I keep starting this piece and then deleting it again. Because it's blindingly obvious, but I'm going to say it anyway. It follows on from the beginning of the last post. And the German article that refers to is now online here.
We don't want writers to be bland people. We want Bukowski and Kerouac, we want addicts and victims of tragic deaths and people who claw their way up from the gutter. We want JK Rowling writing in cafés while her kids are at school. We want rock stars like Patti Smith and spies like John Le Carré. We want Annemarie Schwarzenbach with her permissive aristocratic background and her opium habit, we want Kafka with all his failed engagements and his consumption, we want Hilbig drinking himself to death, we want Walser with that last insane walk in the snow, we want Irmgard Keun going off with that crazy drunk Joseph Roth and then forgotten for years, we want Fallada drinking himself to death, we even still want Grass with his self-denial and his eight kids with four different mothers. We want a narrative of desperation, we want to kid ourselves that writers lead more exciting lives than we do so that not only their books but also the imaginary backdrop to them are part of a cathartic experience for us. Suffer, will you, so I don't have to.
And then they go and get a degree in creative writing and they come from stable family backgrounds because who else would study something as unpromising and whimsical as that. And they do, they really do lead perfectly normal, conventional lives, and the men get married to younger women they met at university and wait a sensible period before having children and buy homes in up-and-coming areas and they probably even have cleaning ladies for all I know. It's a terrible disappointment, I know, and I wish they wouldn't do it. I'm not even being sarcastic. It makes my life look so messy in comparison, even though on a scale from one to Irmgard Keun, my life is at the tidy end.
But they do it, and that means all the writers who don't fit into that dull mould get the more interesting details of their lives splashing over into reviews – exile, prison, exotic past jobs (for exotic read: jobs that journalists would never consider doing). I'm hoping, however, that even the sons and daughters of doctors and teachers will become more interesting as they get older; maybe get divorced from the younger women with the stable jobs, maybe pick up an addiction to gambling or ritalin, maybe start painting or playing music on the side or go in for polygamy or some of those other mid-life distractions. And perhaps, just perhaps, some of them are already doing some of these things, only very discreetly, and it has no influence whatsoever on whether their writing is good or not.
Showing posts with label young writers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label young writers. Show all posts
Wednesday, 22 January 2014
Sunday, 9 December 2012
Categories and Generations
I was talking to someone about whether we can put writers working in German into categories and generations. We didn't get down to the nitty-gritty of definitions, but I rejected the idea of putting writers - rather than writing - into categories. My example was that there are various fairly young women originally from the former Soviet bloc and Yugoslavia now writing in German - Olga Grjasnowa, Nino Haratischwili, Marjana Gaponenko, Marianna Salzmann, Alina Bronsky, Julya Rabinowich, Lena Gorelik, and several more whose names refuse to occur to me right now. Yet despite all they have in common on a biographical level, their common gender, age group and similar childhood experiences, their writing is very different. And yes, I know I'm simplifying the matter by lumping Yugoslavia in with the Soviet bloc. But still, I don't think biographical categories make a great deal of sense when we look at what people are actually writing.
Generations, however, are a concept I can work with. What we talked about - for a Norwegian radio feature, of all things - was that there's a very dominant generation of German writers in the outside perception of the literature. Those canonised Group 47-era old or dead white men (mostly), who everybody interested in international writing has read: Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, maybe Martin Walser, Siegfried Lenz. The postwar generation who defined themselves in opposition to what came before them, broadly speaking, and whose books we all had to read at university. And I said I think there are two other generations who suffer from that dominance. Those who followed on from them and those who are coming up now. And it's that squeezed middle generation that has it the hardest, I think.
Because the youngest and the young generation, the kids coming out of the creative writing schools and graduating and getting their debut novels signed up and the thirty-and-forty-somethings doing exciting but not exaggeratedly exciting things - I think they don't give a shit about Günter Grass. I think he's a figure of fun for them; they might have read him but they don't feel the need to react to his work in any way other than the odd snarky Facebook comment. Their influences are far wider and more international; if they feel the need to position themselves on Germany's past it might be in a less self-accusatory way like in the work of Kevin Vennemann or Tanja Dückers or even, less to my taste, Christian Kracht. And they have youth on their side; they get their column inches boosted by big colour photos and they get fawned over and projected onto by the older critics.
But the poor fifty-and-sixty-somethings - oh boy! They're always going to be in old Günter's shade. There was an article in yesterday's Die Welt criticising just that demographic. And aside from berating the men on the brink of retirement age, Tilman Krause actually compares them unfavourably - no, not to the Group 47 actually, but to Thomas Mann. As if Thomas Mann were the only valid benchmark. What Krause says, however, is interesting. He picks out three writers and puts them in the pillory for writing unadventurous, uninteresting, commercially successful schlock: Ralf Rothmann (I don't agree), Georg Klein and Alain Claude Sulzer. Perhaps, and this is only my theory, once you're facing your sixtieth, you might feel too old to change jobs and you might be stuck having to write and you might not be churning out your most innovative stuff.
The proof of the pudding is of course in the exception. Is that what we say? Never mind. There are plenty of exceptions, two of which Krause hands us on a plate: Sibylle Lewitscharoff and Rainald Goetz. But cf. also: Thomas Lehr, Peter Wawerzinek, Reinhard Jirgl, Ingo Schulze, perhaps Uwe Timm, perhaps Monika Maron. I feel I'm skating on thin ice here in a way, hence all the qualifications. Because yes, I do think the idea of writerly generations is a useful one, in that people writing in one time and place do have something in common but the concept doesn't presume that they're all doing the same thing. At the same time, I notice I'm hesitating over who to put into which generation. Maybe I just don't want to be rude.
Generations, however, are a concept I can work with. What we talked about - for a Norwegian radio feature, of all things - was that there's a very dominant generation of German writers in the outside perception of the literature. Those canonised Group 47-era old or dead white men (mostly), who everybody interested in international writing has read: Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, maybe Martin Walser, Siegfried Lenz. The postwar generation who defined themselves in opposition to what came before them, broadly speaking, and whose books we all had to read at university. And I said I think there are two other generations who suffer from that dominance. Those who followed on from them and those who are coming up now. And it's that squeezed middle generation that has it the hardest, I think.
Because the youngest and the young generation, the kids coming out of the creative writing schools and graduating and getting their debut novels signed up and the thirty-and-forty-somethings doing exciting but not exaggeratedly exciting things - I think they don't give a shit about Günter Grass. I think he's a figure of fun for them; they might have read him but they don't feel the need to react to his work in any way other than the odd snarky Facebook comment. Their influences are far wider and more international; if they feel the need to position themselves on Germany's past it might be in a less self-accusatory way like in the work of Kevin Vennemann or Tanja Dückers or even, less to my taste, Christian Kracht. And they have youth on their side; they get their column inches boosted by big colour photos and they get fawned over and projected onto by the older critics.
But the poor fifty-and-sixty-somethings - oh boy! They're always going to be in old Günter's shade. There was an article in yesterday's Die Welt criticising just that demographic. And aside from berating the men on the brink of retirement age, Tilman Krause actually compares them unfavourably - no, not to the Group 47 actually, but to Thomas Mann. As if Thomas Mann were the only valid benchmark. What Krause says, however, is interesting. He picks out three writers and puts them in the pillory for writing unadventurous, uninteresting, commercially successful schlock: Ralf Rothmann (I don't agree), Georg Klein and Alain Claude Sulzer. Perhaps, and this is only my theory, once you're facing your sixtieth, you might feel too old to change jobs and you might be stuck having to write and you might not be churning out your most innovative stuff.
The proof of the pudding is of course in the exception. Is that what we say? Never mind. There are plenty of exceptions, two of which Krause hands us on a plate: Sibylle Lewitscharoff and Rainald Goetz. But cf. also: Thomas Lehr, Peter Wawerzinek, Reinhard Jirgl, Ingo Schulze, perhaps Uwe Timm, perhaps Monika Maron. I feel I'm skating on thin ice here in a way, hence all the qualifications. Because yes, I do think the idea of writerly generations is a useful one, in that people writing in one time and place do have something in common but the concept doesn't presume that they're all doing the same thing. At the same time, I notice I'm hesitating over who to put into which generation. Maybe I just don't want to be rude.
Sunday, 7 October 2012
Youth Springs Eternal
How wonderful that these young whippersnappers keep on popping up and writing books, eh? I'm turning forty next year and am preparing myself mentally by pretending I'm already forty. It's fine, I'm totally relaxed about it.
Only they will keep putting large-format pictures of young people in the newspaper book sections. Smooth-skinned, wide-eyed, already achieved so much with their youthful, fast-flowing imaginations. Die Zeit has a cover shot of eight German-language writers around thirty in a hothouse. Because they're still growing, geddit? These ones are mainly photogenic young women - all talented, too, I'm sure: Stephanie Gleißner, Nora Bossong (see below), Marjana Gaponenko, Sabrina Janesch, Vea Kaiser, Kevin Kuhn (see below), Rebecca Martin, Teresa Präauer, Marie Pohl and Andreas Stichmann (see below). That's ten, so presumably some were too embarrassed to take part in the photo shoot. I'm in two minds - I'm glad to see young writers getting attention, but of the six pages they share, at least half the space is taken up by photos, while the rest of the literary supplement is devoted to old(er) people.
More excitement over at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, where they have Zwanzig unter vierzig on the literature special title page. Unapologetically lifted from the New Yorker, which they acknowledge with a huge double proofreading error as "Fourty under twenty". Actually, that's the main reason why I had to blog about this, because it made me spit out my false teeth. Much upset discussion on Facebook today, as more mature writers get upset about being ruled out and under-forties get upset about being left out. They do actually write, "These are the best young German-language writers of today. The contemporary canon". But critics do like to think of themselves as canon-builders, don't they?
So, whether ridiculous or not, what's interesting is that eight of the FAS's twenty are or will soon be available in English: Daniel Kehlmann, Alina Bronsky, Helene Hegemann, Thomas Pletzinger, Thomas Glavinic, Uljana Wolf, Judith Schalansky and Clemens Meyer. Two of them in, ahem, my translation. The others are: Antje Wagner, Clemens J. Setz (and it's only a matter of time before he ends up in English, what with translator Ross Benjamin gunning for him), Benjamin Maack, Lisa-Marie Dickreiter, Andreas Stichmann, Nora Bossong (who's having a good week!), Thomas Melle, Annika Scheffel (my best-dressed lady writer of 2011), Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre (who I was surprised isn't much, much older than me), Reinhard Kaiser-Mühlecker (best hair), Maxim Drüner (who's actually a rapper but once told Antonia Baum at a party that he writes stories, another great source of LOLz) and Kevin Kuhn. Note that seven out of these links are to New Books in German or Litrix, in case you happen to be a publishing person trawling the net in search of the next hot German star under forty.
Do I have to say it? It's silly, isn't it? Next issue they should portray twenty writers born under Sagittarius. Actually I'm a teeny bit upset myself, because the Open Mike competition is recruiting bloggers for its blog. And they have to be under thirty-five. I shall get my revenge by one day - one day! - putting together an anthology of my own, of seventeen German-language writers I like, regardless of any other factors whatsoever. There will be no photos. It will be called Love German Books - The Anthology. Publishers - you have my address.
Only they will keep putting large-format pictures of young people in the newspaper book sections. Smooth-skinned, wide-eyed, already achieved so much with their youthful, fast-flowing imaginations. Die Zeit has a cover shot of eight German-language writers around thirty in a hothouse. Because they're still growing, geddit? These ones are mainly photogenic young women - all talented, too, I'm sure: Stephanie Gleißner, Nora Bossong (see below), Marjana Gaponenko, Sabrina Janesch, Vea Kaiser, Kevin Kuhn (see below), Rebecca Martin, Teresa Präauer, Marie Pohl and Andreas Stichmann (see below). That's ten, so presumably some were too embarrassed to take part in the photo shoot. I'm in two minds - I'm glad to see young writers getting attention, but of the six pages they share, at least half the space is taken up by photos, while the rest of the literary supplement is devoted to old(er) people.
More excitement over at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, where they have Zwanzig unter vierzig on the literature special title page. Unapologetically lifted from the New Yorker, which they acknowledge with a huge double proofreading error as "Fourty under twenty". Actually, that's the main reason why I had to blog about this, because it made me spit out my false teeth. Much upset discussion on Facebook today, as more mature writers get upset about being ruled out and under-forties get upset about being left out. They do actually write, "These are the best young German-language writers of today. The contemporary canon". But critics do like to think of themselves as canon-builders, don't they?
So, whether ridiculous or not, what's interesting is that eight of the FAS's twenty are or will soon be available in English: Daniel Kehlmann, Alina Bronsky, Helene Hegemann, Thomas Pletzinger, Thomas Glavinic, Uljana Wolf, Judith Schalansky and Clemens Meyer. Two of them in, ahem, my translation. The others are: Antje Wagner, Clemens J. Setz (and it's only a matter of time before he ends up in English, what with translator Ross Benjamin gunning for him), Benjamin Maack, Lisa-Marie Dickreiter, Andreas Stichmann, Nora Bossong (who's having a good week!), Thomas Melle, Annika Scheffel (my best-dressed lady writer of 2011), Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre (who I was surprised isn't much, much older than me), Reinhard Kaiser-Mühlecker (best hair), Maxim Drüner (who's actually a rapper but once told Antonia Baum at a party that he writes stories, another great source of LOLz) and Kevin Kuhn. Note that seven out of these links are to New Books in German or Litrix, in case you happen to be a publishing person trawling the net in search of the next hot German star under forty.
Do I have to say it? It's silly, isn't it? Next issue they should portray twenty writers born under Sagittarius. Actually I'm a teeny bit upset myself, because the Open Mike competition is recruiting bloggers for its blog. And they have to be under thirty-five. I shall get my revenge by one day - one day! - putting together an anthology of my own, of seventeen German-language writers I like, regardless of any other factors whatsoever. There will be no photos. It will be called Love German Books - The Anthology. Publishers - you have my address.
Sunday, 15 November 2009
17th Open Mike
Last weekend I looked at state funding for more established writers. This weekend was Open Mike weekend, in which unpublished authors up to the age of 35 get a shot at stardom and cash. In Germany, 35 is a magical cut-off date after which you are old. Practically overnight, you're no longer entitled to enter young people's literary competitions and in return, you can get a free check-up from your doctor. But I digress.
Open Mike is a literary institution run by the Literaturwerkstatt Berlin, propelling talented writers to genuine fame for the past 17 years. The list of previous winners includes Julia Franck, Karen Duve, Jochen Schmidt, Tim Krohn, Terézia Mora, Tilman Rammstedt, Zsuzsa Bánk... plenty of big names in what they call "young German literature". Now, the finalists don't just read their texts before a rather large and no doubt rather intimidating audience. They're also treated to a colloquium beforehand (on "what is contemporary about contemporary literature?" - I couldn't get a straight answer when I asked what the outcome was). Plus they meet previous winners, and afterwards they get to work on their texts with experienced editors, whether they win or not. The three winners get a fairly modest sum of money and an indecent amount of attention from publishers.
The finalists are chosen by a team of six editors, each of whom gets their own personal slush-pile of around 120 submissions. The idea is to simulate the actual publishing world, apparently - and the editors did a pretty good job of simulating all that familiar moaning and groaning about the quality of unsolicited manuscripts. But in the end, 20 finalists were selected, six poets and the rest prose writers.
And then the whole world gathers together in my least favourite Berlin venue, the Wabe, for two days. I went along on Saturday and then cheated by just turning up for the announcement ceremony on the second day. Because I felt I ought to spend some time with my family over the weekend – and because it was frankly exhausting. The audience seemed to be made up entirely out of editors, agents, journalists, people who had applied but weren't taken, and the contestants' friends - which meant there was a huge amount of bitching going on.
I'm not going to list who read what. If you're interested, see goldblog for an entertaining blow-by-blow description, or buy the book. One enduring impression though is that almost all young German-language writers feel compelled to include at least one poorly pronounced English phrase in their texts, mainly for no discernible reason. Another is that the young generation is not much better than their elders when it comes to ignoring anyone who isn't white*, beyond certain clichés (domestic staff, sexually available, criminal). And of course there were a hell of a lot of first-person narrators, who were often difficult to distinguish from the writers. The texts that stood out, for me, were those that ventured further afield - Jan Sprenger to China, Lutz Woellert to Ellis Island, Ondrej Cikán to a fantasy cowboy-inhabited New Mexico, to name a few.
The winners?
Matthias Senkel for a dizzying, funny piece about a family history that I too rather admired, Inger-Maria Mahlke for a confusing and well-written fragment culminating in an old man touching an unexpected pair of breasts, and Konstantin Ames for acrobatic poetry. As it turns out, all three of them have some connection to the DLL creative writing school in Leipzig...
It's probably safe to say you may well hear these names again in future. Matthias Senkel also won the audience prize, voted on by a handful of mere mortals rather than the three judges (Kathrin Röggla, Ursula Krechel, Jens Sparschuh). I'll post a link to his text when it appears in the taz as a result.
*By "white" I actually mean German or Western European or American. There are plenty of clichéd Eastern Europeans out there - research has shown that Germans have always loved people from countries to their west and hated everyone from eastwards. To put it rather simply.
Open Mike is a literary institution run by the Literaturwerkstatt Berlin, propelling talented writers to genuine fame for the past 17 years. The list of previous winners includes Julia Franck, Karen Duve, Jochen Schmidt, Tim Krohn, Terézia Mora, Tilman Rammstedt, Zsuzsa Bánk... plenty of big names in what they call "young German literature". Now, the finalists don't just read their texts before a rather large and no doubt rather intimidating audience. They're also treated to a colloquium beforehand (on "what is contemporary about contemporary literature?" - I couldn't get a straight answer when I asked what the outcome was). Plus they meet previous winners, and afterwards they get to work on their texts with experienced editors, whether they win or not. The three winners get a fairly modest sum of money and an indecent amount of attention from publishers.
The finalists are chosen by a team of six editors, each of whom gets their own personal slush-pile of around 120 submissions. The idea is to simulate the actual publishing world, apparently - and the editors did a pretty good job of simulating all that familiar moaning and groaning about the quality of unsolicited manuscripts. But in the end, 20 finalists were selected, six poets and the rest prose writers.
And then the whole world gathers together in my least favourite Berlin venue, the Wabe, for two days. I went along on Saturday and then cheated by just turning up for the announcement ceremony on the second day. Because I felt I ought to spend some time with my family over the weekend – and because it was frankly exhausting. The audience seemed to be made up entirely out of editors, agents, journalists, people who had applied but weren't taken, and the contestants' friends - which meant there was a huge amount of bitching going on.
I'm not going to list who read what. If you're interested, see goldblog for an entertaining blow-by-blow description, or buy the book. One enduring impression though is that almost all young German-language writers feel compelled to include at least one poorly pronounced English phrase in their texts, mainly for no discernible reason. Another is that the young generation is not much better than their elders when it comes to ignoring anyone who isn't white*, beyond certain clichés (domestic staff, sexually available, criminal). And of course there were a hell of a lot of first-person narrators, who were often difficult to distinguish from the writers. The texts that stood out, for me, were those that ventured further afield - Jan Sprenger to China, Lutz Woellert to Ellis Island, Ondrej Cikán to a fantasy cowboy-inhabited New Mexico, to name a few.
The winners?
Matthias Senkel for a dizzying, funny piece about a family history that I too rather admired, Inger-Maria Mahlke for a confusing and well-written fragment culminating in an old man touching an unexpected pair of breasts, and Konstantin Ames for acrobatic poetry. As it turns out, all three of them have some connection to the DLL creative writing school in Leipzig...
It's probably safe to say you may well hear these names again in future. Matthias Senkel also won the audience prize, voted on by a handful of mere mortals rather than the three judges (Kathrin Röggla, Ursula Krechel, Jens Sparschuh). I'll post a link to his text when it appears in the taz as a result.
*By "white" I actually mean German or Western European or American. There are plenty of clichéd Eastern Europeans out there - research has shown that Germans have always loved people from countries to their west and hated everyone from eastwards. To put it rather simply.
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