1.1
“I say we don’t let anyone with rich parents publish a novel for a year, and then we see what the book market looks like.”
Tweet by Matthias Warkus, 12 June 2018, 352 likes, 52 retweets.
1.2
No one can help their own origins.
Origins are not a criterion for literary quality.
1.3
Literature is written mainly by the educated middle classes, and it will most likely stay that way.
1.4
Writers who describe a different class background to their own are often familiar with that class from their own observations.
1.4.1
Writers like Hans Fallada, or later, Jörg Fauser came from families where education was writ large.
It was drug addiction that brought them into contact with other classes and prompted them to write about them.
1.4.2
Ralf Rothmann comes from a working-class background, which he has written a lot about. He is one of the few German working-class writers of the past hundred years to gain respect for their work without being saddled with the nimbus of the plebeian, the court jester, the sleaze.
We’re happy to keep pet writers we regard as representatives of another world, seeing that they have tattoos and manual labour or unemployment in their CVs, even if they actually grew up in homes with books on the shelves.
(By “we” I mean not a group of people, but the structures of an industry, regardless of who is currently keeping that industry thriving or fighting against it.)
Perhaps it’s like the Sidney Poitier effect. Give an Oscar to one Black man to show that it’s been done—and ignore the rest.
1.5
Writers don’t need first-hand experience to report on certain social milieus, but they do need an attitude towards them. Empathy and voyeurism are two possible attitudes. More under 5.3 below.
1.6
In a world where more and more depends on an individual’s purchasing power, image and status, fear of social decline has grown.
There has been no German writer over the past thirty years who even considered moving down a class. Today’s drug addicts write about their experiences in Beverly Hills rehab clinics. At worst, writers live the life of the highly educated, low-income precariat in as yet ungentrified areas, patching holes with money from Daddy’s wallet and venturing a career change if that’s not enough.
1.7
Upward mobility is difficult.
Upward mobility into literature without resorting to romanticized ghetto clichés is even more difficult.
2 The standard language thing
2.1
We expect every writer to have a command of standard language. We consider it legitimate to use jargon, colloquial language, dialect and the like in literary texts, but we assume these means are chosen deliberately.
H.C. Artmann was allowed to write in dialect and play with language because we know he knew dictionary German.
2.1.1
The label Gastarbeiterliteratur was applied to writing we perceived as authentic attempts to describe the lives of Germany’s migrant workers in the 1970s and ’80s, but which we didn’t want to count fully as literature due to a lack of aesthetic quality. Detailing sensitivities without being art.
For most of these writers, German was their second or third language. How could they have competed with anyone whose mother tongue was German?
2.1.2
Gastarbeiter = guest workers. The Nazis had rendered toxic the euphemism Fremdarbeiter = foreign workers. So a new word was needed.
Have you ever seen anyone make their guests work for them?
2.2
“Man, Twitter Nazis, for the 100th time: learn to spell. Stop filling other people’s timelines with your trash while you can’t even spell ‘Amazon’. What is ‘AMASON’?! What is ‘ded borring’? And what does ‘I’ll shoe you wats wat!’ mean?! Come on. Delete yourselves. Thanks.”
Since-deleted tweet by Igor Levit, 30 August 2018, 181 likes, 11 retweets.
Criticizing linguistic incompetence means shying away from criticizing content, preferring to defame and exclude.
2.2.1
It’s widely known that F. Scott Fitzgerald had major problems with spelling. No one believes that made him a worse writer.
2.3
We know nothing about the writer of the novel Lila dit ça (Lila Says). The manuscript (handwritten in exercise books) was offered to its French publishers via a lawyer. Or so the story goes. That story might not be true.
There are mistakes in the novel, which tells a story from a Parisian banlieue. Grammatical mistakes, misspellings, incorrect expressions. Its vocabulary is limited. But the narrator’s talent for perception and his ability to create images for what goes on in his mind make the book literature.
2.4
The Israeli author Tomer Gardi decided to write a book in German, fully aware that his German differs from that of a native speaker.
He read an extract from his book Broken German at one of German-language literature’s major competitions in Klagenfurt, Austria, in 2016. The subsequent discussion among the judges demonstrated how seven people who have been full-time literary professionals for years can be absolutely incompetent at talking about a piece of writing, just because it deviates from standard language and they suspect its writer does too.
The piece clearly works with literary devices.
2.5
We claim the right to define who has mastered a language. All other forms of language besides its standard version are downgraded.
Language serves as an instrument of power.
We bemoan the coarsening of the German language, the increasing use of Anglicisms, the lack of articles, the abbreviations, the omissions, the vulgarity, the inability to form a decent sentence with one or more subordinate clauses.
What we overlook is that writing can possess literary qualities even when written by people whose language is not standard German.
2.6
Language is a living entity, meaning it is constantly changing. It thrives on diversity. Claiming the sole right to interpret it doesn’t restrict that aliveness or diversity, but it does refuse access to literature to all those who speak and write differently.
2.7
Without standard German as your entry ticket, you can’t get in. No matter how much you understand about drama, about dramatization, metaphors, credible depiction of mental worlds, tension, tragedy, comedy, psychology, character development, structure, composition, multidimensional writing.
3 The critics thing
3.1
It takes a whole lot of reading and a whole lot of time to become a critic.
Like anyone who does a public-facing job, critics want acknowledgement and recognition: for their judgement, their understanding of literature, their eye for the writer’s craft—for their expertise.
And yet they are only experts within their own reading background. Outside that field, they can’t make reliable judgements.
3.1.2
Critics could admit to uncertainty in their judgement of a piece of writing. But that would be rather like denying the expert status for which they’ve worked so hard in the past.
Instead, they’ll probably continue to apply their tried-and-tested criteria. For example, the mastery of standard language thing. The references to the canon.
3.1.2.1
In 1960s Germany, there were attempts to work pop culture phenomena into literature and break down hierarchies. For instance, our disdain for comics.
In the 1990s, the content of pop literature shifted. Whereas the 1960s saw an attempt to open up literature, in the 1990s, this newly gained ground was used to put up barriers by making judgements on taste. All of a sudden people were talking and writing about why Tina Turner was unlistenable, not claiming that pop as a whole was inferior.
Critics are also constantly concerned with drawing up barriers, drawing lines between good and bad, between linguistic competence and lack of understanding, between authentic and artificial, between prizeworthy and entertaining.
Naturally, they like the new pop literature better than the old.
Naturally, they like barriers because barriers make it easier for us to locate our own position.
3.2
Criticism is fond of attributing authenticity to novels when writing takes place in different social settings to those familiar to the critics. Which are generally the social settings they come from. The origins thing applies equally to writers and critics.
That’s the one time they make an appearance as experts outside their own field. See also point 6, the authenticity thing.
4 The gatekeepers thing
4.1
The first person in a family to go to university doesn’t usually get a creative writing degree; they’re more likely to opt for business studies, law or medicine.
People who think students have freedom of choice generally haven’t switched from one value system to another and aren’t capable of seeing the difficulties inherent in such a switch.
4.2
I’ve never seen a creative writing faculty from the inside, but I know one of their graduates pretty well and a few others less well. Many of them didn’t become writers in the end, instead going into other aspects of literary work: editing, event organizing, criticism. Areas where they have a greater claim to correct interpretation than that which novelists get. And are less at risk of slipping into the academic precariat.
That’s not necessarily the motive behind their decision not to become writers, but that decision helps—wittingly or not—to uphold existing power structures.
4.3
The best thing teachers can do is make themselves superfluous; train students to match up to their own level.
4.4
The cleverest thing institutions can do is be certain of their own significance.
Just like critics.
Neither institutions nor critics are interested in making themselves superfluous.
4.4.1
Institutions don’t need to make themselves superfluous because they always get fresh intakes. It is in the nature of every school to integrate students into a value system that the school itself co-creates. A teacher can question those values; the institution itself cannot.
4.5
Maren Kames, a graduate from the Hildesheim University creative writing faculty, wrote a foreword for the faculty’s annual anthology—which was not published in the book.
In it, she writes: “I learned nothing about writing in Hildesheim.”
And: “When I say I don’t know anything about writing, that I often find nothing and rarely anything stable, I don’t mean it in a whiny sense; I mean it in a sober sense.”
More in section 7, the prior knowledge thing.
Whatever motivated the editors to reject the foreword, it won’t have been confidence and an unshakeable certainty in their own significance.
4.6
Literary agents are middlemen. People who make a prior selection, which may or may not be in the interest of publishers and readers. Who can say?
They are yet more gatekeepers with the ability to make it harder for writers to succeed, if their origins have not kitted them out with contacts in the culture industry.
4.7
Anyone whose father eats out with senior editors has no need to worry about 4.6.
5 The characters thing
5.1
Has Selim been asleep on the job? There have been all sorts of working-class characters in recent German novels. Der goldene Handschuh, Hooligan, Ellbogen, to name but three of the better-known examples.
5.2
Hans Fallada wrote of his 1934 novel Wer einmal aus dem Blechnapf fraß (Once a Jailbird):
The novel was written not out of enjoyment of adventure, not as a genuine depiction of a real “underworld”, but to show how today’s penal system and today’s society force a man who once faltered to commit ever new crimes.
The author isn’t interested in criminality; what interests him is the criminal’s character and the structures of society. He doesn’t parade his character for his readers’ amusement; he leaves his dignity intact.
5.3
In more recent novels, working-class characters are usually of more interest as delinquents. Pow, he’s punched someone in the gob. Boom, she’s pushed someone onto the tracks. Oh no, he’s gone and drunk too much again, as the plebs do, and then he’s got brutal.
There’s an element of voyeurism, a presentation of characters without the slightest empathy, a confirmation of clichés.
5.4
Working-class characters aren’t interesting as a by-product churned out by our society, but as freaks: turned out differently from the rest, and no one can do anything about it—as we gaze on in amazement.
5.5
I can only think of one German-language novel since the turn of the century that describes a working-class character without taking a voyeuristic slant or pandering to a craving for the apparently authentic: Man Down by André Pilz, a novel in which criminality is the by-product of the conditions dictated by the social majority.
André Pilz is not a well-known writer.
6 The authenticity thing
6.1
Critics like to label novels as authentic when their characters aren’t privileged. How they compare them to real life, I’m not sure. Nor do I know why that ought to be a criterion for literature.
6.2
Senthuran Varatharajah says on the subject:
Authenticity as a literary criterion . . . is a confirmation of what I’ve always known, about people I know nothing about and don’t want to know anything about. It’s a synonym for resentment.
6.3
In the 1990s, the writer Wolf Wondratschek once threatened to beat up the critic Hellmuth Karasek. No, he didn’t. All he said was that he regretted the days were over when a certain kind of thing—a slating for his novel Einer von der Straße (One from the Street)—was dealt with outside between men. (Those days never existed, of course; even Hemingway never punched a critic, only other writers.)
6.4
I’ll punch the next guy in the face who starts on about “authentic” when he’s reviewing a novel featuring people he’d never talk to in real life.
6.5
The expression on the face of someone on the receiving end of a punch is always authentic.
6.6
I haven’t boxed for 25 years, I can’t punch anymore and I try to avoid violence wherever possible.
But the threat alone comes across as authentic, doesn’t it?
7 The prior knowledge thing
7.1
Leonard Cohen often quoted the Canadian poet Irving Layton, who said: “The two qualities most important for a young poet are arrogance and inexperience.”
7.2
Lila Says (see 2.3) was written in exercise books and possibly never intended for publication. Its publication was at least unlikely, assuming it wasn’t a marketing coup.
7.3
Creativity is also born of ignorance. Ignorance of where the barriers are. Ignorance of what the right technique is. Ignorance of how writing is supposed to work.
7.4
Ignorance of how industry structures function. Ignorance of how awards, grants and honours are allocated. Ignorance of where the power is.
That kind of ignorance is certainly a hindrance, but it goes hand in hand with ignorance of how quickly people can get ground down between the wheels of the publishing industry. That ignorance lends courage and forces artists to seek options for themselves, while offering them more possibilities to question structures—because they first have to go to the effort of learning about them.
7.5
I get the impression that every one of the writers now thronging the German book market not only knows their way perfectly around the conditions of the publishing world, its awards, grants, useful contacts, creative writing schools and self-marketing, but is also well acquainted with literary techniques and writers’ workshops—where texts are forged until they lose all their heat.
7.6
With regard to literature, any knowledge acquired is an illusion. See 4.5.
See also Kurt Vonnegut’s eight rules for writing, which end with the postscript that great writers tend to break all the rules.
7.7
Without that knowledge, writers are highly unlikely to get a publishing contract these days.
8 The own-biography thing
My paternal grandmother didn’t learn to read and write until after she turned forty. It was her only way of keeping in touch with my father, who was a guest in Germany but still had to work. My other grandmother was illiterate. My two grandfathers weren’t. Or they were, in a way—they had learned to read and write before Turkey adopted the Latin alphabet.
I grew up in the 1970s, a time when the average wage was still enough to feed a family. My parents both worked; we weren’t rich but we had more money than most people in our neighbourhood.
My father always said: “Reading is educational.” And: “There’s always enough money for books in this house.”
We had perhaps forty or fifty books at home and I saw my father reading the newspaper almost every day, but I rarely saw him with a book. He claimed to have read a lot when he was younger, and when I later read Dostoyevsky, Hamsun and London, I found the lines he’d sometimes quote.
I was allowed to buy myself as many books as I liked—from the books on display in the supermarket stationery section. The first time I set foot in a bookshop, I was thirteen. I had a library ticket, but I was at high school when I discovered there wasn’t just the mobile library that came once a week but also a library branch right there in the next neighbourhood.
Nobody guided or influenced my reading. My parents didn’t know what I was reading. There were a few things they didn’t know. They couldn’t help me with my homework. They couldn’t explain words I didn’t understand.
But it wasn’t just the language that was lacking. In the neighbourhood where we lived, shoplifting, souped-up mopeds, secretly smoking kids, footballs through windows and fistfights were part and parcel of life. There’d be drunk parents swaying across the playground at primary school fairs.
I saw friends getting a beating because their ball had rolled under a car and burst. I learned how to distract shopkeepers’ attention and what it meant to get barred. I had to at least understand the Cologne dialect, because it was important to know when you were being cussed.
I learned things you learn when you live in that kind of neighbourhood.
But everything I knew about literature I got from the books I read.
I learned complicated words with the help of a pocket dictionary, which I bought especially because I realized not understanding words would make it harder for me to get into the literary world.
I knew there were manuscripts, and publishers made them into books. I guessed you had to know complicated words in literary circles. That was about all I knew about the book industry.
In my early twenties, I sent manuscripts to publishers. Some books had the publisher’s address printed in them; I asked at a bookshop for other addresses.
Before my first publication I got dozens of boilerplate rejections, some with a handwritten note saying the title was great. The rejections didn’t get me down. See 7.1, inexperience and arrogance.
I became determined to receive a rejection from every German publisher. Every single one. I suspect you might be getting an impression of how little I knew.
Later, when my first novel came out and everyone at the publishing house was excited about it getting a positive review in the NZZ, I didn’t know what the NZZ was and why they were all so worked up about a newspaper review.
One book had always led to the next; I’d stumbled through bookshops and library shelves but never read reviews in the paper or even heard of literary supplements. I doubt I knew about Germany’s two enormous book fairs.
From today’s point of view, the path I took looks absolutely unlikely. I’m grateful that I’ve been able to follow the words and their sound as far as I have.
Perhaps I’m underestimating the internet; these days, someone like me might be able to get all the information they need. Perhaps every era has its own difficulties, like every writer has their own difficulties. Perhaps the situation in the book industry today is only an expression of the increasing commercialization in all areas of our lives.
But I know that literature can break down barriers. I know that breaking down barriers both calls for and causes mobility.
I regret that the unlikelihood of that mobility seems greater today than it was for me back then.
