Literature has always been a way to help us grasp the incomprehensible or – literally – get a read on it. Literature can frame and shape our present. For me personally, the main thing I like about reading is how language lends expression to diffuse feelings, makes seemingly inexplicable connections and social phenomena accessible.
When asked to join the jury of the German Book Prize in 2025 I realized it would be a chance to engage in an in-depth study of how German-language literature frames the insanity of this moment in history. What are its central themes? How is our present put into words?
The jury considered more than 220 novels. A conspicuous feature of these new novels is that most of them don’t focus their attention on the present, but either on the past or the future. Many of the authors probe the past in order to get their bearings in the present. What mistakes were made? What was left unsaid? What is at risk of being repeated? Or the authors look to the near future: Which mistakes that we are making today will lead to catastrophe before long? What are the consequences of our actions?
At first I feared these authors might be fleeing from the present. Is the present really so hard to grasp? But the deeper I delved into these works, the clearer I understood this method, indeed the trick they employed of using the past and future to better understand the present – by asking hard questions: To what extent did Nazism, communism and the wars in Yugoslavia, did the exploitation of the Global South shape us? How does what we do today shape what happens tomorrow?
This tendency to look backwards or forwards that we observed in hundreds of novels can also be seen in the impressive shortlist of the German Book Prize.
Looking back
Looking back is inevitable when tackling historical subjects. Christine Wunnicke’s light-hearted novel “Wachs” [Wax] centers on the love story of two women in prerevolutionary France who flout every convention; one works as an anatomist who dissects corpses, the other an artist who draws flowers. The two French women love each other, and do it in such a natural way that we have to ask ourselves why there’s a raging cultural war about homosexuality at all these days when queer lives were being lived in Paris during the eighteenth century.
Why did I become the person I am? What role do traumas play, especially ones that span generations?
One such novel on the shortlist is Jehona Kicaj’s debut “ë.” The protagonist of the novel goes to the orthodontist because, like many people, she grinds her teeth. This involuntary habit is so extreme that it threatens to destroy her teeth. Slowly the novel begins to reveal that the tension is linked to her fleeing Kosovo in the midst of murderous war crimes and ultimately to the loss of her homeland. In the autofictional novel “Die Ausweichschule” [The Emergency School] by Kaleb Erdmann the protagonist is still dealing with a trauma from his childhood, one that deeply affected not only him but an entire city for years: the school shooting in Erfurt in 2002.
Looking forward
Two authors on the shortlist who consciously reflect the present in the future are Thomas Melle with “Haus zur Sonne” [House in the Sun] and Fiona Sironic with “Am Samstag gehen die Mädchen in den Wald und jagen Sachen in die Luft” [On Saturday Girls Go into the Woods and Blow Stuff Up] Sironic depicts a world in which two daughters of “mom influencers” get back at their mothers for having shared countless videos of them on social media when they were little kids, thereby violating their privacy. At the same time, this near-future novel depicts an overheated environment destroyed by climate change.
Thomas Melle, in “House in the Sun,” likewise ventures into the near future, portraying a man who is suicidal because of bipolar disorder. The man checks into a state sanatorium which promises happiness to its world-weary patients through AI-simulations. Yet no one can leave the eponymous sanatorium alive, which in reality is a capitalist-run experimental laboratory.
Both novels use future settings to reflect on current-day issues: What makes life worth living? Can the digital world, social media or even simulation machines make us happy?
The winning book, too, “Die Holländerinnen” [The Dutch Women], makes a detour around the present, and very much an artistic one: Elmiger transports her readers to a timeless place, the Central American jungle, where a European theater company is investigating a possible crime, the disappearance of two Dutch women some years before. On their trek through the jungle, the members of the theater group tell each other stories about their own lives, disturbing tales of violence, fear and insecurity – echoing our own unstable times. The novel is remarkable for its language as well, being written entirely in indirect speech.
Stories of violence
What these six books have in common with many other new releases is violence as a core theme: war, mass shootings, femicide, psychological abuse and traumas. The good news is that they don’t glorify violence or use it in a gimmicky or sensationalist way. On the contrary, the authors refuse to turn it into a spectacle. This has a signal effect in our own war-torn times.
A few cursory comments on some other notable aspects of this year’s prize contenders:
- Almost half the novels the jury reviewed are autobiographical or autofictional. In the best cases the authors transcend the personal and tell us something universal; at worst we get what I call the “Instagramization” of literature, where everything orbits around the ego.
- In terms of language and form we see an exciting diversity of styles, from abstract to documentary. Many of the writers have a distinctive voice. The narrative arcs of these works are also varied, from linear to erratic and convoluted.
- Many of the themes, however, are common tropes found in (all too) many other novels, e.g., “protagonist goes back to the town or village he or she grew up in,” “protagonist pulls out a shoebox full of old photos,” etc.
- With a few exceptions, sexuality seems to be virtually nonexistent in contemporary German-language novels (excluding, of course, the “new romance” genre!)
- A large number of the novels are set in Central or Eastern Europe. The divide between Central or Eastern and Western Europe has effectively been blurred, at least when it comes to literature.
- Many characters are named Paul. The jury wasn’t able to determine why or what significance the name might have.
Enriched by our reading experience, one positive thing stood out to us: there were a lot of very strong debuts! There is therefore little cause for concern when it comes to the future of German-language literature.
Laura de Weck is a playwright and literary critic. Since 2023 she has hosted the “Literature Club” show on Swiss Radio and Television (SRF) and 3sat, alternating with co-host Jennifer Khakshouri, and since 2024 she has served on the jury for the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize. In 2025 Laura de Weck was the acting spokesperson for the German Book Prize jury.
Translated by David Burnett
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