Contemporary German Crime Fiction

A Companion

Thomas W. Kniesche, Thomas W. Kniesche

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783110422252
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literarische Sammlungen

A companion to contemporary German crime fiction for English-speaking audiences is overdue. Starting with the earlier Swiss "classics" Glauser and Dürrenmatt and including a number of important Austrian authors, such as Wolf Haas and Heinrich Steinfest, this volume will cover the essential writers, genres, and themes of crime fiction written in German. Where necessary and appropriate, crime fiction in media other than writing (TV-series, movies) will be included. Contemporary social and political developments, such as gender issues, life in a multicultural society, and the afterlife of German fascism today, play a crucial role in much of recent German crime fiction. A number of contributions to this volume will comment on the literary reflection of these issues in the texts. The goal of the volume is to make available to English-speaking audiences, to students, teachers and to a wider circle of interested readers, a series of articles on genres, topics, authors, and texts that will help them understand the scope and depth of German crime fiction, its ties to international traditions and also the specificity of the German context, its historical development and contemporary situation.

1 Introduction: German and International Crime Fiction

Thomas W. Kniesche

International crime fiction vs. crime writing in Germany

Crime fiction has long been considered a literary genre dominated by the Anglo-American writing tradition. This tradition started with Edgar Allan Poe’s stories featuring C. Auguste Dupin, followed by the singular phenomenon of the best-known fictional detective of all times, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. It continued with the authors of the ‘golden age’ of crime fiction (Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Philo Vance), the American hard-boiled school of the 1920s and 1930s (Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler), the police procedural (Ed McBain, P.D. James), the spy thriller (Ian Fleming, John le Carré), the forensic thriller (Patricia Cornwell, Kathy Reichs) and the serial-killer thriller (Thomas Harris, James Patterson). The importance of other distinct national traditions of crime fiction, such as the French, Scandinavian, and Italian traditions, has now also been recognized, and writers from Spanish-speaking countries have had considerable success with English-speaking audiences. On the other hand, many still view crime fiction written in German as a case of a ‘missing literary tradition’.¹ A chapter on ‘Crime Writing in Other Languages’ in an otherwise comprehensive recent companion to crime fiction briefly mentions the Swiss author Friedrich Dürrenmatt but makes no reference to any other German-speaking writers.² The widespread understanding, however, that there is no tradition of crime fiction in Germany is a misconception. It is time for a more differentiated narrative to replace the myth of the missing tradition of German crime fiction.

Due to the immense popularity of detective fiction modelled on the stories and novels of Edgar Allan Poe, Émile Gaboriau and Arthur Conan Doyle, and the dominant role played by the Anglo-American authors of the ‘golden age’, until the 1950s, crime fiction was largely seen as an extension of the concept of the ‘whodunit’.³ Crime fiction that employed the formulas and conventions of the ‘whodunit’ also gained a large following in German-speaking countries in the nineteenth century, but this was a time when other forms of crime writing also developed, competing with detective fiction. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, documentary literary styles depicted crime as realistically as possible, illuminating both the social and psychological backgrounds to criminality and the way the penal system functioned. This was largely a didactic literature that was interested in contributing to ongoing discussions of judicial, sociological and psychological concerns. These texts clearly distinguished themselves from detective fiction in other European countries and in the US, which was written and read as a literary game, where the reader would compete with the detective to solve the mystery.

The strong separation in German cultural history between ‘serious’, ‘high’ literature and ‘mere’ entertainment or genre literature is another reason why the notion that crime fiction has no tradition in German-speaking countries gained so much traction. Novellas and novels such as Friedrich Schiller’s Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre [1792‚ The Criminal of Lost Honour], E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Das Fräulein von Scuderi [1819, Mademoiselle de Scudéri], Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s Die Judenbuche [1842, The Jews’ Beech Tree], Theodor Fontane’s Unterm Birnbaum [1885, Under the Pear Tree] and Jakob Wassermann’s Der Fall Maurizius [1928, The Maurizius Case] all tell tales of crime, criminals and detection. However, these texts have never been considered candidates for possible inclusion in the tradition of crime fiction and are instead allocated to the canon of ‘high’ or ‘true’ literature.

A third explanation for why crime fiction is missing from the German literary tradition is that, after the downfall of the Nazi regime in 1945, translations of Anglo-American writers dominated the crime fiction market. Authors writing in German had a hard time gaining recognition and it was only in the mid- to late 1960s that readers in Germany would take notice of home-grown crime fiction.

A very short history of crime writing in Germany and elsewhere

In order to elucidate and illustrate these issues we have to look back at how crime writing in German has developed and compare it with other national traditions. Just as in other European countries, in German-speaking countries, writing and publishing about crime for a wide audience goes back to the early days of printing. As sensational stories about murder and mayhem were becoming popular material for pamphlets and broadsheets in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,⁴ they were also quickly gaining a captive audience in German readers. These broadsheets often featured illustrations made from woodcuts in order to include the many illiterates among the population in their audience.⁵ However, the stories told in this format were not what we would consider crime fiction. They focussed on the criminal act itself, its brutality and the sordid motivations behind it. No process of detection took place; instead, it was usually an act of divine revelation that connected the criminal to the crime, for example, the corpse of the murder victim would start bleeding as the culprit approached. Broadsheets described the punishment in revolting detail in order to deter the audience from contemplating criminal acts themselves.

This situation changed in the seventeenth century, as legal scholars began employing a new narrative form, the case history, to explore crime in a fresh light. In 1649, the legal expert and poet Georg Philipp Harsdörffer published a compilation of novellas,⁶ in which sinful behaviour resulting in crime was invariably met with draconian punishments. Most of the stories in Harsdörffer’s collection were translations and adaptations of anthologies of novellas that the French bishop Jean Pierre Camus had been publishing since 1630. The case history combined what we now refer to as ‘true crime’ with elements from a variety of discourses (legal history, forensics, psychology, philosophy, etc.) to create a narrative form that would be of interest both to legal scholars and a wider audience of middle-class readers. The latter wanted to be entertained while also being informed about the origins of crime, criminal acts themselves and how the legal system would deal with them. The widespread interest in case histories and their printed anthologies was a truly transnational phenomenon that has survived in other forms to the present day.⁷ Other early examples of these fictionalized forms of true crime were the stories that would later be collected in the Newgate Calendars⁸ (starting in 1728) and in the twenty-volume Causes célèbres et intéressantes [Famous and Interesting Cases], compiled by the French lawyer and writer François Gayot de Pitaval (1673–1743) and appearing between 1734 and 1743. Pitaval went to the archives and searched for cases that had already caused a stir in their own time. He dug out the legal documents pertaining to the cases and combined them with excerpts from the judicial literature and vivid descriptions of the culprits, the crimes and their punishments. Pitaval was the first to augment the bare facts of famous historical cases with fictionalized accounts of their psychological underpinnings, the perpetrators’ sociological backgrounds and the public’s response to the crimes. The formula Pitaval found would prove enormously successful and influential. The first German translation had already appeared by 1747, and in 1792, one of the iconic writers later associated with German literary classicism, Friedrich Schiller, published a four-volume selection with a preface. Schiller praised the fictionalized case history’s potential for exploring the deepest recesses of the human mind and for gaining insights into anthropology, psychology, pedagogics and the medical sciences. In Germany, the Pitaval tradition continued well into the nineteenth century with the publication of the Neuer Pitaval [New Pitaval] by the novelist and lawyer Wilhelm Häring (aka Willibald Alexis, 1798–1871) and the legal expert Julius Eduard Hitzig (1780–1849). These stories first appeared in 1842 and became so popular that sixty volumes had been published by 1890.

In the nineteenth century, crime writing underwent a process of differentiation that generated a number of distinct narrative forms. In countries like Great Britain, France and Germany, these new crime stories met with varying levels of popular success, creating the impression that there was a preponderance of separate national traditions of crime fiction. The Anglo-American tradition of modern crime fiction is said to have its origins in Edgar Allan Poe’s (1809–1849) stories, which feature the brilliant, eccentric amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin. Poe’s ‘tales of ratiocination’ ushered in a new literary form, the detective story, and created a school of writing that found its adherents in novelists and writers such as Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Gilbert Keith Chesterton and Arthur Conan Doyle. Together, the detective story and the novel, the latter usually featuring a charismatic amateur detective, constituted the dominant narrative form in crime fiction until the end of the ‘golden age’ of the 1950s. This period gave rise to enormously popular writers such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, John Dickson Carr, Ngaio Marsh, S. S. Van Dine and Ellery Queen.

This tradition also heavily influenced German crime fiction, and the works of these writers appeared in translation and became just as successful as in their home countries. Crime fiction that originated in German-speaking countries, however, followed a different trajectory. The case histories of the Pitaval tradition had attempted to introduce legal thinking and an understanding of legal procedures into mainstream middle-class discourse. They had set out to engage an audience of non-experts in the exploration of legal issues and thus tried to mediate between the arcane discourse of legal scholarship and the harsh reality of crime in modernizing societies. Case histories relied mostly on authentic legal cases, which authors then supplemented with fictional material to provide a wider audience with a more interesting reading experience. However, the more fictional material the compilers and writers of case histories included in their stories, the more they were criticized for stooping to the base instincts of a mass-audience that was only interested in cheap thrills. Clearly, in a developing literary market, case histories would not be able to satisfy everybody’s tastes. There was room for other forms of crime writing.

Since the 1820s, and therefore almost a generation before Poe, the crime novella (Kriminalnovelle) had been gaining a strong foothold in German literature. The German crime novellas of the nineteenth century highlighted the moral, psychological and social causes of crime. They used fictionalized accounts of crime to explore the moral and psychological dimensions of criminal behaviour. The most important example of the early crime novella in German is E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Das Fräulein von Scuderi [1819, Mademoiselle de Scudéry]. Based on an authentic seventeenth-century string of poisonings in pre-revolutionary France, Hoffmann makes use of the historic setting and protagonists, up to and including the French king, but centres his story not on the poisonings themselves, but on a number of fictional murders, for which the widespread hysteria caused by the poisonings merely provide the background. The eponymous Mademoiselle de Scudéry takes it upon herself to investigate the baffling murders and, by using a combination ...