Baustelle Gegenwartsliteratur

Erb, Andreas, ed. Baustelle Die neunziger Jahre. Opladen: Westdeutscher, 1998. 236 pp. Alexander Kluge's metaphor Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: ratios has found yet another application, as Andreas Erb's collection of essays about German-language literature of the 1990s makes clear. The contributions in this volume originated with an international conference held in 1995 at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen, from which the views of thirteen literary scholars, media critics, and teachers combine to form Baustelle Gegenwartsliteratur. They suggest in varying ways that while Kluge's early depiction of directionless German cultural production finds lingering resonance in the 1990s, the current difficulty in defining a unified period for this body of work is explained by entirely new reasons. In considering literature that is produced in an age of hightech communication, which Erb describes as vorgeblich schriftfeindlichen Zeiten (8), this collection demonstrates the importance of studying in tandem with the primary works also information age communication about literature. This communication is in turn largely determined by the altered nature of the private sphere and new individual needs peculiar to today's generation of readers, as well as the market niches of distinct contemporary social milieus. Klaus-Michael Bogdal's provocative lead essay Klimawechisel. Eine kleine Meteorologie der Gegenwartsliteratur rejects German unification as a categorizing principle for literature of the early 1990s and maintains that much the same literature would have been written even if unification had not occurred. Bogdal proposes the existence of five Klimaanlagen among readers that demonstrate the lack of a characteristic German culture in the 1990s and the inability of literature to represent German society as a whole, whether it is politically divided or unified. Many readers will find Bogdal's delineation of social milieus alternately overlapping and exclusionary. However, his point about the increasing difficulty of isolating a culture with which all Germans identify is well taken, and it sets the stage for the varied analyses that follow. More than an account of conference proceedings, this anthology is best appreciated as a lively conversation about literature and its reception. While there is frequent agreement among the voices represented here that literature is losing ground as a focal point for expressing the shared concerns of a society, the contributors also find productive disagreement. The thesis that unification plays a minimal role in the tenor of current literature is subtly questioned by Hans Peter Herrmann's treatment of literature and literary criticism from the West as signals from the Seite des Siegers (32). Bogdal's assertion that the Nazi past has ceased to function as a motivation for literary treatments of history stands in contrast to essays by Jorg Magenau, Bernd Kinzig, and Petra Ginther, who analyze recent narratives about the Third Reich by authors such as Marcel Beyer and Herta Muller

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