A History of German Literature

From the Beginnings to the Present Day

Wolfgang Beutin, Klaus Ehlert, Wolfgang Emmerich, Helmut Hoffacker, Bernd Lutz, Volker Meid, Ralf Schnell, Peter Stein, Inge Stephan, Claire Krojzl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134928163
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Since the appearance of its first edition in Germany in 1979, A History of German Literature has established itself as a classic work used by students and anyone interested in German literature.
The volume chronologically traces the development of German literature from the Middle Ages to the present day. Throughout this chronology, literary developments are set in a social and political context. This includes a final chapter, written for this latest edition, on the consequences of the reunification of Germany in 1990. Thoroughly interdiscipinary in method, the work also reflects recent developments in literary criticism and history.
Highly readable and stimulating, A History of German Literature succeeds in making the literature of the past as immediate and engaging as the works of the present. It is both a scholary study and an invaluable reference work for students.

LITERATURE OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC

The literary scene

Contemporary German literature does not, of course, exist merely in a definable relationship to political reality in the Federal Republic. Via a diversity of institutions and organisations, it is also an integral part of the social life of the country—of public discussion and of cultural and political issues. At the same time, however, it is also contingent on the given economic conditions prevailing in that cultural life, which also shape the cultural sphere. It is contingent, for example, on the way the publishing industry is organised on a private capital basis, as well as on the public structure of radio and television companies, commercial interests, which reduce books to their commodity character, bestseller lists, sales turnover and publishing strategies and other considerations. All these factors underlying literary life need to be taken into account if one seeks to do justice to the literary work that emerges out of this complex mechanism.

It has become customary to characterise the diverse forms of literary life in the Federal Republic by the critical and apt term Literaturbetrieb—the literary scene or business. Used neutrally, it denotes the sphere of production, distribution and consumption of literature. Compared, however, with the model of the Literaturgesellschaft (literature society of) fostered in the GDR, the term ‘literature business’ also designates a spontaneous, disordered, contradictory and thus far more hectic mode of literary production. It denotes the exertion needed to bring out books, the bustle of the book market, book fairs and readings by authors, the competing forms of self-representation by publishers, and the vanities so often evinced in literary criticism, the character of exhibitions, book reviews on radio and television and the star roles increasingly being accorded to prominent authors in the mass-media age. The literary scene or business, understood as the sum total of phenomena that go to make up literary life in the Federal Republic, is, in other words, the diverse and multi-faceted market in which author and work alike are obliged to act and survive.

The status of the author

Seen against this background, the situation of authors in West German society can be more precisely defined. Here the profession is generally practised freelance—a notion that still owes much to an archaic idea of the individual intellectual worker, far removed from the constraints of profession, institution or organisation, diligently behind his desk and pursuing his craft as he chooses.

In reality this image is deceptive, and has been ever since there have been ‘freelance’ authors. Even Gotthold Ephraim Lessing realised that there was a market to which he as a ‘free’ poet in the eighteenth century was obliged to pay heed. The potential for authors to make a living—poets no less than translators, textbook writers or journalists, ‘wordmakers’ in the broadest sense—is so limited that they would be unable to do more than eke out a bare living without additional income from the mass media, for lectures and readings, or through other secondary or main professions.

This gives rise to a significant shift of perspective in the currently accepted view of the contemporary author: writers who are able to make a living from their literary works are exceptions to the rule in the literature business. These, for the most part prominent, authors are the very ones who unwittingly create the false impression that it is possible to live as a ‘free’ writer today. In fact, as the Autorenreport (Authors’ Report) (Fohrbeck/Wiesand 1972) has shown, the number of freelance authors and creative artists is steadily falling, the social security of this professional group up to 1979 being one of the worst of all professional groups in the Federal Republic. Two sets of statistics from the Autorenreport give the true picture. Of 1,693 ‘word-producing’ respondents asked, only 40 per cent may be classified in the category of freelance authors, compared with 49 per cent in the category of authors for whom writing is a sideline and 11 per cent in the category of part-time authors. The production of literary works (belles-lettres—polite literature), generally regarded as the epitome of literary work, is but one sphere of activity among many in this picture, and quantitatively by no means the most significant.

Radio and television companies as patrons

Seen in this context, it will become clear why the employment of authors in the mass media, and the characteristics of that work, have become permanently differentiated and expanded. Radio and television companies have become the patrons of the modern culture and literature business.

Freelance employment as an author is above all more diverse in the mass media than traditional, terse employment designations are able to show. It is by no means restricted to ‘major’ forms such as the novel, radio play or screenplay (creative works in the traditional sense). It also includes what is nowadays the dominant category (which, in a public-oriented democracy, is at least as important as the above), of topically relevant ‘commercial work’—documentary, reportage, commentary, expert opinion, interviews, etc. In addition, a not inconsiderable role is played by popularising and provocative media work (leading discussions, advisory panels, chat shows, etc.). Transitions to other professions (director, announcer, producers, etc.) are smooth.

(Fohrbeck/Wiesand/Woltereck)

‘An end to modesty’

On the basis of these altered employment characteristics it also becomes clear that the ‘freelance’ author in German society is located in an odd hybrid position—as a ‘wordproducing’ small entrepreneur on the one hand and wage-dependent writer on the other. The call for an ‘end to modesty’ (Heinrich Böll) marked the moment when authors finally drew the necessary conclusions from this hybrid socio-economic position. By demanding an end to their own socio-political modesty, they gave rise to a new self-awareness, and to a consistent set of objectives aimed at finding a new political identity within society that was no longer based on the illusion of the freelance livelihood.

Writers and trade unions

Heinrich Böll proclaimed the ‘end of modesty’ in 1969 at the inaugural meeting of the German Writers’ Association (Verband Deutscher Schriftsteller: VS). His proclamation came in a decade that showed a continuing imbalance between the individual mode of literary production and the industrial evaluation of the product itself. German writers had recognised that their interests within the commercial contingencies of literature marketing needed to be seen in terms of a trade-union model, if market conditions were not to be entirely dictated by their economically more powerful partners—publishers, radio stations, editors and producers. Transcending disparate political positions and literaryaesthetic differences, as well as greater and lesser social reputations, the founders of the VS sought to bring to the fore one key shared factor: the social dependence of the writer, which could only be put right with the aid of an organisation possessing the necessary political capital.

An organisation of loners?

The question of organisation had been unresolved ever since the profession of freelance writer had existed. As early as 1800 the poet and critic Friedrich Schlegel had urged: ‘Like merchants in the Middle Ages, so creative artists should now come together to form a Hanseatic League, so as to be able to protect one another to a certain degree.’ It was not until 1842, with the founding of the Leipzig Association of Literati, that the first step in this direction was made. This was soon to be followed by others: in 1878 came the General Federation of German Writers (ADSV), in 1885 the German Writers’ Association, and in 1887 the merging of these two associations to form the German Writers’ Federation.

It should be pointed out, however, that the objectives of these organisations were far from being of a trade-union nature. They were more organisations of rank, acting on behalf of their members on matters of copyright, but without regarding those members as literary individuals, or even stressing their dependence on fees. It was 1909, with the founding of the Union for the Protection of German Writers, which survived until 1933, before trade union demands as such were raised, albeit still organisationally separate from the associations of wage-earners and salaried employees.

After 1945, the authors’ associations of East and West Berlin, which were still briefly able to join to form an all-German association of German authors, attempted jointly to defend the interests of their members. Major differences of political and social outlook soon began to emerge, however. The trade-union aspect dominated among authors who had belonged to the former Soviet Occupied Zone, while the notion of a freelance existence dominated in West Germany. With the division of Germany also came a division of the all-German association, into a German Writers’ Association in the GDR and a Confederation of German Writers’ Associations in the Federal Republic, which became a member of the Federal Association of Freelance Professions.

This notion of themselves as freelance professionals, however, soon brought writers up against a socio-political issue. Writers were in increasing danger of being lost in the conflict of interests between trade unions and entrepreneur organisations, since they lacked the ability to develop an independent organisational form to further their interests. A survey of the economic situation of the ‘intellectual professions’ in the mid-1950s showed that ‘everywhere a few top earners, box-office hits and star salaries are matched by a thin bracket of medium incomes of between 500 and 1,000 Marks per month, comparable with the earnings of high-ranking salaried employees and skilled labourers. These are then followed by the broad band of the intellectual proletariat and of destitution: young unpaid lecturers and assistant physicians, writers with starvation fees, and out-of-work musicians and actors struggling to eke out a living from their supernumerary fees.’

Demands

Chief among the objectives listed by Dieter Lattmann, first Chairman of the VS, at its inaugural meeting, were to conduct a social survey of the situation of writers in the Federal Republic; to procure pension facilities for their profession in line with socialsecurity legislation; to abrogate ‘school textbook clauses’ which explicitly permitted the publication of literary works in school textbooks without fees being paid to the authors; and to obtain a share for authors in book loans from libraries. In order to achieve these goals, of course, it was necessary to equip the Writers’ Association with the appropriate union backing, to enable it to exert a more powerful influence on organisations, institutions and legislative procedure. This organisational framework was provided by the Federation of German Trade Unions, an umbrella organisation for a number of individual trade unions. Apart from a handful of conservative writers, who formed the more statusoriented Free Association of German Authors (Freier Deutscher Autorenverband), the VS joined the Press and Paper Industry Trade Union in 1973. Subsequently it represented the interests of writers as a specialist group in their own right—with some success, as Lattmann’s successor to the VS chairmanship, Bernt Engelmann, was able to confirm in 1979, some ten years after its founding. In Engelmann’s view, the VS ‘had become a firmly-rooted concept within the Press and Paper Industry Trade Union, and a factor that can no longer be overlooked either in the book publishing sphere, or that of relevant legislation—one increasingly heeded by a democratic public’.

Structural problems

Despite such undeniable success, however, this confident assessment overlooked the structural problems that were to develop for a small specialist group within a large industrial union. These entailed more than disparate political views within the VS itself regarding future policy and topical issues. Towards the end of the 1980s, the more practical realisation drew near of the once so eagerly sought goal of a new, unified trade union—uniting technicians in radio, academics, writers, visual artists, musicians, editors, producers, readers and actors in all spheres of employment within the media—the more ominous it began to appear. Prominent authors such as Günter Grass had forebodings that a comparatively small specialist literary group of 2,400 members, among the total of 150,000 union members, would have little chance either of having their voice heard on the highly specific problems of writers, or of furthering their own interests. For this reason, even some former advocates of the trade union idea were now at pains ‘to stop the automatic participation of the VS in the union’ (F.C.Delius). A similar motion put forward with an eye to the planned date of entry (April 1989), failed at the 1988 VS congress. And yet there could be no more talk of a ‘unity of loners’. The VS committee resigned, and prominent writers (Günter Grass, Anna Jonas, F.C.Delius) announced that they were leaving the union. No-one was now prepared to take on the work of the committee. Two decades after its birth, the end of the VS, shipwrecked on its own objectives, was already close.

Publishing

Although for financial reasons most authors had little choice but to work at least to some extent with the mass media, publishing houses still remained the key organisations by means of which books could finally appear on the book market. Reading, typesetting, printing, bookbinding, distribution and bookselling are all stages that a manuscript accepted by a publisher must go through before reaching the literary readership as a finished product. The decision, however, as to whether it will reach that readership at all is taken at an earlier stage, in the light of considerations of publishing strategy and calculation—a stage hidden from the public gaze. Such considerations by no means defer to the literary, practical or academic quality of a work alone, but arise in an economic context made up of material existence and growth, viability and returns, and the profit and investments of a publishing company. It will be clear from this that a publishing house, regardless of whether it publishes fiction or specialist and technical literature, is first and foremost an economic enterprise that aims to make profits, and organises its strategies, conceptions, and publishing programme according to capitalist principles.

Some data and statistical ratios from 1981 may help to elucidate the kind of level on which publishing houses operate as economic enterprises. In the (West German) Federal Republic as it was then, including West Berlin, there were some 2,044 publishing houses in 1981 (5,100 bookshops). These produced a total of some 67,000 titles, of which 18.5 per cent were accounted for by fiction alone. The number of titles brought out had thus increased over fourfold between 1951 (14,094 titles) and 1981 (67,176), the proportion of paperbacks rising from 4.6 per cent to 11.6 per cent. These production statistics placed the Federal Republic in third place behind the USA and the USSR, both of which produced over 85,000 titles per year. Translations into German accounted in 1981 for some 10 per cent of the total, nearly two-thirds of these being from English. This impressive number of titles, however, was not distributed equally among all existing publishers, as will be clear from the fact that a mere 17 per cent of publishing houses were publishing 80 per cent of all titles. In 1978, book publishers had a turnover totalling 6.6 thousand million DM, and publishers of journals, newspapers, etc. of 8.7 thousand million DM. In terms of overall trends in publishing, ratios within the industry are interesting: a turnover of 6.6 thousand million DM looks decidedly modest when set beside the balance-sheet of Springer-Verlag, which in 1978 alone had a turnover of 1.7 thousand million DM. It may be significant with regard to ratios in the overall economy that despite multiple publications or the issuing of licenses to paperback publishers and book clubs, not even larger publishing houses were able to achieve a market turnover of more than approximately 50 million DM.

The size of businesses

Hardly any other branch of the West German economy is so variegated, motley or stratified as publishing. A media giant such as the Bertelsmann Group, with over 28,000 employees, and a manufacturing concern such as the bustling one-man publishing company Matthes & Seitz have next to nothing in common aside from the fact that both happen to deal with books. Persistent pressure (and coercion) over the years towards mergers and capital concentration has led to the systematic expansion of groups such as Bertelsmann and Holtzbrinck (including the European Educational Union, the German Book Alliance, S.Fischer and Rowohlt) into multimedia giants. This category is matched by the still relatively broad spectrum of small and very small businesses, which are often the most ambitious in literary and political terms (such as Wagenbach-Verlag and Rotbuch-Verlag). In the public awareness, as well as in the shop-windows and display-cases of bookshops, beside the well-known paperback series (Rowohlt, Fischer, dtv, Ullstein, Goldmann), the publishers of fiction have an outstanding role—one which does not in fact accrue to them from the purely economic standpoint. They ‘make’ literature and authors, often living off high-turnover activities in other spheres which scarcely reach the public attention (e.g. Hanser and Luchterhand from the technical specialist publishing houses incorporated in their group, Suhrkamp/Insel from play distribution agencies, or Rowohlt from paperback publishing). Entirely ou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Medieval Literature
• Humanism and the Reformation
• Baroque Literature
• Aufklärung: The Enlightenment
• The Kunstepoche
• Vormärz: The Run-Up to 1848
• Realism and the Gründerzeit
• Under the Banner of Imperialism
• Literature in the Weimar Republic
• Literature in the Third Reich
• German Literature Written in Exile
• Post-1945 German Literature
• Literature of the German Democratic Republic
• Literature of the Federal Republic
• 1992 Update: The Unity and Diversity of German Literature
• Further Reading