The German Essay

I know very little about the German essay. However, I attended an event last week on "The State of the Essay", from which I gleaned a little knowledge. It was organized by Merkur magazine and the Freie Universität's literature faculty, which is running a course on the essay this semester, and I attended mainly because they invited my friend Amanda DeMarco to speak on the subject. It was a panel discussion, so obviously no conclusion was reached.

I discovered a few things nonetheless. Firstly, nobody knows what an essay is. Wahrig defines "Essay (m. 6 od. n. 15; Lit.)" as "literar. Kunstform, Abhandlung in knapper, geistvoller, allgemein verständlicher Form". Note that it's such a vague thing you can say either "das Essay" or "der Essay". Webster's goes into more detail: "2a: an analytic, interpretative, or critical literary composition usu. much shorter and less systematic and less formal than a dissertation or thesis and usu. dealing with its subject from a limited often personal point of view". German also has the term Aufsatz, which I understand as being less impressive, more the school essay type of thing; perhaps the kind of writing that might take the cheap approach of starting with dictionary definitions. There was discussion on the panel of where to draw the line between journalism and the essay. I would like to suggest that if a writer calls something an essay, we can safely assume it is one.

Then there is a distinction between the academic and the literary essay. Merkur publishes the former type, mainly, but with Michael Rutschky on the panel they had somewhat of a shining example of the literary essayist. There was also Georg Stanitzek, who I believe has studied the German essay from an academic perspective, and offered a historical definition along the lines of "something two gentlemen might discuss while out walking". Merkur doesn't in fact have a terribly good track record on publishing women's writing, although I'm assured they're working on it; you can read some of their ideas on why women don't submit to them in Eurozine. Stanitzek took this gender imbalance as an indication that women still don't write essays. In the audience, the editors of the literary magazine Edit proved that this was poppycock by telling us that fifty percent of entries for their annual essay competition come from women.

The panel itself was admirably balanced, with Kathrin Passig to tell us that the internet doesn't offer the kind of prestige that print publications do in Germany, which is why we're not seeing many essays published online here. The essay, she and Rutschky agreed, is not something one writes for money but for recognition. And that recognition comes less from the genre of the essay, which is apparently slightly frowned upon, at least among academics, than from the subject matter – as the genre is profane, Rutschky claimed, it must be made respectable by writing about a sacred matter, such as literature or art. Another thing I found interesting was the general feeling that it's becoming more acceptable to write journalism and essays in the first person here. This has always been something I've noticed about German journalism – writers will tie themselves up in knots to avoid using the word "ich", whereas the first person is a perfectly viable perspective in English. I'm glad things are changing.

Amanda pointed out that German essays are a little more intellectual than American ones, and I'm glad to say I don't see any evidence of the "confessional essay" (my former life as a prostitute, how my boss harrassed me and I put up with it, etc.) over here. I hate to generalize about national cultures but perhaps we can say that the Germans tend to be somewhere between discreet and uptight about private matters. That can go either way but in terms of the essay, it saves us the dreadful fascination of reading young women's emotional crises splashed all over the internet. Another difference posited was that American creative writing schools are training writers as essayists, whereas Germany only has two creative writing schools in the first place.

Where to start reading the German essay? If you read German, try waahr.de for a large collection of what they label "literary journalism". Edit has just published its award-winning literary essays for this year, which are very unconventional and worth buying. And you can search the Merkur archive for predominantly academic essays, some of which are available for free. Some of the major literary houses also still publish literary magazines, including Neue Rundschau from Fischer and Akzente from Hanser, and the LCB does the excellent Sprache im technischen Zeitalter.

I have three suggestions for German literary essays available in English. Starting way back when, you can read a personal essay by Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt in the new issue of Asymptote journal, translated by Isabel Cole. From the mid-nineties, Austrian Christoph Ransmayr's piece "The Gravedigger of Hallstadt" is what I'd call a first-class essay and is available in Seiriol Dafydd's translation at no man's land. Finally, there's an award-winning essay from the first Edit competition, in my translation, German writer Francis Nenik's The Marvel of Biographical Bookkeeping.  

Multiple Uljana Wolf Whammy

O! The new issue of Asymptote is online! It is full of things, but may I draw your attention in particular to some of the laciest poems ever by Uljana Wolf, translated by Shane Anderson, and an essay by Uljana Wolf, translated by me. If you like that kind of thing they have links to the originals.

Mini-making-of: An Asymptote editor and I attended a rather odd event at which Uljana Wolf and Christian Hawkey talked about erasure and their joint book in front of a bunch of students, and then the students asked the kind of questions I personally don't think writers ought to be asked. They had their baby with them and she was a bit wriggly and wanted to be held all the time, which made matters difficult, so I offered my baby-holding services. Uljana read the very essay you too can enjoy at Asymptote, and said editor and I went a bit gooey-eyed (on top of my baby-induced gooey-eyedness). He said could they put it in Asymptote, and I said could I translate it, and that was that.

(Whispering) I took a few little liberties. It was a great pleasure to translate. The essay is about erasure and snow and the Monkees and how Rilke was a bad translator and very possibly an arsehole to boot. And about Elizabeth Barrett Browning and this lovely book.

Alexander Kluge: Die Entsprechung einer Oase

I feel a little uncomfortable writing about Alexander Kluge because I feel a little ignorant about his work. This results from an unfortunate combination of various factors: limited reading time in general, my concentration on younger writers and my irrational avoidance of older men's work (Kluge is in his early eighties). Under normal circumstances I can hide the gaps in my reading behind bluff and bravado, but now I've had a tiny taste of Kluge and find myself craving more.

The taster in question was Die Entsprechung einer Oase, subtitled "essay for the digital generation". Being aimed at the digital generation, it is only available digitally, from my friend Nikola Richter's new publishing venture mikrotext. It is also short, weighing in at 17 pages on my Sony reader or about 50 on a smartphone. I was quite intrigued by how it came about - according to Nikola, it began as an thirty-minute telephone conversation; a very enjoyable one by her account. She told me:

He didn't want to give any advice but he began thinking about his relationship to the younger generation, about the conditions of cultural production and creative activity, about reading on the net - and I just let him talk.

Nikola transcribed and edited what he said - apparently his ideas were pretty much printable the instant he expressed them - and obviously they sent the resulting essay to and fro a couple of times, added quotes, and so on. I'm terribly impressed by the process, by what he had to say and by the man himself. I think I can say he's a writer, a filmmaker, a critical theorist and a pioneer of intelligent private television production in Germany. I don't feel that sums it up adequately - it's particularly the combination of those creative and intellectual activities that makes him the kind of iconic figure my youthful iconoclasm made me ignore in the past. 

The young generation, he says, doesn't need his advice. But he looks to the younger generation to reflect on his own ideas. Kluge talks about the internet with its overwhelming wealth of information and our need to find personal oases within it, places of calm and sustenance dealing with things that interest us subjectively as individuals. He reflects on how the internet has broadened our opportunities for reading and the way in which we can write, both in terms of finding things we want to read and adding things to writing that might have seemed outlandish twenty years ago:

One never previously saw this presence of languages. I can risk writing twenty lines of Latin in a text – and I'm suddenly independent, I have a little independent fortress Memor esto sacerdotalis dignitatis linguam caelestis esse clavem imperii et clarissimam Christi tubam. Quapropter ne sileas, netaceas, ne formides loqui. This Latin has extisted for more than 2000 years. (...) Now I can add something like this in a literary context because young people have become more accustomed to unfamiliar elements in the midst of texts. They're not always instantly amazed to find something new, something they don't immediately understand. They're more tolerant in that respect.

He talks subjectively about intellectual property and the way we can watch opinion forming and crystallising via internet debate, about the unfairness of distribution models, about creative acts. Setting up a publishing house, a band, a gallery - or a website - he says, means creating an oasis, collecting individual voices to make creative statements as a small group rather than as individuals. 

Two things impressed me for the main part. They may both be related to Kluge's age. Firstly, while the essay isn't quite perfectly formed, it flows and returns to certain key points and is coherent. The author uses a variety of metaphors - oases, islands, boats, coral riffs - to get his point across in a poetic rather than informative manner; a distinction he makes himself. Fully formed ideas dictated down the phone, surely a dying art. And secondly, Kluge represents all sorts of ideas one might not expect from the older generation in Germany, particularly on the subject of intellectual property rights - an issue that often seems to split society in two by age. He never seems to want to get down with the kids, is never patronising, but shows so much respect for the new that I instantly felt I owed that same respect back to him.

Some of his work is available in English from New Directions and Seagull Books, translated mainly by the excellent Martin Chalmers. I'm told his Air Raid should also be out later this year from Seagull. This particular essay is a strong start for a new publishing house - I hope, a defining moment that will go on to establish respect and success for mikrotext.

Edit Essay Prize

Probably the most interesting thing I experienced at the Leipzig Book Fair was the rather low-key award ceremony for the Edit Essay Prize. I say low-key because it took place in a gloomy dungeon room with a distinct whiff of sulphur on the air, at the very end of the Lange Leipziger Lesenacht when everybody was rather tired and emotional, including myself. But despite one G&T too many, I found the whole thing fascinating.

Edit is a literary magazine closely linked to the creative writing programme at Leipzig University. I met one of the current editors, Jörn Dege, last autumn, when he was in the grip of essay fever. The essay, he was convinced, is a neglected literary form in Germany, whereas the Americans excel at it. So they launched an essay competition.

An incredible 622 entries later, Dege kind of had to eat his words, and did so ever so slightly during the event. It would appear that Germans are yearning to write essays - but lack publication opportunities. I'd also say that a closer look at a few recent publications might reveal essays masquerading as all sorts of things. David Wagner's Welche Farbe hat Berlin springs to mind pretty instantly, as does some of the work of Carolin Emcke and Ingo Schulze. And I'm sure there are plenty more examples lurking out there on the boundaries of journalism and under the nebulous label of "texts".

Anyway, the first prize went to Simone Schröder for "Manchmal wie ein großer schwarzer Kasten". Schröder seems to have actually edited a vehicle for the German essay, the literary magazine elephant. (Another lesser-known litmag that encourages essay-writing is Freitext, by the way - I'm starting to spot essays hiding everywhere I look now...) She read from her piece about how we negotiate all the objects in our everyday lives and it seemed very impressive, although I found it a tad wandering. But perhaps that was just my mind.

Second place went to Francis Nenik for "Vom Wunder der doppelten Biografieführung". Those (male) judges who were present said it had split the jury: they'd raved over it while the (absent) female judges didn't get it. Being a major fan of macho writing, I fell into the first category. The text is printed in the literary supplement of Der Freitag so rush out and get it now - a wonderful, depressing, beautifully structured and fascinating essay about two poets on their uppers in 20th-century London. For more from the mysterious Nenik in German and English, go to the quandary novelists. You probably ought to.

Bruno Preisendörfer took third prize for his "Zeitsprünge". I wasn't paying attention properly but it seemed to be about John Cage and time. Preisendörfer is a totally cool geezer and writes an awesome and bizarrely not yet famous blog called Fackelkopf.  

All the prizewinning essays and more will be printed in the next issue of Edit. I look forward to it with interest.