Abstract
Has German crime fiction reflected a unified national culture post 1989?
Of course, we do have a more serious-sounding compound for the thing: Kriminalroman, crime novel. And there are some strange German writers who insist they don’t write Krimis but crime novels – or even novels. But every German crime writer who has done a reading in a small-town library or town hall, with wine being served and music to accompany the event, is sure to have heard a version of a pop song which was number three in German charts in the autumn of 1962: Ohne Krimi geht die Mimi nie ins Bett, which tells the story of a woman named Mimi who never goes to bed without reading a crime novel – while her husband desperately urges her to switch off the light.
What does German Krimi – and, to be even more specific, the booming subgenre called Regional-Krimi – have to do with German identity, our inferiority complexes, the unification of east and west and possibly even German notions of blood and soil, or, to put it more mildly, the longing for one’s home and place of origin?
German crime writing – both east and west – became respectable only in the 1970s. West German crime writers of that generation would often name the Swedish journalists Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, best known as the husband-and-wife team who wrote the Martin Beck series of crime thrillers, as models for their writing. Like them they wanted to criticise problems in society, so this type of crime writing was labelled Soziokrimi. Friedrich Schiller’s 1786 story Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre (The Criminal who Lost his Honour) would have fallen into this category – if it hadn’t been labelled “classic” already, and if anybody had cared to remember.
One of the writers who wrote fine Soziokrimis in the 1970s was Richard Hey, whose last name is pronounced like “Hi”, rhyming with “die”, but whose name we younger kids pronounced as a native speaker of English would pronounce Hey (rhyming with May), automatically assuming either he was English or American by origin, or that he was using an English pseudonym, since serious German crime writing didn’t really exist. It was only in 1997, when Hey was to be awarded an honorary Glauser award for his lifetime achievement and I was asked to deliver an encomium, that I learned his name was originally German and that I should pronounce it the German way.
Above: Germany’s crime novels suggest the country’s national identity is still fractured
Credit: Illustration by Brett Evens Biedscheid
Around 1980, the Heyne publishing house made a daring attempt to move crime fiction up-market, placing a stamp on the covers of its Blue Series pocketbooks saying “Deutscher Autor” (German writer). The stamp had a peculiar resemblance to those stamps that every West German housewife was well familiar with, Deutsche Markenbutter (German butter). The Goldmann publishing house followed by creating a special imprint to republish classic crime by German writers, Sammlung deutscher Kriminalautoren (German Crime Writers’ Collection). There was more confidence, and money, in German crime writing than ever before.
After the collapse of the wall, highbrow critics started a search for the “novel of reunification”
Richard Hey was one of the first Germans – if not the first – to have a policewoman investigate his cases. But when, at the end of the 1980s, a new subgenre emerged, Frauenkrimi, crime fiction starring a female investigator, written by a female writer or directed at female readers – the term never really was defined – not many would have remembered Hey’s marvellous policewoman-protagonist, Katharina Ledermacher, with her tiny red high heels. The writers who then appeared on the scene usually named as role models either Sjöwall and Wahlöö or American writers such as Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton and their “tough cookies” invading a supposedly male genre. By coincidence, the Frauenkrimi subgenre emerged around the time when the wall collapsed. Names to be mentioned here are Pieke Biermann, whose debut novel Potsdamer Ableben (Potsdam Death) was first published in 1987, Sabine Deitmer (Bye, Bye Bruno) and Doris Gercke (Weinschröter, du mußt hängen, Weinschröter, You Must Hang).
There was crime writing in East Germany, too. The imprint DIE, short for Delikte, Indizien, Ermittlungen – Offences, Evidence, Investigations – was started in 1970 at Das Neue Berlin publishing house. By 1989, it had published 130 crime novels by such writers as Fritz Erpenbek and Tom Wittgen (pseudonym for Ingeburg Siebenstädt). There were certain no-go areas for East German crime: you couldn’t have a bad cop, and there had to be a clear moral to the story. But East German writers undoubtedly did a fine job walking the tightrope between ideology and censorship. Their writings demonstrated a subtlety that West Germans did not have to develop.
After the collapse of the wall, highbrow critics started a search for the “novel of reunification”, the novel which would depict the so-called Wende, the fall of the wall. They ignored the fact that crime writers such as Dagmar Scharsich (Die gefrorene Charlotte, Frozen Charlotte, 1993) and Hartmut Mechtel (Der unsichtbare Zweite, The Invisible Second Man), 1996, were dealing with recent German history and writing what you might have called Wende-Krimis, crime novels about the fall of the wall.
In 1992, my then-publisher Michael Kellner took part in a panel discussion on German crime literature and came up with a challenging statement. Crime novels, he said, are the modern form of what is called Heimatroman in German, a sentimental and nostalgic – if not reactionary – genre set against a local background, your Heimat (homeland), the place you feel you belong. Heimat does not necessarily have to refer to your home country: it is more about the region, the landscape, its taste and smells and the people it shapes, their culture, their dialect. The Heimatroman was a genre associated with rural areas – particularly the Alps and the Black Forest. But Krimi, said Kellner, can be considered a form of Heimatroman situated in big cities. Kellner published Hamburg-Krimis, crime novels set in Hamburg, which kept the highbrow literature part of his small independent publishing house going for a while.
Today the Regionalkrimi subgenre – crime novels set in a certain region – is going strong. Although crime writing originated as an urban genre, there is not a single region left in Germany that hasn’t been covered by Krimi. Allgäu-Krimi, Ostfriesland-Krimi, Münster-Krimi, Ostsee-Krimi, Nordsee-Krimi, Taunuskrimi … you might get the impression that reunited Germany is being split up into little states, kingdoms, dukedoms and tribal regions as it was pre-1871. There are not so many Regionalkrimis set in former East Germany, and there are not so many set in regions that are not popular tourist destinations – though there are examples of regions becoming popular with tourists because of crime novels set in them. The prime example is the Eifel region, on the borders of Germany, Belgium and Luxemburg. Former journalist and war correspondent Michael Preute published his first Eifelkrimi, Eifelblues, in 1989, choosing for a pseudonym the name of the place in the region to which he had moved, Berndorf. Each new title – Eifelgold, Eifelconnection, Eifelkrieg – sells some 150,000 copies in the first three months, making Jacques Berndorf, the “father of Regionalkrimi”, the best-selling German crime writer.
The German addiction to Regionalkrimi does not have much to do with literature, says critic Thomas Wörtche, who uses the term Krimi only in a derogatory sense. “It has to do with Germans’ self-reflection and self-consciousness. They want easy reading, and they want to avoid the accusation that they idealise their Heimat too much. So they seek refuge in a totally superfluous and irrelevant crime plot. Even the least talented amateur can feel part of a discourse.”
There is also a boom of Scandinavian, particularly Swedish, crime fiction in Germany, and this may stem from the very same nostalgic feelings. Many of the Swedish crime novels convey the cosiness of Miss Marple’s village (a similar culture of everyone knowing everyone’s business), while at the same time dealing with challenges faced by all modern Western societies: illegal trading of weapons and women, drugs, problems of migration and integration, the rise of right-wing nationalism and international terrorism. But the Swedes have two things Germans lack: a capital that they all accept as their capital and a landscape that everybody recognises as Swedish, be it the sea, the islands, the woods or the lakes. In Germany, however, a Bavarian is not very likely to identify with Berlin and “the Prussians”, and many west Germans have spent more holidays in Italy, France or Spain – or Thailand or Florida – than anywhere further east in Germany. Regionalkrimis seem to offer reassurance in rough times. There may be some irony in the fact that at the very same moment when our neighbours feared the rise of a Great Unified Germany after 1989, Germans themselves retreated to a somewhat more moderate form of patriotism, identifying with their regional background instead and thus asserting themselves as Bavarians, Saxons, or even Hamburgians, rather than feeling “German”. Sometimes, one might think we still had a fragmented view of ourselves as if the unification of 1871 had not quite taken place yet.
You might get the impression that reunited Germany is being split up into little states, kingdoms, dukedoms and tribal regions as it was pre-1871
There is a highly popular TV-format that has been broadcast by National German Broadcasting (ARD, formerly West Germany) for more than 40 years now, called Tatort (scene of crime). It is the longest-running and most popular TV-format ever. Here, due to the federal system of German public broadcasting, you have teams investigating in practically every region in Germany, namely 20 different places at the moment. On Sunday nights, when the new Tatort-production comes on, the nation gathers in front of the TV as if it’s a secularised church service. As critic Tilman Krause recently pointed out, the Tatort series is all about German work ethics, and it is no coincidence it’s broadcast at the end of the weekend, preparing the audience for yet another week of duty and work. According to Krause, even the most beautiful German cities, Hamburg and Munich, are portrayed only by their ugly parts, and the country seems to be unified in a lack of any capacity for enjoyment (good food, for example) and by what he calls a specifically German culture of depression.
So far, we have had Deutscher Krimi, Soziokrimi, Frauenkrimi, and Regionalkrimi, all within a few decades. What will come next? Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, our other great classical writer, Schiller’s great competitor, used to speak of Weltliteratur. One world, one literature, no national boundaries – let alone petty regional labels. This, along with Schiller’s free spirit – “Sire, do grant freedom of thought”, the famous lines uttered in his drama Don Carlos, Infant of Spain (1787) –would be my dream.