One only had to count down from ten until someone would come up with the idea of applying the bad habits of the discussion about the so-called identity politics to contemporary German literature. Moritz Baßler has now done it, the literary scholar from Münster, who at the beginning of the noughties prepared the chapter of literary history that was previously vaguely referred to as pop literature for German studies. In the magazine Pop. Culture and criticism (Issue 18, spring 2021) he now complains about the success of a literature that can only be read affirmatively and that is less about its literary-aesthetic form than about “the topics and problems in which the particular groups are interested (loss, trauma, abuse, misogyny, racism, capitalism, flight) are dealt with in the texts. “
Even before one could defend individual books that could be meant by this, such as Olivia Wenzel’s novel “1000 serpentinen angst”, Christian Baron’s “A Man of His Class” or Mithu Sanyal’s “Identitti”, a few queries would be necessary . Aren’t the issues mentioned quite existential? Why should particular groups be interested in this? Or has the established reader only noticed it that way, since recently authors of color, storytellers with migrant or declassified family histories or ambiguous gender identities have been writing about something like this? Does this make trauma, loss or capitalism a niche issue?
Baßler brings himself into this characteristic contradiction in the course of a more comprehensive verdict against the particularization of literary tastes. On the Internet he observes something free at home, for which in the past you might have had to go to the reading group of a community library: clear readership who just want to find what they read well and good, although professional literary criticism only annoys. The academic critic Baßler, quietly insulted, withdraws from this field and shows in a violent all-round blow what he no longer wants to be responsible for in the future.
Kitsch arises when it is always clear what is relevant and right
He calls it, as the title of the article is, “The New Midcult”, a term that Umberto Eco has already used for literature with solid quality standards, but nothing about which is so avant-garde or difficult that it interferes with the convenient consumption of art . What is new compared to the old “Murakami-Franzen-Schlink-Knausgård-Ferrante-Kehlmann-Complex” sees Baßler in the fact that the “feel-good text” is now also provided with ideological and moral self-evident features and authenticated by the author’s biography and identity. The result remains: “Kitsch. This kitsch arises when it is always assumed and it is clear to the target group what is relevant and right; if the corresponding work is not done, work on form and context.”
Like all interventions in the sense of “the” aesthetics grosso modo or universalism against the small and small of the moral, this argument sounds powerful. But it almost never works on concrete examples, here novels. Especially Olivia Wenzel’s “1000 serpentine angst” against Baßler is so madly irobjective that a bad liberalism betrays itself. Simply because he assumes a realistic autobiography and personal sympathy with the narrator for the book and ignores the fact that the whole novel consists of a dialogue with a floating counterpart or alter ego, a decidedly formally unsettled narrative perspective.
Baßler now paraphrases a scene in which Wenzel’s main character and her brother see a couple of Nazis at a bathing lake in Brandenburg and suddenly perceive themselves as People of Color because they are afraid. The Nazis are described as follows: “They undress, as I imagine soldiers would do, tight and jagged.” This confirms, according to Baßler’s reproach, a worldview itself qua stereotype. He would also find it better to learn something about “the insecurity of these men who are laughed about everywhere except here at their bathing place, and who may never, like the narrator here, fill out a questionnaire to enter the USA and never publish a book with S. Fischer. “
Poetic justice does not have to be proven in each individual Nazi
This breakneck turn could be marked morally as a perpetrator-victim reversal or in the sociology of literature as the leveling of a literature that is just beginning to express itself, the subject of which is not how the Nazi is doing, but the fear it triggers. In the current issue of the literary magazine The weather young post-migrant authors ask accordingly impressively why an event like the terrorist attack in Hanau, which they experience as an existential shock, hardly resonates with the majority of the German literary scene. A difference in perception that calls for literary processing.
Even under strict aesthetic standards, poetic justice does not have to be proven in every single Nazi who walks through the picture. It is actually a question of form and context, which Baßler deliberately disregards for the sake of his thesis.