Emerging Writing

TWENTY YEARS AFTER GERMAN REUNIFICATION, much German-language literary fiction, and particularly that written by a younger generation of authors, is distinctly globalized and transnational in outlook: from subject matter to setting, from the style and language of texts to their swift translation into other languages, a larger number of novels from the German-speaking countries than ever before participate in the worldwide circulation of literary fiction. With three German-language writers awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in just over a decade — Günter Grass in 1999, Elfriede Jelinek in 2004, and Herta Müller in 2009 — a variety of international bestsellers including Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser (1995; The Reader, 1999), Thomas Brussig’s Helden wie wir (1995; Heroes Like Us, 1997), W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001), Daniel Kehlmann’s Die Vermessung der Welt (2005; Measuring the World, 2006), and (as always) books by Günter Grass, not to mention high-profile film adaptations such as Stephen Daldry’s The Reader (2008), the beginning of the twenty-first century has seen a greater degree of attention focused on contemporary German-language literature than at any time in the last two hundred years.

The present volume concentrates on “emerging” writers — a term intended to describe a rise to prominence on a number of levels and in a range of arenas. Several chapters feature authors whose names have become increasingly familiar to international audiences in the last few years, including Ilija Trojanow, Karen Duve, Julia Franck, and Kehlmann, as well as one or two who have been established longer but are less well-known outside of Germany, such as Sibylle Berg and Sven Regener. Some chapters offer new, more reflective readings of an author’s bestseller than are typically generated in the immediate aftermath of its international success, such as Rebecca Braun’s chapter on Kehlmann’s Die Vermessung der Welt; others examine newer or less familiar works, or publications that have followed initial success, such as Valerie Heffernan’s chapter on Julia Franck’s Die Mittagsfrau (Lady Midday, the noonday witch, 2007; published in English as The Blind Side of the Heart, 2009) or Heike Bartel’s chapter on Karen Duve’s Taxi (2008), and Kate Roy and Andrew Plowman’s chapters on sequels to acclaimed first novels by Yadé Kara and Sven Regener respectively.