What is most immediately striking about the German literary market since unification, and in particular since the mid-1990s, is its sheer diversity. This variety was reflected in, though not necessarily a direct result of, a series of heated discussions that took place from the end of the 1980s amongst newspaper critics and professional readers working for publishing houses — authors, with some exceptions, continued to write novels. As a by-product of these disputes, literary scholars have been furnished with a lexicon for their readings of post-1990 German fiction, including, as we shall see, “Gesinnungsästhetik,” “Unterhaltsamkeit,” “Realismus,” and “Neue Lesbarkeit.”

The most...

In an influential essay of October 1997, “Der Herbst des Quatschocento. Immer noch, jetzt erst recht, gibt es zwei deutsche Literaturen: selbstverliebter Realismus im Westen, tragischer Expressionismus im Osten,” first published in Die Zeit, resident critic Iris Radisch pointed to the difference between fiction from the east of the now united Germany and that from the west: “Der Osten ist tragisch, der Westen lustig.” In the east of the Republic, writers were prone to draw on the “metaphysischen Traditionen der deutschen Geistesgeschichte”; in the west, they were more likely to imitate an “amerikanischen Pragmatismus.”¹ Radisch describes Matthias Politycki’s Weiberroman (1997),...

The publication in 1995 of Günter Grass’s Ein weites Feld was, Daniela Dahn claims, a “nationales Ereignis” without parallel “in der Kulturgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschlands.”¹ Indeed, a quarter of a million copies of this nearly eight hundred page novel had been ordered prior to its release.² Three chapters, moreover, had appeared in Neue deutsche Literatur, a journal based in the ex-GDR, and some five thousand advance copies had been sent out to reviewers by Grass’s publishing house, Steidl. A literary sensation appeared to be in the offing. Nineteenth-century novelist Theodor Fontane was to be resurrected as Fonty, a seventy-year-old citizen...

At the close of Hanns-Josef Ortheil’s Abschied von den Kriegsteilnehmern (1992), the narrator — a writer who shares a great deal of his biography with Ortheil — relates how he went to Prague in the autumn of 1989 to deliver a letter to an East German couple who, along with hundreds of their compatriots, had taken refugee in the West German embassy and were demanding to be allowed to travel to the FRG. He tells of how he bribed an enterprising East German within the embassy compound to find the addressees of the letter, written by friends who had crossed from Hungary...

In Ulla Hahn’s Unscharfe Bilder (2003), Hans Musbach tells his daughter of a meal at which he was present in the early 1970s during which a colleague’s son publicly attacked his father for his wartime service in North Africa. Provoked by the young man’s scornful self-righteousness, another colleague then proceeded to act out the final agonies endured in the Balkans by a dying German soldier whose testicles had been cut off by partisans. “‘Ich dachte, Sie wollten wissen, wie es war,’” concluded the older man with evident bitterness at the end of this description of a traumatic episode that had...

In Maxim Biller’s Harlem Holocaust (1990), the German narrator pictures how the American-Jewish author Warszawski is caught up in the guilt-induced yet self-serving philo-Semitism of his German girlfriend. “Ihr Volk tut mir ja so schrecklich leid!,” she screams while receiving oral sex from him, “worauf sie in seinen hungrigen jüdischen Schlund hineinejakulierte.”¹ The narrator — whose “Jewish” name Rosenhain is ironic given that his grandfather wrote anti-Semitic tracts and his great-uncle tortured Jews in the Berlin headquarters of the SS (HH, 8–9) — similarly ingratiates himself with Warszawski and yet also exploits him in pursuit of his own “Gier nach Schuld...

Writer and academic W. G. Sebald, in his book on Austrian literature, declares: “Je mehr von der Heimat die Rede ist, desto weniger gibt es sie.”¹ Elsewhere, speaking of fiction in the German language in general, he elaborates: Heimat is “ein mirage, eine Luftspiegelung.” It is, of course, literature itself that is the most important instrument of this myth, deploying “ihre ganze ethnopoetische Kraft” to deliver “authentische Beschreibungen,” Sebald claims, “aus einer sagenhaften Provinz.”² Heimat and Provinz — these are two recurring themes in German-language writing, and, needless to say, of the effort to define German identity.

The tradition of writing...

The opening chapter of the present volume began by proclaiming the heterogeneity of post-unification German writing. In this first chapter and in the chapters that follow, I hope to have given something of the flavor of this contemporary diversity in a series of close readings of individual novels and allusions to further works by authors from east and west and of the older, middle, and younger generations.

The diversity of recent German fiction has to do, in part, with changed market conditions and changed audience expectations. Indeed, the publishing environment in which German authors operate, the kinds of books that...