Bland New Global

No more than a few years ago, world literature theorists, such as David Damrosch, assumed that there was a drawn out process whereby an author would slowly move from a reading public in their native language into the larger global markets outside their own country. There would be stages whereby an author became a member of world literature; this movement unfolded slowly, maybe not with a Hegelian sense of historical time, but definitely not right away, and certainly not so that authors would start writing their fiction with an eye toward the “world literary market,” rather than their own native readers.

Turns out this process can be sped up, so that novels, poems, plays are now written for the world English reader, rather than for just the few million people who speak whatever language other than English is your native tongue. Makes sense, of course. Why pretend that world literature is a pantheon for the famous dead? You don’t have to be the aged Goethe in order to see yourself among that crowd.

Tim Parks complains that this automatic “worldization” produces inauthentic literature written for the general reader:

http://blogs.nybooks.com/post/379987448/the-dull-new-global-novel

Sounds like a problem but it surely is not the first time that authors are writing for a market outside their own vernacular? How stable is the category of the vernacular to begin with? Aren’t the same forces that produce global English, also transforming the other languages?

That the bland novel may now exist on a global scale is surely not surprising. Just start reading the experimental, hard-to-translate worldly literature. Global literary markets may produce a new kind of dullness, a new sort of meaninglessness, but it just as readily presents opportunities for new experimentation and disruption of these emerging stereotypes.

After the Crash

Nothing like having your computer crash on you. Ten years of ruminations, diaries, emails, photos of your children, itunes, notebooks filled with half baked ideas vanish. They are consumed by a two week process of hoping for the best and realizing that it will be worse. "It might just be the motherboard, just an electrical problem" --they mean well when they say that, but somehow you know they are going to amputate.

Makes you reassess your relationship to technology. Of course the manuscripts were tucked away safely in back up disks. What you loose in a catastrophic crash is not the book project, it is all the light-weight, playful musings. We know well enough to back-up the career making files, but the pleasures of writing vanish quickly. The long string of playful emails to your sweetheart, the video of your four-year old daughter twirling a hulla-hoop, the tapeworm file on Adalbert Stifter’s novellas, the MLA papers waiting to become articles and all the other gems that you won’t remember until eight months from now when you suddenly realize that you no longer have them. Your laptop has betrayed you as thoroughly as any person ever did.

And with all such disasters, the only thing is to start writing again. Reconstruct the house that was flattened. Rebuild the collection of Meissen and Rosenthal. Of course you will never get the same faded patterns as from before, but you will feel much better holding a cup that reminds you of the one you lost.

And this time, I will back up everything, not just the chapters on Kant and Goethe.

New Debts, Old Stereotypes

As the news of a possible German-French response to the Greek debt crisis unfolds, you know that Greek politicians are going to blame "the Germans" for the inevitable budget cuts, diminished services and contract renegotiations that any bail-out will require, and that Germans will knowlingly nod to each other that Mediterranean countries try to swindle their way past honest bookkeeping. Thus the ancient North-South divide will reinscribe itself yet again. German tourists will examine their restaurant bills even more closely, waiters will mutter a little more loudly about cheap tips.

Angela Merkel's strategy of not saying anything may be taking such recriminations into account, but then again silence can and is being interpreted all sorts of different ways. Is she forcing the Greeks to restructure their public sector economy? Is she avoiding panic on the markets? Is she herself panicked or clueless? In an era with constant news, refusing to speak to the press does not always have to be a disaster? As long as the tide does not turn against you, silence can suggest careful deliberation. Only later once the disappointment sets in, does everyone bemoan you lack of forthrightness. At least for the moment, the stereotypical gestures are in abeyance.

Here's an earnest analysis from the front page of the FAZ:

http://www.faz.net/s/Rub09A305833E12405A808EF01024D15375/Doc~EF53179FF5D244D65A338644C212FC0BE~ATpl~Ecommon~Sspezial.html

How to talk about the unspeakable

The question remains, how do you talk so as to not sound like a Nazi when the presumption is that you have something to hide? The surest and simplest way is to speak knowingly and sensitively about the Holocaust. You can be "a good German" who instantly displays his thorough knowledge of and engagement with the Holocaust. This maneuver requires you to always be ready to make a transition from summer vacation to Auschwitz. Perhaps your summer vacation was spent visiting Auschwitz, taking in the museum.

The tiresome part is having to be so thoroughly virtuous in everything you say. For years I was the straight man in any conversation about the Holocaust. My friends cracked the jokes, and I made earnest replies. This seriousness was eventually unbearable, and so a new sort of irony set in. With a couple of my oldest friends, it is really just a matter of time before the word "Auschwitz" is uttered. This has the strange effect that we can talk anywhere and at anytime about the Holocaust, in a serious knowing but light-hearted way. Still, the roles are assigned, who gets to crack the joke, who plays the straight man. Germans make excellent straight men, but then again I was grateful to be included, happy to play in a role in a game that offered redemption from the permanent ostracism of my childhood.

No matter what diner we're in, what street we are walking down, eventually there is a transition from trivia to genocide, from baseball to Auschwitz. The two have nothing to do with each other, but at some point the connection has to be made. "Jeter isn't as bulky as A-Rod, he probably doesn't work out as much. Well, but he's still pretty fit. I mean the guy can run, he's not like he's skinny, it's not like he just got liberated from a camp." There we have it, 14 seconds, a new record.

After years of watching this pattern, I finally mentioned it, assuming that everyone else knew it, too. That's when an awkward silence finally kicked in, for the first time in decades. "I am not the one who brought up Auschwitz. It was Ari." "No way. You started talking about train schedules when we got out of the subway." Another two years passed before we were rid of our new middle aged, meta-self-consciousness. For months thereafter we all stopped and counted out how long it took one of us to mention the Holocaust. Eventually, one of us would make the move, just to relieve the tension. In time we fell back into our old habit of sneaking in Auschwitz when you least suspected it.

This style of conversation freaks people out if they haven't heard it before, especially other good Germans who don't understand how anyone can switch in one breath from reminiscing about a high school girlfriend's breasts to the freight station in Paris where Jews were herded into cattle cars. No doubt both topics are with us forever. The jokes mark a collective remembering, a group activity that does not force me stand as the perpetrator, but allows me to mourn, even while dancing away from the misery of having just the one horrible truth define my entire life.

But now in a new medium, a new question arises, how long did it take this blog to land on this topic, --a year, pretty slow, but then again how do you blog about genocide without becoming grim. And after all, this blog is still just an academic monologue full of earnest phrases, it lacks the banter of high school friends.

No, actually, I am not a Nazi

When you are a German-speaking kid growing up in New York, innocent you never get to be. The moment you say your mother is German, or that you were born there, or went there last summer or that you speak the language, you get treated as a Nazi. It's an automatic formula, an instant reaction in the eyes of whom ever is listening.

So you beat around the bush, you learn to not mention having anything German until further into the conversation, after you have convinced the other person that you are a reasonable person. Then, maybe after they have told you something personal, you gently let slip a reference to your family. Most everyone has a family.

Of course, these rules of caution you learn slowly and painfully. Only after years of having people freak out on you, sometimes screaming, "You’re a Nazi?" Later it comes in the form of polite sophisticated Jewish ladies who move away from you at a party, once they hear exactly what you are a professor of. For them it is acceptable to have an unchecked loathing for all things German, and you get to feel it in the turn of their shoulder, the swift conclusion of what seemed like a fruitful conversation.

So after a time, you learn to joke, to spin, to not mention anything personal, to simply become charming and evasive. If you did not care too much about intellectual topics, you could just carry on that way, but alas the weight pulls at you, makes you want to earnestly ponder the question of guilt, responsibility, history, makes you want to explain that you are not a Nazi. There is no finer way to end a conversation than through a sincere attempt to convince the other person that you are not a Nazi.

Herta Müller on the Nobel Peace Prize

We know that the Nobel Prize as an institution, supports a cosmopolitan idea of Weltliteratur. Occasionally, it also takes on a republican character, in the form of previous winners advocating for future ones.

As always, translating authors into languages known to the committee is an essential step. Which leads one to speculate whether the lack of translation accounts for why Liu Xiaobo is mentioned as a potential Peace Prize winner, rather than in the category of Literature.

Herta Müller has joined Vaclav Havel in asking the Nobel Committee to award the 2010 Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, human rights activist and President of China's P.E.N. Last year he was sentenced to eleven years for his activities. You can read a copy of the letter at http://www.perlentaucher.de/artikel/5995.html

The Nobel Foundation


Marcus Storch
P.O. Box 5232


10245 Stockholm

Berlin,

3. Februar 2010




Lieber Herr Storch,



es sollen schon zwei Monate seit der Nobelwoche im Dezember verstrichen sein? trotzdem wünsche ich Ihnen noch ein gutes Jahr 2010. Ich hoffe, wir sehen uns bald mal in Berlin.



Ich habe heute eine dringende Bitte an Sie. Wie Sie wissen, hat Vaclav Havel den chinesischen Schriftsteller Liu Xiaobo als Kandidaten für den Friedensnobelpreis 2010 vorgeschlagen. Liu Xiaobo ist seit 2003 Präsident des chinesischen P.E.N. unabhängiger Autoren und gehört zu den Initiatoren der CHARTA 08, die eine demokratische Gesellschaft einfordert - so wie einst die Charta 77 in der Tschechoslowakei.



Liu Xiaobo setzt sich seit Jahren für die Verwirklichung der Menschenrechte in China ein, mit allen den dazugehörenden Risiken. Er wurde schon mehrfach inhaftiert. Und mit ihm wurden auch andere Unterzeichner der CHARTA 08 festgenommen. Die Organisation "Reporter ohne Grenzen" nennt etwa Zhang Zhuhua in Peking oder Chen Xi, Shen Youlin oder Du Heping. 



2008 wurde er am Tag vor dem 60. Jahrestag der Allgemeinen Erklärung der Menschenrechte verhaftet. Am diesem Menschenrechtstag wurde die CHARTA 08 öffentlich. Am 24. Dezember 2009 wurde Liu Xiaobo wegen seines Engagements zu 11 Jahren Haft verurteilt. 



Liu Xiaobo hat auch meiner Ansicht nach den Friedensnobelpreis verdient, weil er trotz aller Drohungen des Regimes in China und der Gefahr für sein Leben unbeirrt für die Freiheit des einzelnen Menschen eintritt. 



Lieber Marcus Storch, ich weiß, daß ich als Literaturnobelpreisträgerin keinen Kanditaten für den Friedensnobelpreis vorschlagen kann. Aber ich möchte Sie bitten, meine Unterstützung für Liu Xiaobo nach Norwegen weiterzuleiten. 



mit den besten Grüßen



Herta Müller

Photos Found

The Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin just published a series of photographs recovered by the son of journalist Dietmar Gottschall. They show a decidedly seedy BRD, as if the clothes and buildings were really all in black and white. Like the DDR, this country lives on as an afterimage.

http://sz-magazin.sueddeutsche.de/texte/anzeigen/32588

The N Word

People who worry about American Nazis I imagine are as paranoid as the Nazis they are hunting down. Yet to my surprise I ran across several postings from white supremacists about a particularly large, well-known German department at a very large Midwest university. It shocked me to see colleagues with whom I had spoken just weeks before at the MLA listed on these pages.

Now after a deep breath, it was obvious to me that the complaints were really run of the mill undergraduate, right-wing griping, but they had were truly disturbing at the same time.

The first time someone suggested to me that I should identify with the Nazis, I remember, we were standing in the South Bronx at West Farms Square waiting for a bus. This was 1978 at 7:30 in the morning on the way to high school. Having already spent a decade of my life denying I was a Nazi to all of New York, I couldn't believe that there was a kook who would advocate becoming one. I couldn't imagine a more insane thing to do.

Thinking back on that guy, I remember his pitch was something like" You're German, you should get into the Nazis."

The websites complaining about the big Midwestern German department make a similar argument: a large percentage of Americans are descendent from Germans, therefore they should learn about…." This where the argument veered off. Heritage speakers have filled German departments for most of the twentieth century. That does not make them white supremacists.

The Nazi web pages ran pretty much along the same lines as the kid back in 1978. Every ethnic group has its advocacy group, its parade, its national holiday. The shocking difference was the way in which German history was ignored. The undergraduates' complaints were about the classes offered in German departments, their grumbling was curricular. It was very similar to the complaints my colleagues in the English department get from David Horowitz, except that in the case of this German department, the arguments had the extra twist of being racist and anti-Semitic.

Winter's Bone

A super novel, Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell, is now a prize winning movie. The novel is cold tale of a girl in the Ozarks hunting down her father, or what's left of him, so that she can save the family house. Dad skipped out on bail, and now that state has rights to the property.

It's as if Neil Young's "Powderfinger" were a novel

http://sundance.bside.com/2010/films/wintersbone_sundance2010

Support

Here's a Berlin event worth attending just on account of their baroque sense of piling on the metaphors. I use a lot of them myself. Why settle for two, when eight will do.

18. Februar 2010 - 20:30

Support Structures

Bookpresentation with Celine Condorelli

Support Structures is a manual for what bears, sustains, props, and holds up. It is a manual for those things that encourage, give comfort, approval, and solace; that care for and provide consolation and the necessities of life. It is a manual for that which assists corroborates, advocates, articulates, substantiates, champions, and endorses; for what stands behind, underpins, frames, presents, maintains, and strengthens. Support Structures is a manual for those things that give, in short, support. While the work of supporting might traditionally appear as subsequent, unessential, and lacking value in itself, this manual is an attempt to restore attention to one of the neglected, yet crucial modes through which we apprehend and shape the world.

Pro qm thematische BuchhandlungAlmstadtstraße 48-50, 10119 Berlin030 2472-8520‎ – 030 24728521‎ (Fax)