The passion and the good became the most important literary ingredients in 2022. That’s where art comes to a crashing end.
The writer Sebastian Fitzek loves the big stage. In 2019 he will be accompanied by a classical ensemble and will be touring through 20 cities.
Without a doubt: we did a lot wrong last year. We didn’t eradicate the bad from the world, and when we tried to retreat into private life, that wasn’t good either. The “Spiegel” book bestseller list for 2022 is very clear. Emotional kitsch and thrillers as far as the eye can see. Fitzek and Dorte Hansen. Link, Schlink and at least Strunk.
We’re reading it wrong, say the feuilletonists and Germanists, already sore from the sniffles. One of the most famous among them is Moritz Bassler, a professor in Münster. Bassler has something against the ready-made in literature and against sentences that can also appear in early evening series. In the case of Sebastian Fitzek, which has been read millions of times, women like to “give themselves to a representative of the ‘stronger’ sex”. The passions escalate in a «love night». Even if their conclusion is: “The sex was amazing!”, the hardened Germanist Bassler is not to be gotten. He calls out his taunt: «popular realism!» That’s the name of his new book. The book, however, has to be criticized for not having a more popular title. A lot of what it says is correct.
Fitzek’s sex and crime scam – for free! For as long as literature can remember, it has dreamed up tales of seething passion that cultural elites despised as professionally as the masses of readers loved them. Sometimes you even shake hands across the boundaries of taste. Most recently, this happened with the novel that sold the most in Germany last year: Bonnie Garmus’ “A Question of Chemistry”. If you don’t know the book, you can find out more about the heroine of the novel in advance. “Elizabeth Zott is a woman with the unmistakable demeanor of someone who is not, and never will be, average. But it’s 1961 and the women are wearing shirt dresses and joining garden clubs.”
Mrs. Zott and her shirt-blouse-wearing garden club colleagues have made it amazingly far, even in the more sophisticated media. The internationally expensive traded test-tube novel by the American author was highly praised by Elke Heidenreich and also appeared on Swiss television’s “Literaturclub”. “A question of chemistry” was received so enthusiastically because the main character is so “passionate”. A fighter for the cause of women!
Educational added value
Passion in novels is probably a tautological concept, and Moritz Bassler is an enemy of these tautologies. Simply recreating reality in bloodless formulas, but mixing in a dedicated ethic, is part of the essence of “popular realism”, as he describes it. The sentences of these novels resist nothing. Language does not want to find or invent anything. The moral of these stories is always right anyway.
Moritz Bassler picks apart identity-political novels by Sharon Dodua Otoo and Olivia Wenzel in a large arc. He takes on the gender and queer literature and the milieu descriptions of Berlin’s bohemian precariat. In the supposedly real life of these novels, there is much that is wrong. Clichés, which are always clichés in language.
Bassler even tackles the works made for the old white man who reads. Daniel Kehlmann’s “Measurement of the World” is added value for the educated middle class, where one shouldn’t look too closely at the language. Carl Friedrich Gauss! Alexander von Humboldt! Nature and mathematics! That’s enough to enter the spheres of “midcult”. In a form of upscale entertainment literature that is spreading globally, the translatability of which into other media and languages is always taken into account when writing. It reads well all over the world and can be filmed.
Another trick of popular realism: he intersperses “heavy themes” into his trivia. Stories about trauma, the Holocaust or racism. Years ago, Takis Würger’s novel “Stella” was such a calculated novel, in which the Holocaust and sex were brought together in a sticky way. Sometimes the boundaries are fluid: is Yasmina Reza’s hit novel “Serge” so successful precisely because there is hearty laughter about Auschwitz on a few pages? Despite the heavy subject matter, the book is fairly trivial.
Literature today comes along with attempts at moral blackmail, to which we sometimes willingly engage. The world is indeed bad. She should get better. But novels that aim to make the world a better place are often pretty bad novels. You have to be allowed to say that.
The real life
There are also quite a few good people writing stories about their own lives or the lives of their families right now. Grandparent, father and mother stories are booming. Most of these autofictions will be true, but it is also true: literature of this kind leaves the reader, especially the professional one, helpless: how to tell the author that he can still be a little more ambitious about his memories, his traumas, what he is supposed to be could have described?
The struggle for literature today is also a war of credibility. The real experience, the supposedly authentic, can inspire literary careers to a degree that pure invention can no longer do. If identification and empathy become the exclusive currency of literature, then aesthetically little is needed. Only the ethical remains.
In his new book “The Happy Secret”, which will be published next week, Arno Geiger describes what happened to him after the publication of his father’s book “The Old King in His Exile”. Again and again he was accused of not writing the story like a son, but like a writer. An accusation that the Austrian author can still talk about in a rage today. He wrote this work not as a son, but as a writer. So that it becomes literature.