Imperium (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2012). Lebert, Benjamin, Crazy (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1999). Lebert, Benjamin, Der Vogel ist ein Rabe (Munich: Goldmann, 2005). Lebert, Benjamin, Kannst du (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2006). Lebert, Benjamin, Der Flug der Pelikane (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2009). Lebert, Benjamin, Im Winter dein Herz (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 2012). Lottmann, Joachim, Deutsche Einheit. Ein historischer Roman aus dem Jahr 1995 (Zurich: Haffmans, 1999). Lottmann, Joachim, ed., Kanaksta. Von deutschen und anderen Ausländern. Generation Berlin (Berlin: Quadriga, 1999). Lottmann, Joachim, Die Jugend von heute (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2004). Lottmann, Joachim, Auf der Borderline nachts um halb eins. Mein Leben als Deutschlandreporter (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2007). Lottmann, Joachim, Der Geldkomplex (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2009). Lottmann, Joachim, Unter Ärzten (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2011). Lottmann, Joachim, 100 Tage Alkohol. Kein Roman (Vienna: Czernin, 2011). Lottmann, Joachim, Zombie Nation (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2006). Meinecke, Thomas, Holz. Erzählung (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1988). Meinecke, Thomas, The Church of John F. Kennedy (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1996).

Pop Literature: A Bibliography 

 287

Meinecke, Thomas, Tomboy (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1998). Meinecke, Thomas, Hellblau (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2001). Meinecke, Thomas, Musik (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2004). Meinecke, Thomas, Jungfrau (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2008). Meinecke, Thomas, Lookalikes (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2011). Naters, Elke, Königinnen (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1998). Naters, Elke, Lügen (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1999). Naters, Elke and Sven Lager, eds. the Buch. Leben am pool (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2001). Naters, Elke, G.L.A.M. (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2001). Naters, Elke, Mau Mau (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2002). Naters, Elke and Sven Lager, Durst Hunger müde (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2004). Naters, Elke, Justyna (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2006). Naters, Elke and Sven Lager, Was wir von der Liebe verstehen (Munich: btb, 2008). Neumeister, Andreas, Äpfel vom Baum im Kies (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1988). Neumeister, Andreas, Ausdeutschen. (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1994). Neumeister, Andreas, Salz im Blut (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1990). Neumeister, Andreas and Marcel Hartges, eds., Poetry! Slam! Texte der Pop-Fraktion (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1996). Neumeister, Andreas, Gut laut. Version 2.0 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2001). Neumeister, Andreas, Angela Davis löscht ihre Website (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2002). Neumeister, Andreas, Könnte Köln sein. Städte. Baustellen (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. 2008). PeterLicht, Wir werden siegen. Buch vom Ende des Kapitalismus (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2008). Ploog, Jürgen, Cola-Hinterland (Darmstadt: Joseph Melzer, 1969). Ploog, Jürgen, Motel U.S.. Amerikanisches Tagebuch (Basel: Nachtmaschine, 1979). Ploog, Jürgen, Nächte in Amnesien (Bonn: Sphinx, 1980). Ploog, Jürgen, Unterwegs sein ist alles/Tagebuch Berlin – New York (Aachen: Sic Literaturverlag, 2011). Regener, Sven, Herr Lehmann (Berlin: Eichborn, 2001). Regener, Sven, Neue Vahr Süd (Frankfurt a. M.: Eichborn, 2004). Regener, Sven, Der kleine Bruder (Frankfurt a. M.: Eichborn, 2008). Roche, Charlotte, Feuchtgebiete (Berlin: Ullstein, 2009). Röggla, Kathrin, Abrauschen (Salzburg: Residenz, 1997). Röggla, Katrin, Irres Wetter (Salzburg: Residenz, 2000). Röggla, Kathrin, really ground zero. 11. september und folgendes (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2001). Röggla, Kathrin, wir schlafen nicht (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2004). Röggla, Kathrin and Oliver Grajewski, tokio, rückwärtstagebuch (Nürnberg: starfruit publications, 2009). Röggla, Kathrin, die alarmbereiten (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2010). von Stuckrad-Barre, Benjamin, Livealbum (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1999). von Stuckrad-Barre, Benjamin, Remix (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1999). von Stuckrad-Barre, Benjamin, Soloalbum (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1999). von Stuckrad-Barre, Benjamin, Blackbox (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2000). von Stuckrad-Barre, Benjamin, Deutsches Theater (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2001).

288 

 Pop Literature: A Bibliography

von Stuckrad-Barre, Benjamin, Transkript. Mitschrift der Berliner Lesungen (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2001). von Stuckrad-Barre, Benjamin, Afterword for Jörg Fauser’s Rohstoff (Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2004). von Stuckrad-Barre, Was.Wir.Wissen (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2006). von Stuckrad-Barre, Benjamin, Auch Deutsche unter den Opfern (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2010). von Uslar, Moritz and Rebecca Casati, Wie sehen Sie denn aus? Über Geschmack läßt sich nicht streiten. Warum eigentlich nicht? Eine Stilkritik (Munich: Heyne, 1999). von Uslar, Moritz, 100 Fragen an … (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2004). von Uslar, Moritz, Waldstein oder Der Tod des Walter Gieseking am 6. Juni 2005 (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2006). von Uslar, Moritz, Deutschboden. Eine teilnehmende Beobachtung (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2010). Zaimoğlu, Feridun, Leinwand (Hamburg: Rotbuch, 2003). Zaimoğlu, Feridun, German Amok (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2004). Zaimoğlu, Feridun, Kanak Sprak: 24 Mißtöne vom Rande der Gesellschaft, 6th edn. (Hamburg: Rotbuch, 2004).

Recordings PeterLicht, Vierzehn Lieder (Munich: Modul, 2001). PeterLicht, Stratosphärenlieder (Munich: Modul, 2003). PeterLicht, Lieder vom Ende des Kapitalismus (Berlin: Motor Music, 2006). PeterLicht, Melancholie und Gesellschaft (Berlin: Motor Music, 2008). PeterLicht, Das Ende der Beschwerde (Berlin: Motor Music, 2011).

Interviews Gansel, Carsten, and Andreas Neumeister, ‘Pop bleibt subversiv. Ein Gespräch’, in Pop Literatur, ed. by Heinz Ludwig Arnold and Jörgen Schäfer (Text + Kritik, Sonderband [2003]), pp. 183–96. Kanak Attak, ‘Dieser Song gehört uns!’ Interview with Kanak Attak members Imran Ayata, Laura Mestre Vives and Vanessa Barth, by Uli Spenkoch and Serhat Karakayali, Diskus: Frankfurter StudentInnen Zeitschrift, 48.1 (1999).

Secondary Works Abel, Julia, ‘Konstruktionen “authentischer” Stimmen. Zum Verhältnis von “Stimme” und Identität in Feridun Zaimoglus Kanak Sprak’, in Stimme(n) im Text. Narratologische Positionsbestimmungen, ed. by Andrea Blödern, Daniela Langer and Michael Scheffel (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006), pp. 297–320.

Pop Literature: A Bibliography 

 289

Ächtler, Norman, ‘Die “Abtreibung” der Popliteratur. Kracht, Krieg, Kulturkritik’, in Kriegsdiskurse in Literatur und Medien nach 1989, ed. by Carsten Ganzel and Heinrich Kaulen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), pp. 379–401. Adler, Hans, ‘Mediating the Mediation: Rolf Dieter Brinkmann’s Concept of the Aesthetic Subject’, in High and Low Cultures. German Attempts at Mediation, ed. by Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), pp. 95–105. Agard, Oliver and Christian Helmreich, eds, Das Populäre. Untersuchungen zu Interaktionen und Differenzierungsstrategien in Literatur, Kultur und Sprache (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010). Arnold, Heinz Ludwig, ed., Rainald Goetz (Text + Kritik, 190 [2011]). Bashaw, Rita, ‘Comic Vision and “Negative Symbiosis” in Maxim Biller’s Harlem Holocaust and Rafael Seligmann’s Der Musterjude’, in Unlikely History. The Changing German-Jewish Symbiosis 1945–2000, ed. by Leslie Morris and Jack Zipes (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 263–76. Baer, Hester, ‘German Feminism in the Age of Neoliberalism. Jana Hensel and Elisabeth Raether’s Neue deutsche Mädchen’, German Studies Review, 35.2 (May 2012), 355–74. Baer, Hester, ‘Sex, Death, and Motherhood in the Eurozone. Contemporary Women’s Writing in German’, World Literature Today, 86.3 (May–June 2012), 59–65. Bartel, Heike, ‘Porn or PorNO. Approaches to Pornography in Elfriede Jelinek’s Lust and Charlotte Roche’s Feuchtgebiete’, in German Text Crimes. Writers Accused, from the 1950s to the 2000s, ed. by Tom Cheesman (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), pp. 99–124. Baßler, Moritz, Der deutsche Pop-Roman. Die neuen Archivisten (Munich: Beck, 2002). Baβler, Moritz, ‘“Die Zonenkinder” und das “Wir”. Ein Nachwort’, in Die Zonenkinder und wir. Die Geschichte eines Phänomens, ed. by Tom Kraushaar (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2004), pp. 78–81. Bayer, Gerd, ed., Mediating Germany. Popular Culture between Tradition and Innovation (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006). Bentz, Ralf, ‘Zwischen Pop-Affront und Punk-Habitus. Der Schriftsteller Rolf Dieter Brinkmann’, testcard. Beiträge zu Popgeschichten, 7 (1999), 178–85. Berendse, Gerrit-Jan, ‘Grauzone Gewalt: Rolf Dieter Brinkmann und die Achtundsechziger’, Glossen: Eine Internationale Zweisprachige Publikation zu Literatur, Film, und Kunst in den Deutschsprachigen Ländern nach 1945, 15 (2001), no pagination. Beretta, Stefano, ‘Kreuzberg 36 und die Berliner Lehrjahre: zu Sven Regeners Romanen Herr Lehmann und Neue Vahr Süd’, in Gedächtnis und Identität: Die deutsche Literatur nach der Vereinigung, ed. by Fabrizio Cambi (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2008), pp. 99–109. Biendarra, Anke S., ‘Der Erzähler als “postmoderner Flaneur” in Christian Krachts Roman Faserland’, German Life and Letters, 55.2 (April 2002), 164–79. Biendarra, Anke S., ‘Gen(d)eration Next. Prose by Julia Franck and Judith Hermann’, Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature, 28.1 (Winter 2004), 211–39. Biendarra, Anke S., Germans Going Global. Contemporary Literature and Cultural Globalization (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012). Biendarra, Anke, ‘Pop und Politik. Formen von Engagement in der zeitgenössischen Popliteratur’, Closing Borders, Bridging Gaps? Deutscher Pop an der Jahrtausendwende, special issue of Literatur für Leser, ed. by Anke Biendarra, 31.2 (2008), 125–41. Breger, Claudia, ‘Pop-Identitäten 2001. Thomas Meineckes Hellblau und Christian Krachts 1979’, Gegenwartsliteratur: A German Studies Yearbook, 2 (2003), 197–225.

290 

 Pop Literature: A Bibliography

Breger, Claudia, ‘Postmoderne Inszenierungen von Gender in der Literatur. Meinecke, Schmidt, Roes’, in Räume der literarischen Postmoderne: Gender, Performativität, Globalisierung, ed. by Paul Michael Lützeler (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2000), pp. 97–126. Brinkmann, Martin, ‘Unbehagliche Welten. Wirklichkeitserfahrungen in der neuen deutschsprachigen Literatur, dargestellt anhand von Christian Krachts Faserland (1995), Elke Naters Königinnen (1998), Xaver Bayers Heute könnte ein glücklicher Tag sein (2001) und Wolfgang Schömels Die Schnecke. Überwiegend neurotische Geschichten (2002)’, Weimarer Beiträge. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft, Ästhetik und Kulturwissenschaften, 53.1 (2007), 17–46. Büsser, Martin, ‘Der von Zuweisungen befreite Mensch – Der Autor Hubert Fichte’, testcard. Beiträge zur Popgeschichte, 7 (1999), 186–99. Cha, Kyung-Ho, ‘Made in Germany. Feridun Zaimoglu, Fatih Akin, die BILD-Zeitung und der Streit um das Adjektiv, “deutsch”’, Sprache und Literatur, 36.1 (2005), 78–97. Chase, Jefferson, ‘Shoah Business. Maxim Biller and the Problem of Contemporary German-Jewish Literature’, German Quarterly, 74.2 (Spring 2001), 111–31. Cheesman, Tom, ‘Akcam – Zaimoğlu – “Kanak Attak”. Turkish Lives and Letters in German’, German Life and Letters, 55.2 (April 2002), 180–95. Cheesman, Tom, ‘Talking “Kanak”. Zaimoğlu contra Leitkultur’, New German Critique, 92 (2004), 82–99. Chlada, Marvin, Gerd Dembowski and Deniz Ünlü, Alles Pop? Kapitalismus & Subversion (Aschaffenburg: Alibri, 2003). Clarke, David, ‘The Capitalist Uncanny in Kathrin Rögglas’s wir schlafen nicht. Ghosts in the Machine’, Angermion: Yearbook for Anglo-German Literary Criticism, Intellectual History and Cultural Transfers/Jahrbuch für Britisch-Deutsche Kulturbeziehungen, 4 (2011), 147–63. Clarke, David, ‘Dandyism and Homosexuality in the Novels of Christian Kracht’, Seminar, 41.1 (February 2005), 36–54. Constantine, Peter, ‘MTV, Benjamin Lebert, and Me’, Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, 54 (2008), 162–169. Cormican, Muriel, ‘Thomas Brussig’s Ostalgie in Print and on Celluloid’ in Processes of Transposition: German Literature and Film, ed. by Christiane Schönfeld and Hermann Rasche (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 251–77. Cooke, Paul, ‘Performing “Ostalgie”. Leander Haussmann’s Sonnenallee’, German Life and Letters, 56.2 (April 2003), 156–67. Cox, Geoffrey, ‘The Mensch-Machine. Constellations of Pop Music History in Andreas Neumeister’s Gut laut’, in Mediating Germany. Popular Culture between Tradition and Innovation, ed. by Gerd Bayer (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2006), pp.54–72. Dahlke, Birgit, ‘Sexing Berlin?’ German Life and Letters, 64.1 (January 2011), 83–94. Degler, Frank and Ute Paulokat, Neue deutsche Popliteratur (Padeborn: Fink, 2008). Diederichsen, Diedrich, ‘Die 90er, and dahinter die Unendlichkeit’, in Der lange Weg nach Mitte. Der Sound und die Stadt (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1999), pp. 272–86. Drügh, Heinz, ‘“Taping It All”. Überlegungen zum Realismus der Popliteratur bei Rolf Dieter Brinkmann und Rainald Goetz’, Cahiers d’Etudes Germaniques, 48 (2005), 147–58. Drügh, Heinz, ‘Verhandlungen mit der Massenkultur. Die neueste Literatur(-wissenschaft) und die soziale Realität’, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, 26.2 (December 2001), 173–200.

Pop Literature: A Bibliography 

 291

Dunker, Axel, ‘“Alle tanzen, doch niemand kennt die Platten”. Pastiche, Sampling und Intertextualität in Thomas Meineckes Roman Tomboy’, Weimarer Beiträge. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft, Ästhetik und Kulturwissenschaften, 52.1 (2006), 105–18. Eichmanns, Gabriele, ‘Die “McDonaldisierung” der Welt. Das Parodieren der Erwartungen des westlichen Lesers in Christian Krachts Der gelbe Bleistift (1999)’, in Strategies of Humor in Post-Unification German Literature, Film, and Other Media, ed. by Jill E. Twark (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013), pp. 267–90. Ernst, Thomas, Popliteratur (Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 2001). Ernst, Thomas, Literatur und Subversion. Politisches Schreiben in der Gegenwart (Bielefeld: transcript, 2013). Ernst, Thomas, ‘German Literature and Cultural Globalization’, in German Literature in the Age of Globalisation, ed. by Stuart Taberner (Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 2004), pp. 169–188. Feiereisen, Florence, ‘Eternal Interns. Kathrin Röggla’s Literary Treatment of Gendered Capitalism’, Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature, 35.1 (Winter 2011), 95–113. Feiereisen, Florence, Der Text als Soundtrack – der Autor als DJ. Postmoderne und postkoloniale Samples bei Thomas Meinecke (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2011). Fiedler, Leslie, ‘Cross the Border – Close the Gap’, in The Collected Essays of Leslie Fiedler (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), vol. II. Finlay, Frank, ‘“Dann wäre Deutschland wie das Wort Neckarauen”. Surface, Superficiality and Globalisation in Christian Kracht’s Faserland ’, in German Literature in the Age of Globalization, ed. by Stuart Taberner (Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 2004), pp. 189–208. Finlay, Frank, ‘“Surface Is an Illusion But So Is Depth”. The Novels of Christian Kracht’, German Life and Letters, 66.2 (April 2013), 213–31. Fornoff, Roger, ‘“Jede Fusion hat ihre Verlierer”. Über Popliteratur, Mauerfall und die politische Lethargie der Generation Golf’, Glossen. Eine Internationale Zweisprachige Publikation zu Literatur, Film, und Kunst in den Deutschsprachigen Ländern nach 1945, 24 (2006), no pagination. Forssell, Louise, ‘“Wir küssen uns, und ich sehe ihr dabei in die blaugefärbten Kontaktlinsen …”. Christian Krachts Faserland’, Studia Neophilologica. A Journal of Germanic and Romance Languages and Literature, 83.1 (2011), 104–120. Frank, Dirk, ‘“Die Nachfahren der Gegengegenkultur”. Die Geburt der Tristesse Royale aus dem Geiste der achtziger Jahre’, in Pop-Literatur, ed. by Heinz Ludwig Arnold and Jörgen Schäfer (Text + Kritik, Sonderband [2003]), pp. 218–33. Frank, Dirk, Popliteratur. Arbeitstexte für den Unterricht (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003). Frank, Dirk, ‘“Talking About My Generation”. Generationskonstrukte in der zeitgenössischen Pop-Literatur’, Deutschunterricht. Beiträge zu seiner Praxis und wissenschaftlichen Grundlegung, 52.5 (October 2000), 69–85. Gansel, Carsten, ‘Adoleszenz, Ritual und Inszenierung in der Popliteratur’, in Pop-Literatur, ed. by Heinz Ludwig Arnold and Jörgen Schäfer (Text + Kritik, Sonderband [2003]), pp. 234–57. Gemünden, Gerd, Framed Visions. Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999). Gleba, Kerstin and Eckhard Schumacher, eds, Pop seit 1964 (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2007).

292 

 Pop Literature: A Bibliography

Goer, Charis, ‘Cross the Border – Face the Gap. Ästhetik der Grenzerfahrung bei Thomas Meinecke und Andreas Neumeister’, in Pop-Literatur, ed. by Heinz Ludwig Arnold and Jörgen Schäfer (Text + Kritik, Sonderband [2003]), pp. 172–81. Grabienski, Olaf, Till Huber and Jan-Noël Thon, Poetik der Oberfläche. Popliteratur der 90er Jahre (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011). Grasskamp, Walter, Michaela Krützen and Stephan Schmitt, eds, Was ist Pop? Zehn Versuche (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2004). Häusler-Gross, Katharina, ‘Hybride Heimat. Changing Concepts of Heimat and Identity in Post-Wende Stories of Zonenkinder and Wendekinder’, in Heimat Goes Mobile: Hybrid Forms of Home in Literature and Film, ed. by Gabriele Eichmanns and Yvonne Franke (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013), pp. 122–45. Hecken, Thomas, Populäre Kultur (Bochum: Post, 2006). Hecken, Thomas, Pop. Geschichte eines Konzepts 1955–2009 (Bielefeld: transcript, 2009). Hempel, Dirk, Stuckrad-Barre und Kempowski. ‘Eine Annäherung’, in Autorinszenierungen. Autorschaft und literarisches Werk im Kontext der Medien, ed. by Christine Künzel and Jörg Schönert (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007), pp. 209–21. Hinz, Ralf, ‘Pop-Theorie und Pop-Kritik. Denk- und Schreibweisen im avancierten Musikjournalismus’, in Pop Literatur, ed. by Heinz Ludwig Arnold and Jörgen Schäfer (Text + Kritik, Sonderband [2003]), pp. 207–310. Höfler, Günther A., ‘Sampling – das Pop Paradigma in der Literatur als Epochenphänomen’, in Kontinuität und Wandel. Apokalypse und Prophetie. Literatur an Jahrhundertschwellen, ed. by Dietmar Jacobsen (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2001), pp. 249–67. Hoffmann, Dieter, Deutschsprachige Prosa seit 1945. Vol. 2. Von der neuen Subjektivität zur Pop-Literatur (Stuttgart: UTB, 2006). Hollmer, Heide, ‘The Next Generation. Thomas Brussig erzählt Erich Honeckers DDR’, Text + Kritik, (2000), 107–21. Hügel, Hans-Otto, ed., Handbuch Populäre Kultur. Begriffe, Theorie und Diskussionen (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2003). Jeong, Hang-Kyun, ‘Ästhetik des Abfalls. Eine Überlegung zu Abfall für Alle von Rainald Goetz’, Wirkendes Wort. Deutsche Sprache und Literatur in Forschung und Lehre, 61.2 (August 2011), 259–71. Joachimthaler, Jürgen, ‘Politik bis Pop. Gegenwartsliteratur in Deutschland 1980–2005’, Orbis Linguarum, 30 (2006), 37–64. Jung, Thomas, ‘Trash, Cash oder Chaos? Populäre deutschsprachige Literatur seit der Wende und die sogenannte Popliteratur’, in Alles nur Pop? Anmerkungen zur populären und Popliteratur seit 1990, ed. by Thomas Jung (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2002), pp. 15–27. Jung, Werner, ‘“Let’s go, man, go!” Jörg Fauser und sein Amerika. Mit einem Seitenblick auf Rolf Dieter Brinkmann’, in Amerika der Autoren. Von Kafka bis 09/11, ed. by Jochen Vogt and Alexander Stephan (Munich: Fink, 2006), pp. 323–35. Kahnke, Corinna, ‘Intercourse as Discourse in Alexa Hennig von Lange’s Relax’, Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature, 35.1 (Winter), 40–55. Kahnke, Corinna and Maria Stehle, ‘“Made in Germany”. The Politics of Teaching German Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century’, Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German, 44.2 (Fall 2011), 116–23. Karakus, Mahmut, ‘“Kanak Sprak” als Ensemble kultureller Mehrdimensionalität und der Prozess der Kulturvermittlung’, in Translation und Transgression. Interkulturelle Aspekte

Pop Literature: A Bibliography 

 293

der Übersetzung(swissenschaft), ed. by Ernest Hess-Lüttich, Ulrich Müller and Siegrid Schmidt (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2009), pp. 153–62. Kauer, Katja, Popfeminismus! Fragezeichen! Eine Einführung (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2009). Koepnick, Lutz P., ‘Negotiating Popular Culture. Wenders, Handke, and the Topographies of Cultural Studies’, German Quarterly, 69.4 (Fall 1996), 381–400. Kramer, Andreas, ‘Westwärts-und zurück. Zu London-Texten von Jörg Fauser und Rolf Dieter Brinkmann’, Angermion. Yearbook for Anglo-German Literary Criticism, Intellectual History and Cultural Transfers/Jahrbuch für Britisch-Deutsche Kulturbeziehungen, 3 (2010), 51–68. Langer, Phil C., ‘“Express Yourself!”. Gender, Pop und Postmoderne in der deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur’, Recherches Germaniques, 34 (2004), 171–92. Langston, Richard, ‘Escape from Germany. Disappearing Bodies and Postmodern Space in Christian Kracht’s Prose’, German Quarterly, 79.1 (Winter 2006), 50–70. Langston, Richard, ‘Roll over Beethoven! Chuck Berry! Mick Jagger! 1960s Rock, the Myth of Progress, and the Burden of National Identity in West Germany’, in Sound Matters. Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture, ed. by Lutz Koepnick and Nora Alter (New York: Berghahn, 2004), pp. 183–96. Lehmann, Christine, ‘Fantasien der Auslöschung. Christian Krachts Romane Faserland und 1979’, Pandaemonium Germanicum. Revista de Estudos Germanísticos, 9 (2005), 255–73. Liebrand, Claudia, ‘Pornografische Pathografie. Charlotte Roche’s Feuchtgebiete’, Literatur für Leser, 34.1 (2011), 13–22. Liesegang, Torsten, ‘“New German Pop Literature”. Difference, Identity, and the Redefinition of Pop Literature after Postmodernism’, Seminar, 40.3 (September 2004), 262–76. Liesegang, Torsten, ‘Die Wiederkehr der Popliteratur als Farce’, in Krisis, 25 (2002), 155–62. Link, Heiner, ed., Trash-Piloten (Leipzig: Reclam, 1997). Maase, Kaspar, ed., Die Schönheiten des Populären. Ästhetische Erfahrung der Gegenwart (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2008). Martin, Elaine, ‘New-Economy Zombies. Kathrin Röggla’s wir schlafen nicht’, in Transitions. Emerging Women Writers in German-language Literature, ed. by Valerie Heffernan and Gillian Pye, German Monitor, 76 (2013), 131–48. Matejovski, Dirk, Marcus S. Kleiner and Enno Stahl, eds, Pop in R(h)einkultur. Oberflächenästhetik und Alltagskultur in der Region (Essen: Klartext, 2008). Matthes, Frauke, ‘“Was deutsch ist, bestimmen wir”. Definitions of (Turkish-) Germanness in Feridun Zaimoğlu’s Kanak Sprak and Koppstoff’, Focus on German Studies: A Journal on and Beyond German-Language Literature, 14 (2007), 19–35. Mattson, Michelle, ‘Rebels Without Causes. Contemporary German Authors Not in Search of Meaning’, Monatshefte, 104.2 (Summer 2012), 244–62. Mazenauer, Beate, ‘Auf der Suche nach dem Queer-Potenzial. Amerika und das Pop-Konzept in den Romanen von Thomas Meinecke’, in Das Amerika der Autoren. Von Kafka bis 09/11, ed. by Jochen Vogt and Alexander Stephan (Munich: Fink, 2006), pp. 381–92. McCarthy, Margaret, ‘Somnolent Selfhood. Winterschläfer and Generation Golf’, New German Critique 109, 37.1 (Winter 2010), 53–74. McCarthy, Margaret, ‘Feminism and Generational Conflicts in Alexa Hennig von Lange’s Relax, Elke Naters’s Lügen, and Charlotte Roche’s Feuchtgebiete’, Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature, 35.1 (Winter 2011), 56–73. Mecky, Gabrijela. ‘Ein Ich in der Genderkrise. Zum Tomboy in Thomas Meineckes Tomboy’, Germanic Review, 76.3 (2001), 195–214.

294 

 Pop Literature: A Bibliography

Mehrfort, Sandra, Popliteratur. Zum literarischen Stellenwert eines Phänomens der 1990er Jahre (Karlsruhe: Info, 2008). Mertens, Matthias, ‘Robbery, assault and battery. Christian Kracht, Benjamin von Stuckrad Barre und ihre mutmaßlichen Vorbilder Bret Easton Ellis und Nick Hornby’, in Pop-Literatur, ed. by Heinz Ludwig Arnold and Jörgen Schäfer (Text + Kritik, Sonderband [2003]), pp. 201–17. Moraldo, Sandro M., ‘Kanak Sprak. The Linguistic Features of Turkish Migrants’ Communicative Style in Feridun Zaimoğlu’s Works’, in Language and Verbal Art Revisited: Linguistic Approaches to the Study of Literature, ed. by Donna R. Miller and Monica Turci (London: Equinox, 2007), pp. 234–52. Mueller, Agnes, German Pop Culture. How ‘American’ Is It? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004).  Mueller, Agnes, ‘Sampling “America”. Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and Thomas Meinecke’s Poetics of Postmodernism’, in Literarische Experimente. Medien, Kunst, Texte seit 1950, ed. by Christoph Zeller (Heidelberg: Winter, 2012), pp. 255–67. Neuhaus, Stefan, ‘Der Autor als Marke. Strategien der Personalisierung im Literaturbetrieb’, Wirkendes Wort. Deutsche Sprache und Literatur in Forschung und Lehre, 61.2 (August 2011), 313–28. Oulios, Militiadis, ‘Was guckst du? Kanak TV. Anleitung für einen medialen Antirassismus’, in Konkret konkrass 2002, by Kanak Attak (http://www.kanak-attak.de/ka/archiv /ffm/txt/ gucks.htmp). Pankau, Johannes G., ed., Pop Pop Populär. Popliteratur und Jugendkultur (Bremen: Aschenbeck & Isensee, 2004). Penze, Matthias and Ambros Waibel, eds, Rebell im Cola-Hinterland. Jörg Fauser. Eine Biografie (Berlin: Edition Tiamat, 2004). Petersdorff, Dirk, ‘Intermedialität und neuer Realismus. Die Text-Bild-Kombinationen Rolf Dieter Brinkmanns’, in Literatur intermedial. Paradigmenbildung zwischen 1918 und 1968, ed. by Wolf Gerhard Schmidt and Thorston Valk (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009), pp. 361–77. Pickerodt, Gerhart, ‘“Der Film in Worten”. Rolf Dieter Brinkmanns Provokation der Literatur’, Weimarer Beiträge. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft, Ästhetik und Kulturwissenschaften, 37.7 (1991), 1028–42. Prager, Brad, ‘The Erection of the Berlin Wall. Thomas Brussig’s Helden wie wir and the End of East Germany’, Modern Language Review, 99 (October 2004), 983–98. Pye, Gillian, ‘Anxiety and the Archive. Constructing Value and Identity in the Pop-Lit Novels Soloalbum and Generation Golf’, German Life and Letters, 59.2 (April 2006), 309–22. Rauen, Christoph, Pop und Ironie. Popdiskurs und Popliteratur um 1980 und 2000 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010). Rehfeldt, Martin, ‘Archiv und Inszenierung. Zur Bedeutung der Autorinszenierung für Walter Kempowskis Das Echolot und Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barres Soloalbum’, in Walter Kempowski. Bürgerliche Repräsentanz, Erinnerungskultur, Gegenwartsbewältigung. Ed. by Lutz Hagestedt (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), pp. 369–90. Richardson, Michael, D., ‘A World of Objects. Consumer Culture in Filmic Reconstructions of the GDR’, in The Collapse of the Conventional. German Film and Its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, ed. by Jaimey Fisher and Brad Prager (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), pp. 216–37. Rink, Christian, ‘Christian Kracht und die “totale Erinnerung”. Zur Vermittlung des “Erinnerungsdiskurses” als Aufgabe der interkulturellen Literaturwissenschaft’, in

Pop Literature: A Bibliography 

 295

Autobiographisches Schreiben in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur. Band 2. Grenzen der Fiktionalität und der Erinnerung, ed. by Christoph Parry and Edgar Platen (Germany: Iudicium, 2006), pp. 242–54. Rohde, Carsten, ‘Rolf Dieter Brinkman and What Came After’, in German-Language Literature Today. International and Popular?, ed. by Arthur Williams, Stuart Parkes and Julian Preece (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2000), pp. 295–308. Rutschky, Katharina, ‘Wertherzeit. Der Poproman – Merkmale eines unerkannten Genres’, Deutsche Zeitschrift für europäisches Denken, 57.2 (February 2003), 106–17. Schäfer, Jörg, Pop-Literatur. Rolf Dieter Brinkmann und das Verhältnis zur Populärkultur in der Literatur der sechziger Jahre (Metzler: Stuttgart, 1998). Schäfer, Jörg, ‘The Intellectual and the Popular. Reading Rainald Goetz’, Germanic Review, 81.3 (Summer 2006), 195–268. Schäfer, Jörg, ‘‟Fantasy Realism”: Rainald Goetz, Jeff Koons, and the Ethics of Pop Art’, Germanic Review, 81.3 (Summer 2006), 255–68. Schlaffer, Hannelore, ‘Die Göre-Karriere einer literarischen Figur’, Merkur. Deutsche Zeitschrift für Europäisches Denken, 65.3 (March 2011), 274–279. Schmidt, Gary, ‘Feridun Zaimoğlu’s Performance of Gender and Authorship’, in German Literature in a New Century. Trends, Traditions, Transitions, Transformations, ed. by Katharina Gerstenberger and Patricia Herminghouse (New York: Berghahn, 2008), pp. 196–213. Schmitz-Emans, Monika, ‘Sprechblasen. Der Comic und seine Bedeutung für literarisch-poetische Experimente in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren’, in Literarische Experimente. Medien, Kunst, Texte seit 1950, ed. by Christoph Zeller (Heidelberg: Winter, 2012), pp. 173–207. Schneck, Peter, ‘Pop Goes the Novel. Avant-Pop Literature and the Tradition of the New’, in Simulacrum America. The U.S. and the Popular Media, ed. by Elisabeth Kraus and Carolin Auer (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000), pp. 64–74. Schödel, Kathrin, ‘“Secondary Suffering” and Victimhood. The “Other” of German Identity in Bernhard Schlink’s Die Beschneidung and Maxim Biller’s Harlem Holocaust’, in Germans as Victims in the Literary Fiction of the Berlin Republic, ed. by Stuart Taberner and Karina Berger (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009), pp. 219–32. Scholz, Leander, ‘Ein postmoderner Bildungsroman. Christian Krachts 1979’, Gegenwartsliteratur. A German Studies Yearbook, 3 (2004), 200–25. Schulze, Gerhard, Die Erlebnisgesellschaft. Kultursoziologie der Gegenwart (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 1992). Schumacher, Eckhard, ‘Das Ende der Popliteratur. Eine Fortsetzungsgeschichte (Teil 2)’, in Poetik der Oberfläche. Die deutschsprachige Popliteratur der 1990er Jahre, ed. by Olaf Grabienski, Till Huber and Jan-Noël Thon (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), 53–70. Schumacher, Eckhard, Gerade Eben Jetzt. Schreibweisen der Gegenwart (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2003). Schumacher, Eckhard, ‘Pop-Kultur-Wissenschaft. Schreibweisen zwischen Universität und Pop-Diskurs’, in Akten des X. Internationalen Germanistenkongresses Wien 2000. Zeitenwende. Die Germanistik auf dem Weg vom 20. ins 21. Jahrhundert, Volume 9. Literaturwissenschaft als Kulturwissenschaft (Bern: Peter Lang, 2003), pp. 243–48. Schumacher, Eckhard, ‘Das Populäre. Was heißt denn das? Rainald Goetz’s Abfall für alle’, in Pop-Literatur, ed. by Heinz Ludwig Arnold and Jörgen Schäfer (Text + Kritik, Sonderband [2003]), pp. 158–71.

296 

 Pop Literature: A Bibliography

Schumacher, Eckhard, ‘Schreibweisen des Alltags. Rainald Goetz’s Zeitmitschriften’, in Geteilte Zeit. Zur Kritik des Rhythmus in den Künsten, ed. by Patrick Primavesi and Simone Mahrenholz (Schliengen: Edition Argus, 2005), pp. 137–51. Schwander, Hans-Peter, ‘“Dein Leben ist eine Reise mit dem Ziel Tod…”: Tod in der neuen Pop-Literatur’, Deutschunterricht: Beiträge zu seiner Praxis und wissenschaftlichen Grundlegung, 54.1 (2002), 72–84. Seelig, Armin, H., ‘Irony and Narrative Subtext in the Novel 1979 by Christian Kracht’, in Strategies of Humor in Post-Unification German Literature, Film, and Other Media, ed. by Jill E. Twark (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013), pp. 242–66. Seiler, Sascha, Das einfache wahre Abschreiben der Welt. Pop Diskurse in der deutschen Literatur nach 1960 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006). Siegel, Elke, ‘Remains of the Day. Rainald Goetz’s Internet Diary Abfall für alle’, Germanic Review, 81.3 (Summer 2006), 235–54. Skiba, Dirk, ‘Ethnolektale und literarisierte Hybridität in Feridun Zaimoğlus Kanak Sprak’, in Migrationsliteratur. Schreibweisen einer interkulturellen Moderne, ed. by Klaus Schenk, Almut Todorow and Nikoletta Enzmann (Tübingen: Francke, 2004), pp. 183–204. Smith-Prei, Carrie, ‘“Knaller Sex für alle”. Popfeminist Body Politics in Lady Bitch Ray, Charlotte Roche, and Sarah Kuttner’, Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature, 35.1 (2011), 18–39. Smith-Prei, Carrie, ‘Kölner Realismus Redux. The Legacy of 1960s Realism in Postunification Literature’, Closing Borders, Bridging Gaps? Deutscher Pop an der Jahrtausendwende, special issue of Literatur für Leser, ed. by Anke Biendarra, 31.2 (2008), 81–93. Spittler, Horst, ‘Die Dichter der “Generation Golf”’, Literatur für Leser, 25.3 (2002), 189–96. Stahl, Enno, Diskurspogo. Über Literatur und Gesellschaft (Berlin:Verbrecher, 2013). Stahl, Enno, ed., German Trash (Berlin: Galrev, 1996). Stahl, Enno, Pop am Rhein. Popliteraturgeschichte(n). Texte, Schriften, Bilder, LAUT!Dichtung 1965–2007. Exhibition catalog, ed. by Joseph A. Kruse (Düsseldorf: Heinrich-Heine-Institut Düsseldorf, 2007). Stahl, Enno, ‘Popliteratur – eine fragwürdige Kategorie. Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsproblematik inklusiv eines Exkurses zu Thomas Meineckes Produktionsästhetik’, Closing Borders, Bridging Gaps? Deutscher Pop an der Jahrtausendwende, special issue of Literatur für Leser, ed. by Anke Biendarra, 31.2 (2008), 65–79. Stahl, Enno. ‘Trash, Social Beat und Slam Poetry’, in Pop Literatur ed. by Heinz Ludwig Arnold and Jörgen Schäfer (Text + Kritik, Sonderband [2003]), pp. 258–78. Stehle, Maria, Ghetto Voices in Contemporary German Culture. Textscapes, Filmscapes, Soundscapes (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012). Stehle, Maria, ‘Pop, Porn, and Rebellious Speech. Feminist Politics and the Multi-Media Performances of Elfriede Jelinek, Charlotte Roche, and Lady Bitch Ray’, Feminist Media Studies, 12.2 (June 2012), 229–47. Stehle, Maria, ‘Transnationalism Meets Provincialism. Generations and Identifications in Faserland, Kurz und Schmerzlos and Selam Berlin’, in Generational Shifts in Contemporary German Culture, ed. by Laurel Cohen-Pfister and Susanne Vees-Gulani (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), pp. 269–86. Steinecke, Hartmut, ‘Das literarische Plagiat im Zeitalter der Intertextualität. Von E. T. A. Hoffmann bis Helene Hegemann’, in Plagiat, Fälschung, Urheberrecht im interdisziplinären Blickfeld, ed. by Charlotte Grollegg-Edler, Patrizia Gruber and Victoria Kumar (Berlin: Schmidt, 2013), pp. 97–103.

Pop Literature: A Bibliography 

 297

Sutherland, Marielle, ‘“Globale Empfindsamkeit”. Rolf Dieter Brinkmann’s Poetics of the Global’, in Local/Global Narratives, ed. by Renate Rechtien and Karoline Oppen, German Monitor, 68 (2007), 201–27. Taberner, Stuart, ed., German Literature in the Age of Globalization (Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 2004). Tacke, Alexandra, Depressive Dandys. Spielformen der Dekadenz in der Pop-Moderne (Cologne: Böhlau, 2009). Thomas, Rebecca S., ‘Kathrin Röggla’s wir schlafen nicht. Reality Fiction and the New Economy’, in Modern Austrian Prose, Volume II. Interpretations and Insights, ed. by Paul F. Dvorak (Riverside: Ariadne, 2012), pp. 266–82. Vetsch, Florian, ed., Ploog-Tanker. Texte von & zu Jürgen Ploog (Herdecke: Rohstoff, 2004). von Dirke, Sabine, ‘Pop Literature in the Berlin Republic’, in Contemporary German Fiction. Writing in the Berlin Republic, ed. by Stuart Taberner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 108–24. Ullmaier, Johannes, ‘Paratexte im Pop. Ein Text über das Beiwerk zum Text’, testcard. Beiträge zu Popgeschichten, 7 (1999), 54–93. Ullmaier, Johannes, Von Acid nach Adlon. Eine Reise durch die deutschsprachige Popliteratur (Mainz: Ventil, 2001). Waine, Anthony, ‘Anatomy of a Serious Thriller. Jörg Fauser’s Der Schneemann’, Neophilologus, 77 (1993), 99–112. Waine, Anthony, ‘“Blissful, Torn, Intoxicated”. Brinkmann, Fauser, Wondratschek, and the Beats’, in The Beat Generation. Critical Essays, ed. by Kostas Myrsiades (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), pp. 309–33. Wehdeking, Volker, ‘Debüt-Romane der Postmoderne als Kult. Ein Erfolgsphänomen im Zusammenhang mit dem jungen deutschen Film und jüngeren Leserzielgruppen’, in Der Bildhunger der Literatur, ed. by Dieter Heimböckel and Uwe Werlein (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005), pp. 385–95. Wehdeking, Volker, ‘Film, Musik und neue Medien in der deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur’, in Literarische Medienreflexionen. Künste und Medien im Fokus moderner und postmoderner Literatur, ed. by Sandra Poppe and Sascha Seiler (Berlin: Schmidt, 2008), pp. 205–22. Wehdeking, Volker, Generationenwechsel. Intermedialität in der deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur (Berlin: Schmidt, 2007). Weingart, Brigitte, ‘Global Village Berlin. Rainald Goetz’s Internet Journal Abfall für alle’, Gegenwartsliteratur. A German Studies Yearbook, 4 (2005), 48–70. Wellershof, Dieter, ‘Destruktion als Befreiungsversuch: über Rolf Dieter Brinkmann’, Akzente. Zeitschrift für Literatur, 23 (1976), 277–86. Werth, Eva, ‘Literarischer Lifestylepop. Alltägliches und lebensgeschichtliches Erzählen in popliterarischer Perspektive’, in Das Populäre. Untersuchungen zu Interaktionen und Differenzierungsstrategien in Literatur, Kultur und Sprache, ed. by Olivier Agard, Christian Helmreich and Hélène Vinckel-Roisin (Göttingen: V & R Unipress, 2011), pp. 223–35. Werth, Eva, ‘Postmoderne Singles. Das Junggesellenmotiv in der Neuen Deutschen Popliteratur’, in Literarische ‘Junggesellen-Maschinen’ und die Ästhetik der Neutralisierung/Machine littéraire, machine célibataire et ‘genre neutre’ (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2011), pp. 197–220. Winkels, Hubert, Einschnitte. Zur Literatur der 80er Jahre (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1988).

298 

 Pop Literature: A Bibliography

Winkels, Hubert, ‘Grenzgänger. Neue deutsche Pop-Literatur’, Sinn und Form, 51 (1999), pp. 581–610. Yildiz, Yasmin, ‘Critically “Kanak”. A Reimagination of German Culture’, in Globalization and the Future of Germany, ed. by Andreas Gardt and Bernd Hüppauf (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004), pp. 319–40.

Index Acker, Kathy 273–274 Adorno, Theodor 21, 56 Airen 277–278, 281–282 – I am Airen Man 283 Artmann, Hans Carl 4, 268 Bakhtin, Michail 267 Ballard, J. G. 34 Barbarella 47 Baudrillard, Jean 37 Bauhaus 71 Beat Poets 10, 34, 48, 51–52, 268 Beatles, the 41, 84, 198 Beckett, Samuel 267 Benjamin, Walter 211 Benn, Gottfried 33 Berg, Sibylle 237, 260 Berlin Republic 6, 26, 68, 167–168, 170, 177, 180–182, 184, 238, 250 Bessing, Joachim 20, 54 – Tristesse Royale. Das popkulturelle Quintett [Tristess Royale. The Popcultural Quintet] 6, 195 Bildungsroman 131 Biller, Maxim 257 Böll, Heinrich 41 Bolz, Norbert – Die Helden der Familie [The Heroes of the Family] 248 Bonn Republic 54 Brecht, Bertolt 57, 266 Brinkmann, Rolf Dieter 16–17, 20–21, 23, 34–35, 52, 67, 82, 101, 268, 270 – ACID 4, 32 – Der fröhliche Tarzan [Joyful Tarzan] 33 – Der Gummibaum [Rubber Tree] 33 – Keiner weiß mehr [No One Knows More]  32 Brussig, Thomas 84–85, 167, 219 Bukowski, Charles 34, 39, 45 Burroughs, William S. 34, 36, 39, 45, 52, 270 – Naked Lunch 41

Carow, Heiner – Die Legende von Paul und Paula [The Legend of Paul and Paula] 84 Casati, Rebecca 6, 20 Cassady, Neal 34 Cave, Nick 274 Celan, Paul 266 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand 36 Chic Lit 103 Clockwork Orange, A 154 Dada 26, 189, 196 DEFA [Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft] 24, 82 Diederichsen, Diedrich 18, 20, 22 Dutschke, Marek 250–251 Dutschke, Rudi 250 Dylan, Bob 34 – ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ 85, 96 Element of Crime 85, 96 Eliot, T.S. – ‘The Waste Land’ 67, 68 Ellis, Bret Easton 195 Expressionism 26, 189, 196, 205 Faithful, Marianne 96 Fauser, Jörg 20, 23, 34, 38-46, 51–52 – Aqualunge 39 – Die Harry-Gelb-Story 42 – Rohstoff [Raw Materials] 45 – Der Schneemann [The Snowman]  38 – Das Schlangenmaul [Mouth of the Snake] 38 – Tophane 39, 42, 45 Feldbusch, Verona 176–177 Fichte, Hubert 20, 101 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 265–266 Fiedler, Leslie 17–18, 32 Fluxus Movement 257 Fontane, Theodor 266 Foucault, Michel 35, 264, 267, 284 Frankfurt School 3, 56

300 

 Index

‘Fräuleinwunder, das’ [miraculous young women] 9 Freud, Sigmund 218, 223–224 Frisch, Max 266 Fukuyama, Francis 13 Ginsburg, Allen 33–34, 52 ‘Gesinnungsliteratur, die’ [aesthetics with a moral imperative] 2 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 6, 265–266 – Die Leiden des jungen Werther [The Sorrows of Young Werther] 15 Goetz, Rainald 19, 20, 82, 101, 105, 202, 257–258 Goosen, Frank – Liegen lernen [Learning to Lie] 85 Grass, Günter 27, 41, 47, 263, 264 Grether, Kerstin – Zuckerbabys [Sugar Babies] 24, 144–145, 150, 152, 159–166 Guthmann, Daniel – Die Cut-up-Connection 38 Gysin, Brion 34 Hagen, Jens – Jensimaus 33 Handke, Peter 20, 33 Hartz IV 252 Haußmann, Leander 83–99 – NVA 24, 85–99 – Robert Zimmermann wundert sich über die Liebe [Robert Zimmermann Is Tangled Up in Love] 85 – Sonnenallee 84, 88, 95 Heesters, Johannes (Joopi) 191, 202 Hegemann, Carl 272 Hegemann, Helene 263–284 – Ariel 15 – oder die Grundlagen der Verlorenheit [Ariel 15 – or the Foundations of Forlornness] 272 – Axolotl Roadkill 27, 263–264, 272–284 – Torpedo 272 Heine, Heinrich 266 Hell, Richard 51 Hennig von Lange, Alexa 1, 6, 8, 19, 20 – Relax 9, 16 – Hielscher, Martin 239

‘Historikerstreit, Der’ [The Historian’s Debate] 59 Hoffmann, E.T.A. 266 Hölderlin, Friedrich 265 Holocaust 54–55, 57, 59 Horkheimer, Max 21 Hübsch, Hadayatullah 23, 33–34, 38, 44, 46–52 – Keine Zeit für Trips [No Time for Trips]  46 – Macht den Weg frei [Free the Way/Clear the Path] 48 – mach was du willst [do what you want] 47 Illies, Florian 1, 6, 8, 124 – Generation Golf. Eine Inspektion [Generation Golf. An Inspection] 12–13, 24, 85, 167–177, 179, 202 – Ortsgespräch [Local Call/Talk of the Town] 183–184 Ingeborg Bachmann Prize 25, 187, 190 Jandl, Ernst 33, 257 Jelinek, Elfriede 20, 264, 283 Jessen, Philipp 125 John, Rolf Eckart 32 – Der Gummibaum [Rubber Tree] 33 – Der fröhliche Tarzan [Joyful Tarzan] 33 Kafka, Franz 6, 266 Kerouac, Jack 34, 52, 198 Kiepenheuer & Witsch 19, 20, 32, 52, 101–102, 105, 124, 131, 239, 253, 255–258 Kirst, Hans Hellmut – 08/15 Trilogy 88, 92, 97–98 Klein, Georg – Roman unserer Kindheit [Novel of Our Childhood] 263 Kluge, Alexander 56, 61, 63, 66, 75 – Die Patriotin [The Patriot] 60, 65 Koeppen, Wolfgang 266 “Kölner Realismus” 20 Kracht, Christian 8–10, 19, 23, 31, 54, 124, 188, 190, 202, 209–235, 240, 257 – 1979 209, 211–212, 214, 216, 218, 229–232

Index 

– Faserland 1–2, 4, 6, 15, 21, 27, 54, 101–102, 123–124, 127–128, 171, 182, 195–196, 203, 209, 214–216, 218–231, 234 – Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten [I Will Be Here in the Sun Shine and Shadow] 26, 209–216, 231–235 – Imperium [Empire] 26 – Tristesse Royale. Das popkulturelle Quintett [Tristesse Royale. The Popcultural Quintet] 6, 195, 222 Kraushaar, Tom – Die Zonenkinder und Wir [Children of East Germany and Us] 170 Kristeva, Julia 226, 228, 267 Kubrick, Stanley – Full Metal Jacket 97 Lady Bitch Ray 257 Lady Gaga 18, 197 Langhans, Rainer 44 Lebert, Benjamin 1, 6 – Crazy 25, 123–132, 138, 139, 141, 180 – Der Vogel ist ein Rabe [The Bird is a Raven] 25, 123, 131–141 Leipzig Book Prize 263 ‘Leitkultur, die’ [Guiding Culture] 111 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 266 Lichtenstein, Roy 67 Lottmann, Joachim 237–261 – Die Jugend von heute [The Youth of Today] 26, 237, 242–250, 256 – Zombie Nation 26, 237, 242, 246, 248–251, 255–256 – Der Geldkomplex 26, 237, 251–256, 259 – Mai, Juni, Juli [May, June, July] 26 – Magritte, Rene – ‘The Son of Man’ 199 Mann, Thomas 2 – Buddenbrooks 248 – Der Tod in Venedig [Death in Venice] 15, 220, 221 Meineke, Thomas 19, 20, 105, 164, 240, 264, 271, 283 – Tomboy 110, 182, 219 Merkel, Angela 246, 259 Moore, Michael 107

 301

Moritz, Karl Philipp 266 Morodor, Giorgio 56 Naters, Elke 6, 20 Neoliberalism 81–82, 93, 146–147, 151, 154, 158–159, 162–163 Neumeister, Andreas  20, 23, 55–75, 82, 196 – Angela Davis löscht ihre Website. [Angela Davis Deletes her Website] 19, 69, 191–192 – Äpfel vom Baum im Kies [Apples from the Tree in the Scree] 56, 57, 60, 63–68 – Ausdeutschen [De-Germanizing] 68 – Gut laut [At High Volume] 56, 62–63 – Könnte Köln sein [Could be Cologne] 69, 70–71, 73 – Salz im Blut [Salt in One’s Blood] 56, 57–60, 63 O’Hara, Frank 16 ‘Ostalgie, die’ 79, 81–82, 95, 168, 182 PeterLicht 187–208 – ‘Das Abhandenkommen der Staaten’ [‘The Disappearance of States’] 188 – ‘Der Beginn des dritten Jahrtausends’ [‘The Beginning of the Third Millennium’]  197 – ‘Blaues Blau’ [‘Blue blue’] 199 – ‘Fünfmal über Licht’ [‘Five Times about Light’] 203 – ‘Die Geschichte meiner Einschätzung am Anfang des dritten Jahrtausands’ [‘The Story of My Assessment at the Beginning of the Third Millennium’] 187, 189, 206 – ‘Ich gehe durch einen Park’ [‘I Walk through a Park’] 193 – ‘Ich stand auf dem Dach’ [‘I Stood on the Roof’] 205 – ‘Ich wollte glücklich sein’ [‘I Wanted to be Happy’] 200 – ‘Kosmosbeschiessen’ [‘Shooting at the Cosmos’] 203 – ‘Lieder vom Ende des Kapitalismus’ [‘Songs about the End of Capitalism’] 196 – Lob der Realität [Praise of Reality] 187

302 

 Index

– ‘Mein Verhältnis zu Insekten’ [‘My Relationship to Insects’] 197 – ‘Melancholie und Gesellschaft’ [‘Melancholy and Society’] 204 – ‘Nationalitäten’ [‘Nationalities’] 199 – ‘Sonnendeck’ [‘Sun Deck’]  87 – ‘Die transylvanische Verwandte ist da’ [‘The Transylvanian Relative is Here’] 198 – ‘Trennungslied’ [‘Break-up Song’] 202 – Vierzehn Lieder [Fourteen Songs] 25, 198 – Wir werden siegen. Buch vom Ende des Kapitalismus [We Will Be Victorious. Book of the End of Capitalism] 187, 189, 191, 193, 197–198 Plenzdorf, Ulrich 82 Ploog, Jürgen 23, 34–39, 41, 51–52, 270 – Berlin – New York-Tagebuch [Berlin – New York Diary] 38 – Cola-Hinterland [Cola Outback] 35 – Motel USA. Amerikanisches Tagebuch – [Motel USA. American Diary] 37 – Nächte in Amnesien [Nights in Amnesia] 37 – Ploog-Tanker 37 – Unterwegs sein ist alles [To be on the Move is Everything] 37 Pollesch, René 264, 274, 283 Stadt als Beute [City as Prey] 271 Pop art 82, 268 Radisch, Iris 1, 167, 187, 194, 248 – Die Schule der Frauen: Wie wir die Familie neu erfinden [The School of Women: How we Reinvent the Family] 248 raster-dot technique 66–67 ‘Räterrepublik, die’ [council republic] 63 Regener, Sven 6, 83–99 – Der kleine Bruder [The Little Brother] 85 – Herr Lehmann 84–86, 88, 90, 92 – Neue Vahr Süd [New Vahr South] 24, 85–99 – Robert Zimmermann wundert sich über die Liebe [Robert Zimmermann Is Tangled Up in Love] 85 Riefenstahl, Leni – Der Triumph des Willen [Triumph of the Will] 217, 226 Riot Grrrl movement 160

Roche, Charlotte 150 – Feuchtgebiete [Wetlands] 24, 145, 152–160, 164–165 Roddam, Franc – Quadrophenia 84 Röggla Katrin 20–21 Rolling Stones, the 84 – Exile on Main Street 84 Rösinger, Christiane 191 Ryan, Mark – ‘Incarnation’ 197 Rygulla, Ralf-Rainer 20, 32 – ACID 4, 32 Schirrmacher, Frank 249–250, 257 – Das Methusalem-Komplott [The Methusalem Plot] 244–245 – Minimum: Vom Vergehen und Neuentstehung unserer Gemeinschaft [Minimum: On the Decline and Rebirth of our Society] 248 Schlingensief, Christoph 273 Schnitzler, Arthur – Fräulein Else 16 – Traumnovelle [Dream Novella] 215 Schröder, Gerhard 14, 246 Schulze, Gerhard – Das Erlebnisgesellschaft [The Experience Society] 240 Schwabinger Krawalle [Schwabinger Riots] 72–73 Schwarzer, Alice 149 Schwitters, Kurt 33 Situationist International 72 ‘Spaßgesellschaft, die’ [fun society] 1, 18, 23, 188, 238 Sterbak, Jana – ‘Chair Apollinaire’ 197 – ‘Vanitas. Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorexic’ 197 Suhrkamp 19, 82, 101, 105, 188–189, 258 Surrealism 26, 189, 196, 197–202 Timm, Uwe – Go Trabi Go 84 ‘Twin Peaks’ 228 Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The 45

Index 

Vampirella 9, 16 Velvet Undergound, the 45 Verband deutscher Schriftsteller [Association of German Authors] 263 Verhoeven, Paul – Basic Instinct 174 Viebahn, Fred – eiapopeia 33 – Viva 152 von der Grün, Max 33 von der Leyen, Ursula 248 von Schönberg, Alexander 54 – Tristesse Royale. Das popkulturelle Quintett [Tristesse Royale. The Popcultural Quintet] 6, 195 von Stuckrad-Barre, Benjamin 1, 8–10, 19–20, 23, 54, 101, 125, 127, 188, 190, 219, 240 – Soloalbum [Solo Album] 5–7, 15, 31, 171, 180, 182, 196 – Transcript 270 – Tristesse Royale. Das popkulturelle Quintett [Tristesse Royale. The Popcultural Quintet] 6, 195 Wallace, David Foster 274, 281 Wallraff, Günter 93 – Ganz unten [Lowest of the Low] 8 – Mein Tagebuch aus der Bundeswehr [My Diary of the Bundeswehr] 92

 303

Walser, Martin 2, 13, 41, 42, 269 Warhol, Andy 34, 45, 67, 103 Wenders, Wim – Der Himmel über Berlin [Wings of Desire] 216 Wesseling, Hans 46 Weyrauch, Wolfgang 33 Wieland, Christoph Martin 266 Wizard of Ox, The 274 Wolf, Christa 27, 263–264 – Wolfgang-Koeppen-Literaturpreis 237–238, 260 Young, Neil 274 Zaimoğlu, Feridun 219 – German Amok 105 – Kanak Attak 104, 106, 109 – Kanak Sprak 23, 101–102, 104–106 – Kanak TV 103, 106–119 – Leinwand [Canvas/Screen] 105 – ‘Das Märchen von der Integration’ [‘The Fairytale of Integration’] 109–115 – ‘Philharmonie Köln – 40 Jahre Einwanderung’ [‘Philharmonic Orchestra Cologne – 40 Years of Immigration’] 113–116 – ‘Weißes Ghetto’ [‘White Ghetto’] 113, 115–118 Zappa, Frank 34