Once again this year readers will find themselves confronted with the theme of identity and the question of how individuals can establish a solid basis for their existence within a constantly changing and increasingly heterogeneous society - and they will also encounter the question of how the mounting ideological tensions and associated battle lines within society can be adequately reflected in literature. It is no coincidence that Saša Stanišić won last year’s German Book Prize with a work that bore the title Herkunft (‘Origins’) and through its autofictional mode of writing satisfied the growing desire for the literary processing of personal experiences. Olivia Wenzel’s novel 1000 Serpentinen Angst appeared in spring 2020. Born in 1985 in Weimar as the daughter of a punk mother and Angolan father, Wenzel undertakes a rhythmically structured, dialogue-based self-interrogation that repeatedly focuses on issues of institutional marginalisation and discrimination, and recounts the story of a stigmatised individual growing up in two different German polities - the GDR and the Federal Republic.
The debut novel of Ronya Othmann, born 1993 in Munich, also comes under the heading of autofictional works by authors with a migrant background. At last year’s Tage der deutschsprachigen Literatur (the competition that determines the winner of the annual Ingeborg Bachmann Prize), the extract from Othmann’s novel submitted for consideration prompted an extremely complex discussion amongst the members of the jury centring on the problem of evaluating literary renderings of personal experience. Die Sommer, as her novel is entitled (‘The summers’), is due to appear this autumn, and tells the story of a life split between two different cultures. Leyla, the central figure, is the daughter of a German mother and a Yazidi Kurd - a member of the ethnic group notoriously persecuted as ‘infidels’ by ISIS and brutally slaughtered in 2014 in an act categorised by the UN as genocide.

It has to be acknowledged, however, that a migrant background is not indispensable to a convincing representation of the present-day world in this era of turmoil characterised not least by the disparities between people’s different experiences of reality. Thus for instance Elbwärts (‘Elbe-wards’) is due to be published in late August as the first novel by Thilo Krause, a writer known hitherto solely as a poet and as a winner of the distinguished Peter Huchel Prize for Poetry. Krause, born in Dresden, recounts in vivid, picturesque language the story of a couple who return to their home village in the region known as ‘Saxon Switzerland’. The past catches up with the first-person narrator in the form of guilt-stricken memories, while in the novel’s present nazis arrive and set up their summer camp, and the couple themselves are faced with rampant mistrust in the village. As is already clear from the title, Christoph Peters also focuses on village life in his Dorfroman (‘Village novel’), due out in August. In his fabulous 2012 novel Wir in Kahlbeck (‘We in Kahlbeck’), Peters - born in the Lower Rhein area of Germany - recounted the story of life in a Catholic boys’ boarding school near the Dutch border. Now, after a series of entertaining and highly intelligent forays into the detective-story world, Peters takes a new turn with his Dorfroman, in which the narrator goes to visit his parents in the village of ‘Hülkendonck’. Here again, returning home sparks a plethora of memories, and by the point where the novel’s main focus shifts to the construction of a nuclear power plant and the resulting ideological  battles, it is already clear that ‘Hülkendonck’ bears a more than passing resemblance to Peters’s own home village of Kalkar.

Two of the most notable books published so far this year deal with East German lives and experiences. Ingo Schulze’s cleverly constructed novel Die rechtschaffenen Mörder (‘The righteous murderers’), which was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize, reconstructs the story of a bookseller and antiquarian who in GDR days became a beacon of intellectual opposition, but lost everything once the wall fell: his means of earning a living, his standing within society, the entire basis of his intellectual life. No one needs him any more, no one wants to see him. Although it is left open whether he becomes truly radicalised and morphs into an enragé from the ranks of the well-educated middle class, Schulze’s novel nonetheless illuminates a pan-German problem, namely the ease with which someone who feels misunderstood can re-cast themself as an enemy of the system.
Turning now to Lutz Seiler, born 1963 in Gera and winner of this year’s Leipzig Book Fair Prize for his novel Stern 111: Carl Bischoff, the book’s protagonist and Seiler’s alter ego, arrives in Berlin from Thuringia  in December 1989 and quickly finds fellowship in a commune in the Prenzlauer Berg district characterised by dreams of total freedom and a permanent state of quasi anarchy. At issue here is the crucial interstice between two contrary regimes - the GDR and the Federal Republic - and Seiler captures the full flavour of it by dint of great observational acuity and the use of powerful imagery. In parallel to this, Seiler also recounts the story of Carl’s parents, who start life all over again in West Germany and end up finding happiness on a completely different continent. Kruso, the protagonist of the earlier, eponymous novel that earned Seiler the German Book Prize, also pops up in Stern 111 as a radicalised street fighter intent on using erstwhile GDR border-guard dogs to defend squatted houses. This is a book of real literary and documentary merit - and it comes complete with a talking goat!

Self-affirmation, accounts of the coming-together of the country we live in, the experience of cultural heterogeneity - all those elements that we associate with the notion of ‘identity politics’ are still being richly reflected in current German-language literature. Despite the corona virus, 2020 is an excellent year for books!


Christoph Schroeder is a freelance writer (Süddeutsche Zeitung, Tagesspiegel, Die Zeit) based in Frankfurt am Main and is a lecturer in literary criticism at the university there.

Translated by John Reddick

“Poetry is vital. It performs social work and the only way it can do this is poetically,” writes the poet Elke Erb, who was awarded the 2020 Georg Büchner Prize for her life’s work in letters. The poets Monika Rinck and Steffen Popp have selected poems from Erb’s oeuvre and collected them in Das ist hier der Fall (That’s the case here). The title of the volume is taken from a poem written in 2018: “I wake up / and discover a note that says: / I don’t give a hoot / I always read in the morning / “the bright blue brook” / (with the forget-me-not / in the margin). / And: my horse is in the stall. / The point of a horse isn’t to reveal itself. / The peacock wears all of its resplendent plumage on its back. / It doesn’t have a clue. / I’ll go pick some flowers. That’s the case here.” Calm like the horse and oblivious like the peacock to questions of beauty, a more precise definition is given for the social work of a poem that is absorbed in the daily comings and goings and in what’s to be discovered. Its rebellion lies within these elements and in the poem’s inability to be economically of use, its supposed marginalization.

In 2020, a year that was extremely rich in impressive volumes of poetry, numerous volumes were published that can be read as such an act of rebellion, as a challenge, vigilantly investigating what is said and how beyond the discourses of relevance and ideological trench warfare. But these volumes cannot all be measured with the same yardstick, since, after all, the search for their own voice is characteristic of such work.

Nimbus, the celebrated fifth volume of poetry, by Marion Poschmann (born in Essen in 1969) searches for an adequate language to describe natural phenomena in the age of the Anthropocene, where humans exert their influence on the environment in an unprecedented manner. This volume discreetly negotiates how (artistic) speaking, thinking and behavior co-determine their relations.

The opening poem, entitled “Und hegte Schnee in meinen warmen Händen“ (“And nurtured snow in my warm hands”), at first appears to be nurturing but turns out to be a work of destruction: mountains explode in the poem not because of the violence of nature but because of the violence of humans. But whether the lyrical I is aware that it also bears some responsibility is an unanswered question. As such, readers are also at liberty to consider this question with regards to their own lives.
  A different form of melting is addressed in the title of the third volume of poetry by Kerstin Preiwuß (born in Lübz in 1980): Taupunkt (Dew Point). The dew point quantifies the air’s humidity and indicates the temperature that must be fallen below at constant pressure so that water vapors can precipitate as dew or mist and water condensation can form. The title suggests that the poems revolve around states and feelings that resemble the dew point, a point that may come to a standstill or it may flow, depending on changes in the temperature and pressure. Searching for a singing language that can leave the awful daily life and carelessness behind it, the poems are “really tired of the pragma”: “I’ve had enough of this cud / of this chaff saturation / that consumes everything you do.”

Poetry’s propensity to song and rhythm are celebrated in the book kommen sehen (see coming) by Anja Utler (born in Schwandorf in 1973). Written in strict couplets, Utler’s long poem takes place in a future where water has become scarce and where men are no longer necessary for the survival of humankind. Three women from three generations speak. But are they speaking with one another? Or against one another, thus demonstrating that the bane resides in the destructive power of speech that does not rely on understanding? Coming from a different direction than Nimbus, kommen sehen critically reflects on the responsibility of the individual.

Strict attention is also paid to form in Dämonenräumdienst (Demon Clearing Services) by the Georg Büchner Prize winner Marcel Beyer (born in Tailfingen in 1965) and in Im Glasberg (In the Glass Mountain) by Nadja Küchenmeister (born in Berlin in 1980). While all of the poems in Beyer’s volume consist of ten stanzas with four lines in each stanza, Küchenmeister mostly arranges the stanzas in tercets. And while the poems in Dämonenräumdienst humorously dispose of demons as being mere servile spirits of a dubious esotericism at the cost of enlightened thinking—“I learned that even in the most peaceful / idyll, there’s a homeopath – a / homeopath who is capable of everything”—Küchenmeister’s lyrical I comes to terms with the past, with the false promises of fathers and lovers in a manner that is visually powerful, self-critical, and sometimes cold: “we’ll never see one another again / you remember me, I remember // you, no one really cares. I admit / I’d prefer that. I remember remembering // even more I remember nothing.”
  Numerous volumes published in 2020 were written by poets whose native tongue is not German. This fact remains inconspicuous in Gestohlene Luft (Stolen Air), the second volume of poetry by Yevgeniy Breyger (born in Kharkov in 1989). It is better to approach this book’s cycles with questions about the ways in which diverse manners of speaking, as well as the ways in which language is timeless or can be related to a specific moment, are put into a fruitful configuration.
  ​​​​​​​ The origin of the authors is more clearly articulated in Liedvoll. Deutschyzno (Songful. Germanyzno) by Dagmara Kraus (born in Wroclaw in 1981), which hints at the ambivalence of multilingualism with the made-up word “Deutschyzno” and the semantic proximity between “liedvoll” and leidvoll” (sorrowful). Alexandru Bulucz (born in Alba Iulia in 1987) also reminisces on his childhood in the Romanian countryside in his second volume Was Petersilie über die Seele weiß (What Parsley Knows about the Soul).

Joy in playing with language and the desire to understand poetry as a corrective force can be discerned in numerous debuts of the year. Lisa Jeschke’s Die Anthologie der Gedichte betrunkener Frauen (The Anthology of Poems by Drunk Women), Caca Savic’s Teilchenland (Particle Country) or Saskia Warzecha’s Approximanten (Approximants) confidently and skillfully survey the tension between inquiring and making statements, between experiences of art and the world. Erb’s heirs emphatically attest to poetry being vital and a social labor.


Beate Tröger
Beate Tröger is a journalist, critic and presenter. She writes reviews for Deutschlandfunk, SWR, Freitag and the Frankfurter Hefte, amongst others. Tröger is also a member of the jury of the Peter Huchel Prize for German-language poetry.


Translated by Shane Anderson