eJournals Colloquia Germanica 48/1-2

Colloquia Germanica
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
A comparison of two bestselling novels that appeared a decade apart allows us to assess the changes that have taken place in the efforts of German-language publishers to gain a foothold in the marketplace of global literature. Patrick Süskind’s Das Parfum (1985) and Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser (1995) both appeared on bestseller lists in numerous countries. The shift from the intensely literary aesthetics of Das Parfum to the more straightforward prose of Der Vorleser suggests that a new emphasis on “readability” (“die neue Lesbarkeit”) had become the publishing strategy of choice in the 1990s. Nonetheless, this essay argues for a reading of Der Vorleser that moves the reader away from absorption in the emotional aspects of the love story to increasing modes of distance from it. Step by step, Schlink’s novel encourages the reader to balance “absorptive” and more skeptical modes of reading.
2015
481-2

Schlink’s Vorleser, Süskind’s Parfum, and the Concept of Global Literature

2015
Judith Ryan
12 Eva B. Revesz Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). New York: Penguin, 2006. Bartov, Omar. “Germany as Victim.” New German Critique 80 (2000): 29-40. Donahue, William Collins. Holocaust as Fiction. Bernhard Schlink’s ‘Nazi’ Novels and Their Films. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. ---. Holocaust Lite: Bernhard Schlinks ‘ NS -Romane’ und ihre Verfilmungen. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2013. ---. “Taking Jewish Cover: A Response to Bernhard Schlink.” The German Quarterly 85.3 (2012): 249-52. Hage, Volker. “Gewicht der Wahrheit.” Der Spiegel 29 March 1999: 242-43. Hall, Katherine. “Text Crimes in the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Case of Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser / The Reader .” German Text Crimes: Writers Accused from the 1950s to the 2000s. Ed. Tom Cheesman. Amsterdam / New York: Rodopi, 2013. 193-208. Hoffmann, Eva. “The Uses of Illiteracy.” The New Republic 23 March 1998: 33-36. Mahlendorf, Ursula. “Trauma Narrated, Read and (Mis)understood: Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader.” Monatshefte 95.3 (2003): 458-81. Niven, Bill. “Introduction: German Victimhood at the Turn of the Millenium.” Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany. Ed. Bill Niven. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 1-25. Ozick, Cynthia. “The Rights of History and the Rights of the Imagination.” Commentary 107.3 (1999): 22-27. The Reader . Dir. Stephen Daldry. Perf. Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, David Kross. Miramax / Weinstein, 2008. Schlant, Ernestine. The Language of Silence: West German Literature and the Holocaust. New York: Routledge, 1999. Schlink, Bernhard. Der Vorleser . Zurich: Diogenes, 1995. ---. The Reader . Trans. Carol Brown Janeway. New York: Vintage, 1997. ---. “Kollektivschuld? ” Vergangenheitsschuld: Beiträge zu einem deutschen Thema. Zurich: Diogenes, 2007. 11-33. “Jewish Resistance.” Holocaust Encyclopedia . United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. n.d. Web. 15 Aug. 2016 Taberner, Stuart, and Karina Berger, eds. Germans as Victims in the Literary Fiction of the Berlin Republic. Rochester, NY : Camden House, 2009. Schlink’s Vorleser, Süskind’s Parfum, and the Concept of Global Literature 13 Schlink’s Vorleser, Süskind’s Parfum, and the Concept of Global Literature Judith Ryan Harvard University Abstract: A comparison of two bestselling novels that appeared a decade apart allows us to assess the changes that have taken place in the efforts of German-language publishers to gain a foothold in the marketplace of global literature. Patrick Süskind’s Das Parfum (1985) and Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser (1995) both appeared on bestseller lists in numerous countries. The shift from the intensely literary aesthetics of Das Parfum to the more straightforward prose of Der Vorleser suggests that a new emphasis on “readability” (“die neue Lesbarkeit”) had become the publishing strategy of choice in the 1990s. Nonetheless, this essay argues for a reading of Der Vorleser that moves the reader away from absorption in the emotional aspects of the love story to increasing modes of distance from it. Step by step, Schlink’s novel encourages the reader to balance “absorptive” and more skeptical modes of reading. Keywords: global, literature, postmodernism, Holocaust, German The ten-year time difference between the publication of Patrick Süskind’s Das Parfum (1985) and Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser (1995) can serve as a useful barometer of the changes that have taken place in the global functioning of literature. In terms of their reach across cultures and languages, the two novels are roughly comparable: Das Parfum has been translated into some 49 languages, and Der Vorleser into 50; 1 both appeared on bestseller lists in several countries. 2 Of the two, Das Parfum has attained quite remarkable sales figures (approximately 20 million copies), 3 although it has had a considerable head start over Der Vorleser (which had sold over 1.5 million copies by 2000, 4 and, while exact numbers are difficult to obtain, has undoubtedly sold more in the intervening years). Schlink’s reputation in the United States was aided by its selection by Oprah Winfrey for her Book Club in 1999 and its subsequent appearance on 14 Judith Ryan The New York Times bestseller list for several weeks in 2009, following Stephen Daldry’s film version in 2008. In Germany, Der Vorleser has found a place in the German high school curriculum. 5 In Britain and the US , it has been the subject of vehement debate, largely about its approach to the Holocaust, and these concerns have now filtered back to Germany in turn. 6 Although Das Parfum and Der Vorleser are by no means situated on an even playing field, they have enough features in common to help us gauge the shifting conditions for global literary success. Das Parfum was an instant bestseller that sprinted rapidly across Europe and into the US and other English-speaking countries. Its success was largely the result of its style: it had the flavor—metaphorically, of course, the “scent”—of time-proven classics, and the original jacket illustration, Antoine Watteau’s painting “Nymph and Satyr” (1715), suggested that the book possessed a certain patina that was consonant with its seemingly traditional style. In fact, however, much of the “fine writing” was actually pastiche of identifiable authors from different periods. 7 This pastiche combined with other forms of allusion to distinguish “specialist” readers from general readers. The presence of allusive elements is entirely in accord with one of the novel’s major themes: the questionable nature of the concept of “original genius.” The development of the protagonist from a perfume maker alive to the subtle nuances of different ingredients to an obsessive monster who commits murder in his desire for the perfect scent, reflects our current skepticism about the adequacy of such concepts as genius or originality. The episode in which a crowd, seduced by his extraordinary perfume, cannibalizes his body in order to enjoy it to the full, appears at first to be an attempt to shock the reader. Yet this grotesque episode is in fact an allusion to the myth of Orpheus, whom jealous matrons tore limb from limb because of his rejection of their daughters following his loss of Eurydice. Stylistically and conceptually, Das Parfum is an extraordinary tour de force � Although both ordinary readers and those with more sophisticated knowledge of literary tradition were full of praise for the novel, the reasons for their admiration differed: one set of readers was fascinated by Süskind’s ingenious use of borrowings from other texts, while another set enjoyed what appeared to be the novel’s overall aesthetics. What the theory of postmodernism terms “double encoding” (writing a text so that it can enjoyed by both general and specialist readers) did not so much split the readership as augment it. If a single novel could be said to be paradigmatic of postmodernism, Das Parfum might be the one. Its success, not only upon its first publication but also subsequently, shows that at least this type of postmodernism can work well in the global market. Schlink’s Der Vorleser confronts us with an almost opposite set of characteristics. Instead of a highly wrought style, Der Vorleser uses plainer, more restrained Schlink’s Vorleser , Süskind’s Parfum , and the Concept of Global Literature 15 language; instead of the spectacular grotesqueries of Süskind’s novel, Der Vorleser confines itself primarily to everyday settings such as Hanna’s apartment and the law court, using realistic techniques that remain relatively unobtrusive. As Katharina Hall points out, the novel’s prose hews closely to what was called “Die Neue Lesbarkeit,” a combination of “universal themes, storytelling, and a straightforward, accessible writing style” (447). Publishers promulgated this style in the 1990s with the aim of gaining a place for German writers on the international market and stanching the flow of German readers toward American novels that were seen as less depressing and more enjoyable than their German counterparts (Hall 447). Joseph Metz points out that the style of Der Vorleser provides an almost too easy read, with “its smoothly accessible realist prose, stereotypical scenarios, and power to seduce readers into passively accepting the values and viewpoints of hypnotic narrator [Michael] Berg” (300). In addition, as both Metz and Hall point out in different contexts, the love plot is distinctive primarily because it inverts traditional male and female roles. It is easy to see how a more straightforward type of narrative combined with a schema familiar from the romance genre would be likely to draw a wider range of readers in. Being drawn in is what most readers desire when they pick up a novel, especially if they do so outside the framework of an academic course. Reading for pleasure is usually identified with a state in which a reader feels completely “absorbed in the book.” In childhood we are led to believe that this posture is the correct one, and that a “good book” is one that gets us hooked on the narrative it presents. Sometimes such a mode of reading creates the impression that there is “a whole world in [the reader’s] head.” 8 Norman Holland has described the principal symptoms of this state as loss of perception of our bodies and our environment, letting go of testing the narrative against familiar reality, and responding to the text with the same emotions we would experience if the situation were real (397). As long as we are reading the book, we are to all intents and purposes lost to the familiar world around us. Schlink’s Der Vorleser sets up a three-part structure in which the first seems to call precisely for such “absorptive” reading. This opening part, some eighty pages in length, sets the tone for readers who prefer to be carried away by the narrative without too much concern for testing it against their familiar view of reality. It is not difficult for readers to “lose themselves” in the love story of Michael and Hanna. Part Two, by contrast, calls for a different approach. The setting of most of this part, the law court where Hanna is being tried along with four other female concentration camp guards, is designed to make us attend to details. As Michael takes stock of his earlier experience with Hanna, he begins to resolve inconsistencies and understand events that at first seemed puzzling. This reality-testing mode operates in a manner akin to detective novels and 16 Judith Ryan police procedurals, genres popular among a wide spectrum of readers. Part Three, finally, ranges more widely in time and space. Michael’s reflections on law and its place in society are shown through a widened aperture that allows for complex historical and moral considerations. Michael is acutely aware of the ambiguities that arise in such reflections, and through them, the reader is brought to a third level of abstraction. In the last analysis, Der Vorleser is not a simple love story, but rather a text that exercises increasing distancing from the actions it depicts. Yet it would seem that some readers failed to recognize the novel’s increasingly probing structure and allowed the “love story” mode of reading to carry them through to the end. Skimming over the intellectual and moral problems addressed in the third part of the book would be unsurprising in the case of readers from outside the German-speaking countries, who are unlikely to be familiar with generational shifts in those cultures’ changing understanding of individual and collective guilt during the Nazi period. Lack of knowledge about these matters presumably makes it difficult for some readers to assess the psychological and moral predicament of the “second generation” (Germans who were not adults during the Holocaust). Readers for whom the novel was primarily a love story may also not have realized that Michael is an unreliable narrator. 9 As the novel progresses, we need to take an increasingly skeptical position toward what Michael writes. Above all, we are invited to question his decisions. The shoplifting spree he engages in toward the end of the first part is symptomatic: he is terrified when he thinks that the store detective has seen him, but in the end, he is excited by Hanna’s delight when he gives her the silk nightgown he has stolen. 10 His narration here does not fully reflect the older person he already is when he begins to write his story. Michael’s belated revelation of Hanna’s illiteracy is the most telling indication of his narrative unreliability. Coupled with this unreliability is his failure to exercise moral responsibility. When he goes to see the presiding judge during the course of Hanna’s trial, he fails to tell him about Hanna’s disability, instead taking part in small talk about his law studies and his future prospects in the legal profession. At the end of the novel, he does follow the prison superintendent’s request to find Hanna a job and a place to live after her release, but he does so in a perfunctory manner. His relationship to her has changed, not only as a result of the trial, but also because of new public and private reflections on the past that have occurred in the meantime. It may be worth saying just a little more about the issue of Hanna’s inability to read and write. In a 2002 article in The Guardian , Nicholas Wroe looked back at the way in which Schlink’s novel Der Vorleser hinged on the issue of literacy: “Of all the ways literature has found to deal with the Holocaust and its consequences, a book about the inability to read might not seem the most obvious. Yet in terms of attracting a mass audience, a German novel with illiteracy at its heart, published in 1995, has been a publishing phenomenon.” This is indeed remarkable. Schlink himself explains his interest in illiteracy by saying that he once did some substantial research on it. Perhaps more to the point is a declaration made by UNESCO that 1990 was to be designated the “International Literacy Year”; the aim was to attain “universal literacy” by the year 2000 (Bhola). News items that appeared in the early 1990s and thereafter kept the issue alive by noting, among other things, that even in Germany, the number of people who were either illiterate or functionally illiterate was much higher than one might expect (“Unbelesen, unbelehrt”). Among other things, such articles tended to describe the great ingenuity with which functional illiterates contrived to keep their handicap secret, even from close family members, and how deeply ashamed they were of it. No doubt such articles helped create a public climate in which a range of disability in reading and writing could be more clearly understood. There was now an informed international readership that was able to empathize with the fictional Hanna’s predicament. Nonetheless, opinion is divided about whether her disability is to be taken metaphorically, especially in connection with the moral implications of the novel and the issue of victimhood. 11 Still, I do not believe that the discrepant view of general readers and more skeptical readers is equivalent in this case to the “double encoding” of postmodernism. Although William Collins Donahue points out that Der Vorleser “gestures toward” a number of features that are often equated with postmodernism ( Holocaust as Fiction 66) it is not really a postmodern text. I see it, rather, as situated within a new turning to a global readership. 12 To some extent, Der Vorleser benefits from the fact that many of its greatest fans are unfamiliar with much of the textual canon that Michael reads to Hanna. With some exceptions, such as Homer’s Odyssey and Tolstoy’s War and Peace , the list of readings is drawn from the German tradition, much of it scarcely known to readers outside the German-speaking countries. None of the texts is presented in any detail, and they increasingly become a bare list of titles. The young Michael regards Hanna as an astute judge of the texts he reads to her, but in fact, her comments are quite superficial. The novel leaves no hint, furthermore, of the importance of the first text Michael reads to Hanna: Lessing’s drama Emilia Galotti (1772). In Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774), Emilia Galotti is found open on Werther’s desk after he has committed suicide. At this point in Der Vorleser , we have no inkling that Hanna will ultimately commit suicide or that she will do so after eighteen years of canonical readings that Michael sends to her on tape. If Werther’s suicide results from a distorted reading of Lessing’s play, what are we to say about the effect of reading on Han- Schlink’s Vorleser , Süskind’s Parfum , and the Concept of Global Literature 17 18 Judith Ryan na? Has she learned anything, psychologically or morally, from this extensive course of literary fare? What, if anything, has Michael himself learned from his many years of audiotaping texts for Hanna? There is one fleeting moment in Der Vorleser when Michael questions the premises of his almost lifelong reading aloud project, describing it as born of “ein großes bildungsbürgerliches Urvertrauen” on his part (176). He even wonders why he was never tempted to read experimental literature to her, but he rapidly dismisses that thought because he fears that such works might also experiment on the reader. His fear of texts that may not confirm his long-held opinions reveals how little he understands the dialogical function of literature. Michael’s conservative perspective is troubling, and it would seem to speak against a view of literature as in itself redeeming. Of course two novels do not make for a satisfactory theory about the global literature market around the turn of the millennium. The comparison is instructive nonetheless. One crucial difference is the shift in the more popular readership, which in the case of Das Parfum was at least to some degree aspirational (there was widespread approval of the novel’s style), whereas with Der Vorleser the popular reader seems to have preferred the easy reading of relatively plain language. Both novels are written in crossover genres: Das Parfum , with its subtitle “Die Geschichte eines Mörders” alludes to murder mysteries, although it is not itself one, and as we have seen, Der Vorleser capitalizes on the police procedural genre in its courtroom scenes. Das Parfum has a sensationalist streak that was emphasized in its marketing, while Der Vorleser was assigned to the less flashy “love story” category. Although Das Parfum does raise the association with Hitler in the deranged seduction of its protagonist, it avoids altogether the kind of direct representation of Nazi Germany that had already led to what is called “Holocaust exhaustion.” In Der Vorleser , the plot hinges on Hanna’s role during the Holocaust, but we hear about that role only through the testimony given in the law court. Despite the novel’s “realistic” style, there is no actual description of the small camp not far from Auschwitz where she and the other accused women served as guards. Although mention is made of the “selections” in which prisoners arriving at a concentration camp were divided into able-bodied potential workers and others who were sent immediately to their deaths, the crucial scene does not take place in a concentration camp, but in a burning church where the prisoners are confined overnight during a forced march westward. Surely fictional representations have an important place even so many decades after the end of the Nazi regime. It is doubtless too early to tell, but Süskind’s displacement of Holocaust issues into an aestheticized allegory seems, to some extent against all odds, to have had better staying power than the controversial minimalism of Schlink’s novel. Yet given the expectations of a diverse global readership, it is hard to imagine that more radically experimental forms of fiction would be a safe strategy for publishers who wish to reach beyond a select audience of readers accustomed to more complex modes of approaching literature. Paradoxically, the marketing strategies of the 1980s and 1990s do not seem to have unified a diversity of readers, but have instead revealed even more clearly the fault lines of global sales ambitions. On the face of it, the two modes of reading—absorptive and more detached—seem fundamentally incompatible. Those of us who read against the grain, or from the margins, or with a focus on seemingly minor but telling details will continue to do so and teach others to do so. It may be asking too much to expect all readers to give up their desire to be swept away by a book. Yet it seems to me that it is also possible to switch back and forth, now empathizing with the characters and their predicaments, now stepping back from them more critically. We also know that in the classroom or other more formalized discussions of texts, even inexperienced readers can be brought to appreciate a second, more complicated approach. What I am proposing here is that we hold the absorptive and the more skeptical modes in balance as we attempt to learn what is involved when we think about large questions through literature. Notes 1 See the website of the Diogenes Verlag: http: / / www.diogenes.ch/ leser.html. 2 Bestseller lists differ widely in the number of categories they use. In the US alone, USA Today uses a single category, while the New York Times divides the adult fiction list into hardcover, paperback, trade book, and mass market publications. Such differences create difficulties in comparisons across different lists. 3 See http: / / www.diogenes.ch/ leser/ verlag/ geschichte. In general, Diogenes resists giving sales figures for its publications. The astonishing figures achieved by Das Parfum seem to have made an exception to the publishing house’s general rules. 4 Katherine Hall cites this figure for 2000 (47), and Nicholas Wroe also gives it in his article of 2002; these figures cover sales in Germany, the US , Britain, and France. Unfortunately, the publisher is not eager to cite exact figures. 5 In this connection, see Ursula R. Mahlendorf ’s observation that all but two of the teachers’ manuals she consulted fail to mention that the sexual relationship between Michael (at fifteen years of age, a minor at the time) and Hanna was, in legal terms, youth abuse under German law (476). The situation here can be compared with a similarly neglected aspect of another bestseller, Schlink’s Vorleser , Süskind’s Parfum , and the Concept of Global Literature 19 20 Judith Ryan Marguerite Duras’s L’Amant (1984), the protagonist of which is aged fifteenand-a-half. There, too, the “love story” has significant implications for the theme of abuse and oppression in Indochina during French colonial rule. 6 See Niven 381-82. 7 See Ryan. 8 See Jacobus, Chapter 2 (“A whole world in your head”) 52-86. 9 Michael’s narrative is, to be sure, “einsinnig”—in other words not obviously devious or ironic—but even in the stories by Kafka for which Friedrich Beißner used this term (Beißner 37), the reader is still able to “get around behind” the narrator and catch a glimpse of at least some of his or her inadequacies. Here I beg to disagree with Donahue, “The Popular Cultural Alibi” 476. 10 The shoplifting episode is motivated by his desire to bribe his younger sister so that he can have Hanna visit his parents’ house during their absence; yet this motivation seems insufficient. 11 See Bartov. In addition, Jeremy Adler in Britain, and Cynthia Ozick in the US made similar charges. 12 Note that Donahue uses the term “global” in his chapter on the film version of Der Vorleser , where he explores differences between film and book ( Holocaust as Fiction , especially 185). I use the term “global” for the print versions of both Der Vorleser and Das Parfum because it is important to differentiate the type of literature I am considering here from David Damrosch’s more capacious term “world literature.” Although circulation in translation is also a key category in Damrosch’s definition of world literature, his book on that topic considers several texts (such as Gilgamesh or the writings of Mechthild von Magdeburg) that predate the bestseller culture that is my focus here (284-300). Works Cited Bartov, Omer. “Germany as Victim.” New German Critique 80 (2000): 29-40. Beißner, Friedrich. “Der Erzähler Franz Kafka.” Der Erzähler Franz Kafka und andere Vorträge. Mit einer Einführung von Werner Keller. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1983. 21-54. Bhola, H. S. “International Literacy Year: A Summons to Action for Universal Literacy by the Year 2000.” Educational Horizons 67.3 (1989): 62-67. Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton UP , 2003� Donahue, William Collins. “The Popular Culture Alibi: Bernhard Schlink’s Detective Novels and the Culture of Politically Correct Holocaust Literature.” The German Quarterly 77.4 (2004): 462-81.