The Popular Culture Alibi: Bernhard Schlink's Detective Novels and the Culture of Politically Correct Holocaust Literature
2004; Wiley; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1756-1183
Autores Tópico(s)Crime and Detective Fiction Studies
ResumoThough Holocaust remembrance may be a high priority for official German culture, popular entertainment seems to have evaded this onerous burden. This essay takes Bernhard Schlink's popular detective novels-in particular the Selb-trilogy-as a case in point, arguing that the Nazi appears in these stories to be a quite achievable task. Over the course of three novels, the loveable Gerhard Selb not only rehabilitates himself, but contributes in larger ways to the normalization of contemporary German culture. Drawing on Ernst Bloch, the articles suggests that the genre of detective fiction is itself implicated in this normalization strategy. Finally, Detective Selb is viewed as a prototype for the characterization both of Hanna Schmilz and Michael Berg of Der Vorleser; the essay argues that a consistent ideology governs all these works. [the detective novel] is seldom praised and often read, even by those who despise it-what do we have here? There must be something to this case after all. -Ernst Block1 a mystery novel everyone is suspect, simply by virtue of being there. It's a kind of realism, which is the main attraction of these books. (Only the detective is exempt, since he-or she-is the fairy responsible for restitution and retribution.) -Ruth Kluger2 It had to be Germany. Where else could the mere suspicion of an anti-Semitic literary figure in a book that had not yet been published ignite such a vituperative controversy? British Germanist Michael Butler has since assured us that Martin Walser's novel, Tod eines Kritikers (2002),3 while perhaps in some ways tasteless, features a sufficiently ironic narrator such that the attentive reader will know to place his judgments in doubt.4 Frank Schirrmacher, ferocious editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, ostentatiously refused to serialize the novel because of the putative wrong done to real-life critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, whose popular but now defunct TV program Literarisches Quartett is without doubt the target of the novel's merciless (and, if we are honest, often quite hilarious) satire. Ironically, Schirrmacher-and those who take up his side of the dispute-appear to confirm Walser's own claim, made several years ago at the Frankfurt Book Fair, regarding the use of the Holocaust as a moral cudgel (Moralkeule) in contemporary German cultural politics.5 By responding so immediately and in denouncing the novel on grounds without the due process of literary-critical analysis, these pundits appear indeed to corroborate, if only in part, Waiser 's thesis that the Holocaust continues to dominate standards of judgment in German cultural matters. Are these headline-grabbing controversies surrounding Martin Walser really typical of broader German culture? In this essay, I want to draw attention to another German cultural arena that is significantly less sensitive to this rigorous agenda of mastering the past, one that in fact remains blithely exempt from Waiser 's moral cudgel. To introduce this point, let us employ the following hypothetical: Imagine a popular, best-selling piece of conventional German fiction that features a loveable (or at least pitiable) ex-Nazi who makes overtures to an attractive young member of the opposite sex. This figure with a burdened past eventually acknowledges having been involved in some nasty business, but pointedly never specifies her responsibility for crimes during the Hitler period. Imagine further that this character, definitely though nebulously connected to Nazi crimes, is portrayed as a moved-mover, that is, as a middle-management actor with accomplices and superiors at least as guilty as she, probably, we are led to believe, much more so. Hypothesize yet further that this novel places the ex-Nazi in the context principally of German (rather than Jewish) suffering, and that she is portrayed as having paid the price (or at least a very high price) while the truly guilty go unpunished. …
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