There are advantages to coming late to an outlook and a set of conventions like realism, and arriving there via a different national tradition. It is sometimes claimed that all the realist writers of note subvert the realism they represent. If this is so, then perhaps those who come last are likely to be more subversive than their predecessors. For at least three of the novels I am taking as paradigms in this chapter the claim has been made that they bring the German novel at long last into the European realist tradition; and also that each of them is in some way the culmination of that tradition.

For at least three of the novels I am taking as paradigms in this chapter the claim has been made that they bring the German novel at long last into the European realist tradition; and also that each of them is in some way the culmination of that tradition. Effi Briest, Buddenbrooksand Der Untertanhave all been ranked among major social novels in the European canon of realism; they embrace ‘society’ not as a backcloth to individual human experience (as in the Bildungsroman tradition described in chapter 6 of this book), but as its constituent element. (It is however worth noting that none of them deals with the conditions of lower-class life.)

Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg, published in 1924 (the translation The Magic Mountain appeared in 1927) describes how a talented if somewhat simple young bourgeois of Hamburg, Hans Castorp, postpones his internship in a shipbuilding firm in order to visit his cousin Joachim Ziemssen, a patient with tuberculosis in the Berghof sanatorium in Davos. Castorp has planned on a comfortable three-week visit; he ends up staying for seven years, and with him the reader of this magnum opus is confined within the institution and the nearby countryside for hundreds of pages. Yet the copious attention that Mann devotes to life among the moribund and the convalescent - including Castorp who, soon after his arrival, is diagnosed with a not inconsequential problem in his lungs - does not produce a novel which one could accurately describe as being 'about' a sanatorium. On the contrary, The Magic Mountain is about Castorp's growth and transformation, his 'heightening' or 'transsubstantiation', to use the novel's own categorical terms, in a context, the sanatorium, populated by an array of characters constituting an allegory of European culture on the eve of the First World War. It is, in other words, about Castorp's education and can therefore be usefully discussed within the tradition of the novel of education, the German Bildungsroman.

The polemical tone of the above quotations is unmistakable. The slightly world-weary cadences of the established writer Frisch contrast sharply with the self-confident assertiveness of the young Peter Handke, but both were responding to the pressures brought about by the growing politicisation of literature in the 1960s, particularly inWest Germany. The decade had opened with the controversial trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem (1961), and was dominated by the harrowing Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial (1963-5) and the powerful documentary theatre of Rolf Hochhuth, Peter Weiss and Heinar Kipphardt. The decade was to be even more politicised by increasing opposition to the Vietnam War, the formation of the Auβerparlamentarische Opposition (Extra-Parliamentary Opposition) in the face of the threat to West German democracy posed by the CDU-SPD 'Grand Coalition' of 1966, and the rapid escalation of the anti-authoritarian student movement inWest German universities. It is therefore perhaps understandable that at this critical moment all social activity, including literature and art, should have been seen in starkly political terms.

At the end of the most destructive war in historical memory, Germans were confronted with the near-impossible demand that they look at the now visible enormity of material and moral devastation and accept collective responsibility. Collectively they had become ‘the German question', as the photo-journal LIFE announced on the title page of the issue that published the first images of the opening of the camps. In the pre-television period, these images had enormous power, and they made ordinary Americans ask how the German people could have committed such acts of unspeakable, unbelievable cruelty. The assumption of collective guilt and demand for collective remorse was to endure for over half a century, creating the politically potent notion of a uniquely German ‘unmastered’ or ‘uncompleted’ past. At the end of the war German civilians, at that time women, children and old men, were taken to the camps to view the atrocities committed in their name. This was documented in a large number of photos taken by US Army Signal Corps photographers whose task was to show the viewers’ criminal culpability and lack of remorse; and their notoriously ‘stony’ faces do indeed show horror and repulsion rather than sadness. Obviously, they did not know how to react to what they saw and they did not understand what was asked of them. They were ordinary women who had just barely survived a total war of hitherto unknown dimensions, with most of the men either killed or prisoners of war, and when the victors asked the notorious question, ‘How could you have done it?’ they would answer ‘We did not know anything about it’, which confirmed the victors’ certainty that they ‘must all have known’. Whether they did or did not know is politically still a ‘live’ but ultimately moot question, because from the beginning it failed to address the different ways of knowing and of remembering. Instead it imposed an enduring sameness of guilt – they all knew everything and did not do anything – and of memory: they will now all remember, and in the same way, that they did know and did not act.

What kind of scope and limits should a Companion to the Modern German Novel set itself? What in particular do we mean by 'modern'?

One approach would equate 'modern' with 'contemporary', and thus focus on the novel in the here-and-now, in 'our era' - whether that era be relatively narrowly defined as the period since the Wende (turning-point) of German unification in 1989-90, or more broadly as the six decades following the collapse of Nazi Germany at the end of the Second World War. Both 1945 and 1989 mark important cultural as well as socio-political breaks in the continuum of German history, and there exists a considerable body of scholarly literature devoted to the development of the novel in these periods - as well as in the decades into which they are subdivided. To anchor ourselves purely in the 'now' would however make for a viewpoint that is inherently unstable, as well as lacking a longer-term historical perspective, and a Companion constructed around it would fairly soon be overtaken by events.

To begin understanding how the modernist novel explored new conceptions of the self, we may briefly consider two works published in 1895: Fontane's Effi Briest and the Studien über Hysterie by Freud and Breuer. In Fontane's novel, accurate knowledge about the characters is in principle readily accessible, both to the narrator and to the characters themselves. Not only does the narrator give us authoritative accounts of Effi's personality and motives (chapters 3 and 20), but the major characters, whether in conversation or private reflection, are articulate and self-analytical to an extraordinary degree. They lack that layer of unconscious mental activity which finds expression in all the purposive mistakes that Freud called 'Fehlleistungen' or parapraxes. Despite her wildness and spontaneity, Effi seems preternaturally self-controlled by comparison with the disturbed young women in the Freud–Breuer case histories: Anna O., for example, who at one time was unable to drink any water because she had seen a dog drinking out of a water-glass, and at another time lost her command of German and communicated solely in English. In Fontane’s presentation of character, the articulate, controlled social self dominates the private self that is rooted in the body with its unruly, non-verbal drives. But by the end of the century, the fictional conventions of the social novel were wearing thin; they were readily compatible with irony, as in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (1901), or with downright comedy, as in Heinrich Mann’s Im Schlaraffenland(1900; In the Land of Milk and Honey). A fictional exploration of the self, running parallel with the new psychologies, needed a different range of narrative devices and expressive techniques.

French, English, Russian and American novels have been able to call upon grand, semi-mythical metropolises – Paris, London, St Petersburg, New York – as metaphors, but the German novel has never had a centrally symbolic city that it could call its metaphoric home. To a much greater extent than in these other literatures, cities in German literature have been for the most part either regional or foreign. This reflects in part the tri-national character of literature written in German. Austria and Switzerland, as well as Germany, have produced major German novels. It also reflects the quite different historical, political and social development of all three countries. In addition, within each country there have been, over the centuries, marked regional differences.

This situation has posed a particular problem for the novel written in German in the twentieth century. In the heyday of realism, in the later nineteenth century, what we might call regional urbanism (to the extent that novels in German were urban) was the norm in prose; Gottfried Keller’s Swiss towns and cities, Fontane’s Berlin, and even the L‥ ubeck of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks all revel in detailing specifics of geography, language and customs in representing the particular culture of particular cities. But if one jumps ahead only ten years from Buddenbrooks (1901) to Rilke’s novel Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910; The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, 1930), in which the cities, Paris, St Petersburg and Venice, are not German at all, one has entered an entirely different urban world. Gone are the fixed hierarchies of class, speech and local customs that mark the life of a particular city; instead, in Rilke’s Paris we are inside the fragmented consciousness of a would-be poet who is trying desperately, and without much success, to create art out of his fugitive sense-perceptions and impressions of a hostile and unyielding urban reality.

The term kleiner Mann ('little man') is not a strictly defined sociological category. It is, rather, a loose expression used both in the everyday world of colloquial exchanges and also in more formal discourse to evoke associations with, and sympathy for, the lot of ordinary people in a world in which important decisions are taken by a small and powerful but largely invisible group of people 'up above'. The kleiner Mann is the underdog who feels the odds are stacked against him. The sense of being insignificant or helpless has of course been a widespread one in the mass society of the industrial age: the kleiner Mann is not a marginal creature but a very representative figure – 'the man on the street', 'the ordinary guy', or, in older parlance, 'the common man', 'Everyman'. Furthermore, his predicament has been articulated not only by writers but by artists from a variety of national and ethnic backgrounds, and working in a range of media and genres, who, in the midst of the confusing modern world of factories, machines, cities, bureaucracies, commercial entertainment and mass politics, have collectively created a 'culture of the little man'.

Given the political circumstances in Germany between the end of the First World War and the Nazis' assumption of power, any treatment of the experience of serving at the Front – literary or otherwise – was automatically political. There were vested interests on both the left and the right, but especially the latter, in making the war experience work to the advantage of ideology. Hence, in the first years of the Weimar Republic, and then again towards the end of the 1920s, the war as a literary topic was predominantly the domain of nationalist elements, all the more so because of the historical role of militarism in the Prussian ethos. For these elements, who clung to the view that the German army had remained 'undefeated in the field', the experience of the war was to be esteemed as a forcing ground for völkisch values, which would come into their own once the compromise of Weimar had been overcome.

In 1930, six years after the publication of The Magic Mountain, there appeared the first parts of two novels by Austrian writers that were destined to take their place alongside Mann's work as summative achievements of European modernist fiction. Hermann Broch's 1888. Pasenow oder die Romantik (Pasenow the Romantic (1888)) was the first volume of the trilogy Die Schlafwandler (The Sleepwalkers, 1932), whose second and third parts were published in 1931 and 1932; Book 1 of Robert Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities, 1953-60) was followed by a portion of Book 2 in 1933, but the work remained incomplete, a massive fragment, on its author's death in 1942.

Like The Magic Mountain, both The Man Without Qualities and The Sleepwalkerstake the First World War as the chronological end-point of their fictional worlds. In Musil’s novel, set in Vienna on the eve of its outbreak, the war hovers as a huge irony, a knowledge, shared by author and readers, of the destruction that is about to engulf the traditional social world that its unwitting characters inhabit. Broch’s trilogy, whose first two parts 1888. Pasenow oder die Romantik and 1903. Esch oder die Anarchie (Esch the Anarchist (1903)) are set in 1888 Berlin and 1903 Cologne/Mannheim respectively, locates its third novel 1918. Huguenau oder die Sachlichkeit (Huguenau the Realist (1918)) amidst the débâcle of Germany’s defeat.

Thanks to committed and painstaking work by feminist literary historians and academics, it is now widely accepted that women did not first pick up their pens in the twentieth century but that they have always written. Many reasons have been put forward to explain the scarcity of writing by women in previous centuries: sanctions were placed on such activities not deemed suitable for women, and even when women found the time and private space to write, their finished work struggled to be accepted by publishers and the reading public. In any case, women, it was suggested, had little to write about given their supposedly limited 'domestic sphere'.

The patriarchal nature of the publishing industry was one of the obstacles which women writing in the 1970s still had to overcome. At the same time previously ‘private’ or domestic matters were beginning to find heightened political and literary treatment, as exemplified in the feminist slogan, ‘the personal is political’ (‘das Private ist politisch’).

For many who watched them, the dramatic events that unfolded in the German Democratic Republic in the autumn of 1989 - the so-called Wende or 'turning-point' - seemed to confirm what Christa Wolf had asserted two decades earlier: 'The writer . . . is an important person.' As one of the most acclaimed writers in the German Democratic Republic, Wolf's own importance was primarily an effect of the attention accorded to her as a critical voice by readers inside and outside the GDR - as well as by that state itself. For almost as long as the GDR existed, texts by Wolf and other critical writers were scrutinised on both sides of the East/West German border in order to discover how the writers' mastery of language was deployed in broaching taboo topics, expressing opinions contrary to the officially promulgated party line, or questioning the official code of form and content embodied in the notion of 'socialist realism'. For the purposes of this discussion, 'critical' novels are understood to be works written in the GDR, usually by convinced Marxists, who nonetheless distanced themselves from the rhetoric and expectations of those in power. This element of resistance can be located both in nonconformity to the party line in matters of content, such as pressure to depict 'positive socialist heroes', but also in regard to preferred aesthetic strategies.

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was born to a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, a Czech city under Austro-Hungarian rule. This piling-up of ethnic particulars right at the outset should suggest some of the complexity of Kafka's predicament, one reflected in his very rich confessional writings–his correspondence and journals–his stories and parables, and his three great unfinished novels America (Amerika, written 1912-14; published in 1927), The Trial (Der Process, written 1914; published as Der Prozess in 1925; trans. Willa and Edwin Muir 1935) and The Castle (Das Schloss, written 1922; published 1926; trans. Willa and Edwin Muir 1930).

Kafka’s situation, like his city, is mazy, disjunct, overly detailed by history; it held exceptional danger and promise: the danger of becoming lost in a lawless complexity that finally flattens out into anxiety, apathy and nothingness, but the promise, too, of a sudden breaking open under great tension into a blinding prospect of truth. At various moments one can see Kafka laying weight on one or the other of his identity elements in an effort to find his way: he studied law at university, then practised it at the partly state-run Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute, where he rose to a position of considerable authority (Obersekretär), though he experienced his ‘work at the office’ mainly as a hindrance to his writing.

At the end of Peter Weiss's play Hölderlin, the eponymous poet is visited by the young Karl Marx. It is an entirely apocryphal encounter, but one which is revealing in terms of the relationship between writers and politics in the 1960s and 1970s. Marx describes how the encounter with Hölderlin's poetry has led to his realisation of the need for a materialist, dialectical political philosophy. He concludes that in furthering the aim of societal change the artist's individual vision is of equal status with political analysis.

Hölderlin appeared in 1971. Just a few years previously West Germany had experienced the most radical questioning of this position. The student movement had sought to enlist all aspects of social life in the cause of global revolution. In September 1968 the influential journal Kursbuch contained no fewer than three articles which proclaimed that literature was ‘dead’: in the current world-political situation, belles lettres had no discernible function; rather it was the duty of writers to document exploitation and oppression, whether of the South Vietnamese peasants or of the foreign workers in West Germany, and to engage themselves directly in combatting the concentration of the mass media in the hands of a few reactionary figures, such as Axel Springer. Peter Weiss himself had embraced this line.