„So ist ein Buch entstanden, das die Geschichte der letzten sechzig Jahre der deutschsprachigen Literatur in vielen einzelnen Porträts beschreibt, in Lebens- und in Werkporträts, die hoffentlich am Ende ein zusammenhängendes Bild ergeben.“ (Zitat Seite 10)

Thema und Inhalt
Der Untertitel dieses Sachbuches beschreibt bereits Thema und Inhalt: „Eine kurze Geschichte der deutschen Literatur von 1945 bis heute“ und beginnt, ergänzt durch entsprechende Rückblicke, im Mai 1945 und endet 2005. Die Auswahl der über 140 Schriftstellerinnen und Schriftsteller (teilweise nur mit einem kurzen Absatz erwähnt) hat der Autor selbst getroffen. Die Werke selbst nehmen einen eher kleinen Teil der jeweiligen Kapitel ein, den Hauptteil bilden geschichtliche Rückblicke und vor allem Anekdoten aus dem Leben der Autoren und Autorinnen.

Umsetzung
Mentor und großes Vorbild von Volker Weidermann war Marcel Reich-Ranicki und ähnlich wie dieser bekannte Literaturkritiker wertet auch Volker Weidermann in diesem Buch teilweise sehr subjektiv und ordnet auch gleich das literarische Schaffen der besprochenen Autoren und Autorinnen je nach politischer Gesinnung in gut und schlecht ein. Das erste Kapitel dieses Sachbuches beginnt mit der Frage „Wo waren sie am 8. Mai?“, nämlich im Mai 1945, und stellt sofort das Werk von Schriftstellern wie Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Heinrich Böll und natürlich Heimito von Doderer ins künstlerische Abseits, lästert über Erich Fried, während er Seite um Seite mit Maxim Biller verbringt. Dass auch er Peter Handke ausschließlich nach „Eine winterliche Reise zu den Flüssen Donau, Save, Morava und Drina“ be- und verurteilt, hat mich in diesem Wertungskontext nicht überrascht. Von „Scharfzüngig und humorvoll“ spricht der Verlag im Zusammenhang mit diesem Querschnitt durch 60 Jahre Literaturgeschichte, für mich lesen sich manche Abschnitte eher als abwertend, denn als scharfzüngig, kombiniert mit Volker Weidermanns leicht überheblichem, belehrenden Schreibstil. Abgesehen davon jedoch ist dieser Ausflug in die deutsche Literatur ein gelungener, anregender Querschnitt, der neugierig macht, bisher Unbekanntes zu entdecken und zu erlesen.

Fazit
Ein Querschnitt durch die deutsche Literaturszene zwischen 1945 bis 2005, wobei der Schwerpunkt weniger auf den Werken der besprochenen Autoren und Autorinnen liegt, sondern auf Gschichterln und Anekdoten aus dem Leben derselben. ( )

The subtitle of this book is a little misleading - it isn't really a short history of post-war German literature, but rather a collection of short essays about some 150 German writers active in the post-war period. Weidermann avoids making any direct generalisations about literature as it exists in the German-speaking region, the role it has or should have in connection to German history and politics, the way it is controlled by publishers and journalists and writers' clubs, the way its annual cycle of prizes sometimes makes it seem more like a competitive sport than anything else, how it deals with regional differences, the way it's perceived outside Germany/Switzerland/Austria, etc., etc. - he sticks to the particular and only addresses those questions in passing, as and when they come up in the lives of individual writers. What this book is mostly about, in roughly equal measure, is sharing his gossipy journalistic interest in the lives of authors, and in discussing the way he reacts to what authors have written. It's unapologetically subjective - he claims that his inspiration was the semi-frivolous little book [Deutsche Literaturgeschichte in Einer Stunde] which the poet Klabund published in 1920, although it isn't hard to imagine that a large part of the motivation for putting together a book like this might have been the possession of a healthy backfile of his own newspaper articles and interviews about writers...

It is basically an anthology, so we can play "who's in and who's out". Essentially, he seems to have picked his candidates from amongst poets, dramatists and authors of literary fiction written in German and published between 1945 and 2005. There are a few essayists and diarists, but hardly any authors of genre fiction (the only crime writer apart from Dürrenmatt is Jakob Arjouni). Most writers who are included are there because Weidermann likes their work: only a few who are too big to ignore (Günter Grass, Christa Wolf, Stefan Heym) are there to be slapped down, and some notoriously successful mass-market authors (Simmel, Konsalik) are ignored altogether. With hindsight, the most embarrassing omission must have been Herta Müller - a literary journalist who failed to see the 2009 Nobel coming in 2006 obviously has some explaining to do! I had the feeling that he might have been under-representing both German-speakers from outside Germany/Switzerland/Austria and writers with an immigrant background, but so much has changed in Germany in the last ten years that it's hard to assess that objectively now. And of course there are authors I've read in the last ten years who might well appear in an updated edition of this book, but were unknown at the time (e.g. the DDR author Werner Bräunig, whose 1960s novel Rummelplatz was only published in 2007).

Obviously, in a book where most authors don't get more than two pages each, the opinions are usually quite summary, but most of the time he's given us enough context to understand how he gets there. But not always: in a couple of cases he plays with us, setting up the question "is it worth fighting through the obscurity of this author's prose?" and feeding us a string of good arguments for why we should attempt it, then concluding that we needn't bother.

There is perhaps a little hint of sexism in his choices and in the language he uses to describe writers: it's not blatant, but over the 150 or so mini-bios, you can see that he reacts to women writers in a different way from men. With Ingeborg Bachmann it almost seems that he's more interested in her role as a literary femme fatale than in what she wrote, but that could simply be because she only appears once in her own entry, but five or six times in those of others! Not a show-stopper, but something to bear in mind.

In any case, subjective as it obviously is, I found this a useful and entertaining book, even when I didn't altogether agree with his conclusions about the few authors I have read. It's meant to be readable, and Weidermann is obviously good at what he does. And it told me about a lot of writers I've overlooked through not reading the German papers regularly and only getting to visit big German bookshops once or twice a year. Not all of those will be writers I want to explore, but at least they are on my radar now, and I have some idea of a context to put them in when I do come across them. ( )