Emerging German Writers at Words without Borders

They asked me to guest-edit an issue of Words without Borders showcasing emerging German writers. I nearly burst, I was so proud and excited. For years I'd been fantasizing about putting together an equivalent to Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, only with Germans. The power! The influence! The delights of including certain favourites and excluding writers who've blanked me at parties!

And then: Jesus, it was hard. Try choosing only ten writers, of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. As in, only ten writers you want the whole world to read. Also, try choosing ten pieces of writing that are varied and reflect different aspects of a "national literature" (let's not go there) and are also serious and fun to read and outstandingly good and grab you by the throat and shake you and work on their own and in combination. Thankfully, they let me choose only German writing rather than German-language writing from Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Luxemburg, and wherever. So only about half the total volume to sieve through.

I define the nebulous "emerging" as not yet world famous and with a maximum of two book-length publications. Some of the writers haven't put any books out yet. For poets I was looking for people who haven't yet been translated. I define "German writers" as people who write in German in Germany, possibly coming from elsewhere, or come from Germany and write in German elsewhere. There's a fair amount of moving around the world among the authors in the issue – I didn't check anyone's passports.

One thing very quickly went out the window: an age limit. Because an age limit is a ridiculous restriction that punishes writers who've been doing other things with their lives before getting published and rewards writers who take the straight path. Another thing was that I sought help and advice on poetry, because I know very little indeed about poetry.

Anyway, look upon their works ye mighty, and despair. Maybe no one will remember them in ten years' time or maybe they'll be famous the world over. These are my emerging German writers:

Finn-Ole Heinrich
Olga Grjasnowa
Stephanie Bart
Marianna Salzmann
Bettina Suleiman
Simone Kornappel
Isabelle Lehn
Francis Nenik
Noemi Schneider
Deniz Utlu

Thanks to my fellow translators Amanda DeMarco, Jake Schneider and Julie Winter, and to the lovely editors at Words without Borders. The issue also features a special on writers from Burundi, which you should also read. Also I wrote an introduction. Enjoy. I am available for interviews.

Stephanie Bart: Deutscher Meister

I first came across Johann Rukelie Trollmann when translating the new exhibition at the German Resistance Memorial Center. He's a fascinating historical figure who stood up to the Nazis in his own way. Stephanie Bart's novel Deutscher Meister (her first with a major publisher) tells part of his story, wisely restricted to the time between March and July of 1933. 

The Nazis have come to power and are also asserting their presence in the sporting world, with boxing being made compulsory in schools. The story begins with the expulsion of all Jewish boxers, functionaries and managers from the boxing association, but Trollmann’s case is less clear-cut. Labelled “Gipsy” by the press, he comes from a Sinto family and has suffered discrimination in his career for years. At this point, however, Nazi ideologists have not yet decided whether to classify the Sinti as “Aryan” or not, and so Trollmann is reluctantly allowed to continue fighting. 

Using real-life characters in fiction is tricky – it can feel disrespectful when a writer assumes too much about what's going on inside their heads. Instead of focusing entirely on Trollmann, Bart also shows us a host of different characters around him, which I think dodges this dilemma rather cleverly. So as well as the individual story of how Trollmann was cheated out of the German Champion title in the light-heavyweight category and deliberately lost his last fight, we get a broader picture of Berlin in the summer after Hitler came to power. 

These characters are one of the novel's key strengths, for me. They come from all corners of society - boxing functionaries, SA brawlers, bakery sales girls, society gentlemen, workers and schoolgirls. And we see them either settling into life under the Nazis or beginning to suffer. We watch Berlin turning from an open, bohemian city to a place of danger for anyone who doesn't fit into the Nazis' bizarre understanding of how Germans ought to be. There's a lot of dialogue, making the most of the Berliners' sharp tongues but not using too much dialect – another thing that often backfires. And there's humour, which took me a while to pick up on but once it hit home I was chortling my way through until the laughter stuck in my throat, especially at the descriptions of historical events like the book-burning and the mass murders of Nazi opponents in Köpenick.

  

The other stand-out strength is the physical descriptions. It’s not easy to write about boxing without slowing the pace, but Bart uses all sorts of tricks to get around that problem. She varies sentence length, makes subtle use of metaphor (one round of boxing is compared to Trollmann playing a drum kit, for instance), sometimes dispenses with verbs to add speed, and generally shows a great deal of skill. So much so that I read the 100 pages devoted to the main fight in a single, breath-taking sitting. 

Although it may not be breaking any literary moulds, Deutscher Meister is an ambitious novel, and while I found I had to overcome a slow start I got hooked pretty quickly. I hope a British publisher will pick it up – New Books in German recommends! That would even reconcile me momentarily to the British obsession with the Nazis, because the book is less about Nazis as such and more about those whose lives they harmed, those who stood up to them in small ways. You can read a sample translation by Imogen Taylor at the NBG link just above here. I think you should.