Introduction
Literature is not just texts, because texts are not just texts. Texts are always turned, and turn their readers, to something other than texts and readers, something the texts are about. An introduction, even a very short introduction, to a national literature cannot be just an introduction to texts, it is also an introduction to a nation. To ask what German literature is like is to ask what - from a literary point of view - Germany is like. Since the foundation in the 18th century of the two distinctively modern literary genres, the book of subjective lyrical poems and the objective realistic novel, there have been two voices of literary modernity, and Germany has spoken, supremely, with one of them: poetic, tragic, resolutely reflective, and subliminally religious. The other voice - novelistic, realistic, sometimes comic, sometimes morally earnest - has in the German tradition been more muted, though by no means mute. This book is concerned with the character of Germany’s literary contribution to our modern self-understanding, and so with the character of the community to and about which, and in whose language, its writers primarily expressed themselves. The fi rst thing to say about that community is that, for all the centrality of Germany in European geography, history, and culture, it is not unifi ed, and never has been.
From a British point of view, ‘Central Europe’ probably means somewhere unreliable north of Transylvania. But ‘Mitteleuropa’ (‘Central Europe’) is how contemporary Germans describe the area in which they live, and with justifi cation. Since the fall of Rome, Europe’s trade routes from North to South and East to West have intersected on German territory. Forms of the modern German language have been spoken from the Rhine to the Volga and from the borders of Finland to the southern slopes of the Italian Alps. Language, culture, and genes have been exchanged, over the centuries, in peace and war, with French, Italian, Hungarian, Slavonic, and Scandinavian neighbours. (In addition to Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, German is an official language in part or all of Belgium, Hungary, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Namibia, and Poland.) Lacking clear geographical boundaries, however, Germany has been a point of reference for the European identities grouped around it without establishing an identity of its own. The speakers of German have never been united in a single state calling itself Germany, not even by Hitler.
The modern state of that name is one, historically unique, result of a long and complex development. The process which brought together the Federal and Democratic Republics in 1990-1 was known as ‘re-unifi cation’ but the state that emerged from it has different boundaries from any of its predecessors and a signifi cant proportion of its older population was born outside it, though in territories that had thought of themselves as German, in some cases, for many centuries. Europe’s other two principal German-speaking states, Austria and Switzerland, have had rather more continuity of identity, even if Austria, as the former metropolitan state of an empire which lasted under various names from 1526 to 1918, has reached its present equilibrium only through the trauma of multiple amputation. German-speaking Switzerland (though each canton has its own history) has developed independently of the other German lands since the 15th century, if not before.
What is called German literature is really three separate literatures, of three separate states, as distinct as the literatures of, say, England, America, and Australia. Dürrenmatt was no more
a German writer because his plays were put on in Berlin than Arthur Miller was an English writer because his plays were put on in London, and to call Kafka a German novelist is rather like calling Seamus Heaney a British poet: there is some truth in the phrase, but only because it points to a tension between the writer’s origins and material, on the one hand, and his medium and his public, on the other. This book is concerned with the literature of the state now called Germany, which needs to be seen in isolation from the literatures of Austria and Switzerland if its own peculiar dynamic is to become visible. Rambling though it is, there is a single tale to tell and it cannot be told outside its specific political, social, and even economic setting.
In order to bring out the coherence of the German story, I begin with a synopsis of political and cultural developments since the Middle Ages, without referring to individual writers. There follow four chapters which keep to the same framework but give rather more detail. Chapters dealing with the Middle Ages and the literatures of Austria and Switzerland can be found on the internet (http://www.mml.can.ac.uk/german/staff/nb215). Those who miss Kafka in the present volume have the benefi t of the excellent Kafka: A Very Short Introduction by Ritchie Robertson (OUP, 2004), Chapters 1 and 4 being particularly relevant.
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Author: Nicholas Boyle
