Page-Turners & Anti-Politics

PLAN D

by Simon Urban

Random House, 551 pp., €11.99 (German Price), March 2013, 978 3 442 74442 8

Much has happened in the three months it's taken me to get sucked in & through Simon Urban's breakthrough novel. Katy Derbyshire's English translation of the book was published last month by Harvill Secker, priced £15. Around the same time, over the first weekend in June, Hessen's police force, working under orders from Hessen's CDU Minister of the Interior, brushed off a well-organised, 10,000 strong Blockupy demo in Frankfurt, against the European Central Bank. The kettling tactics used to crush a protest overwhelmingly non-violent in its motivation were upsettingly similar to tactics used by the Metropolitan Police to suppress student and anti-cuts demos in London over the last two years. The Frankfurt law-enforcement officers didn't even have to use their water cannons. Managed-democracy's most expensive hardware has its greatest effect simply by standing there, martially: its bad PR for a state to allow sufficient uncontrolled dissent to get itself into a position where it actually has to make use of it. Two weeks after no one outside of the left was saying anything about violations in Frankfurt – where does the democratic masses' disinterest in freedom of assembly & of collective action spring from? – the German government's Human Rights Spokesman, the Free Democrat's Markus Löning started feigning panic about Turkey:

“It makes me really worried when I see the water-cannons and other big machinery being deployed.” ⁱ

Why Gysi didn’t sue Simon Urban

Back in August 2011, the Hamburg based Simon Urban released Plan D, his first novel. The reaction of the German Feuilleton – something like a Grand Central Committee of Literary Taste, housing inside the press – was so unanimously, screamingly positive, that you might suspect its unanimity had been argued through in advance; that tactics were at play. The novel is itself set in 2011, in an East Germany to which reunification has never happened. In Urban’s alternative future the collapse of the iron curtain was followed, in 1992 already, by Die Wiederbelebung – The Resucitation – of the old East Germany, which has slugged on, stubbornly & monotonously socialist, with as much restriction on emigration – i.e. almost total – as there was in the GDR up til 1989. This author combines this gimmick with a whodunnit, airport thriller genre – the victim found hanging right at the start; both shoes tied together being the boasty stamp of a Stasi ritual revenge murder – to milk every West German sterotype about the old East for all it is worth. And these stereotype’s are worth more than a bit. Hard on the heels of the Holocaust industry, an ‘Ost’-algia industry – complete with torchlit tours through the old Stasi interrogation cells – has followed. I had to wait til February of this year for the paperback to gorge myself on those sterotypes; and now I’m glad I waited. 

Picking bones or grinding them? - Lewitscharoff vs. Jelinek

         The non-English literary novel continues to be a globalisation resistant artefact, in an age where it’s the quality of a product and not where it’s made which normally determines whether we’ll buy it or not. Figures like Gabriel García Márquez remain exceptions: just try playing "name three contemporary German novelists we all really enjoy" at the end of your next dinner party if you need further proof of this fact. So why should we bother our heads about a recently famous and deservedly so, German literary great? – Sibylle Lewitscharoff, whose 2009 novel Apostoloff is due out in Katy Derbyshire’s English translation on Seagull Book's German List  in December of this year.
                Because Lewitscharoff's newest creation, her speech on accepting the Austrian Arts Award prize this January, can be read as a compelling manifesto for the future of literature, equally applicable to novels or plays originally written in Persian, English or German: a plea for less realism, and more idealism. In doing so she appears herself to consciously write in the tradition of German idealism; she also writes for the German Schiller Society. Lastly, Lewitscharoff uses the speech to demonstrate her likeable, Alan Bennett-esque “I’m not standing for any old nonsense” quality, in her thinly-veiled attack on Austria’s 2004 Nobel Prize for Literature winner, Elfriede Jelinek. Nicholas Spice wrote about Jelinek in the London Review of Books in 2008 (here), praising the work but damning the specific English translation under review – the novel Greed translated by Martin Chalmers (Serpent’s Tail, 2008). Spice: “It’s hard to imagine that Jelinek’s reputation in the English-speaking world will ever recover.” In her speech, Lewitscharoff principally attacks her plays, which stands to reason, as Jelinek’s had premieres of five new works in German and Austrian theatres since 2009, while her last published novel came out in 2008. What Lewitscharoff calls “atrocity theatre” - a Jelinek play - looks like this on the stage. Hamburg’s Thalia Theatre’s production of The Merchant’s Contract which premiered 2009 was performed for the last time in Hamburg on 8th June 2012.
             This is what Lewitscharoff thinks of theatre like that – and what she proposes as a more deserving alternative for our attention:
       “With regards to atrocity theatre, which is – let’s please be clear about this – mostly of aseptic dreariness: this kitsch stopped being sweet long ago and is now gone sour. The chirpy sparrows, so loved by Peter Handke, have blasted it clean from the roof-tops with the strength of their song. People trying to impress us with their atrocity-wallowing who in their childhoods never got so much as a slap around the ear. Who brag about having looked into the heart of darkness, when they’ve never known anything other than rather drab, regular doses of life, provided for in every way. And who then go and put on the war paint for a big night out. 
        I don’t want to name any names in connection with this matter in this speech; it’s not for me to attack some Austrians who’ve made a comfy home for themselves amid the pornographic, while skinning bodies, in grinding bones, in hate-sex, in a deeply ridiculous play-feminism and in the unceasing activity of Austria bashing.
        The annoying thing about literature monsters like this is that they always march waving the flag of the Enlightenment before them. They’re telling it like it really is, or so they claim, about the Darkness of Mankind or of Austrians respectively. Poppycock I say, a dirty lie. In order to progress towards the heart of darkness, you’ve also got to be able to describe the wayward goodness of humans. People are complex, that’s what’s so devilish about them: the sublime and the loathsome, the generous, the cruel and the beautiful, all living side by side in different chambers of the heart. Only those who are capable of capturing at least a part of that complexity deserve our attention and our affections.
        Because – hand on heart – what’s the good of literature, if it doesn’t conceive the abyss of human turpitude as being anything other than a transgression, in the constantly new task of establishing integrity in humans. Treachery against a process of civilisation, which may only be achieved through perseverance, and to which all the arts should submit themselves. In a huge and unforeseeable variety of forms, naturally.”
(Translated from Lewitscharoff speech as printed in the 1/2012 of Volltext, a bi-monthly, print edition Austrian literary newspaper.)
        Would David Foster Wallace have disagreed with Lewitscharoff? I don’t think so. Hard to imagine Franzen disagreeing either. There may be many good reasons, however, for British novelists being disinclined to take up the mantle of idealism.