A crisis of literature? : Germany

One of the outstanding authors of the last twenty years is Botho Strauss, whose short stories and novels (”Marlenes Schwester”, 1975; “Der junge Mann”, 1984), plays (”Die Hypochonder”, 1972; “Bekannte Gesichter, gemischte Gefuhle”, 1974; “Kalldewey, Farce”, 1981; “Der Park”, 1983) and essays (”Paare, Passanten”, 1981; “Wohnen Dam-mern Lugen”, 1994) make a serious attempt to capture the present at the very moment of its outrageousness by borrowing from mystical images in language and scene sequences.

The end of the political and ideological division of Europe and Germany is still too recent to permit even a tentative answer to the question of how it has influenced or altered German literature. It is, however, clear that thus far no artistically convincing attempt to address this elementary change has left a lasting literary impression. Gunter Grass’s novel “Ein weites Feld” (1995), which sought to assess this radical change, admittedly unleashed a discussion, largely with political arguments; after it subsided, however, the general opinion was that this topic had not yet found its master articulator.