The German Literary Scene 2023

When asked about the German literary scene, I immediately think of how much has changed during the years I have represented German literature in Japan. In the 1990s authors from England and the USA dominated the bestseller lists – in Germany as well as in Japan. Walk into a German bookstore today and you find an abundance of original German titles alongside authors from all over the world. This is true for every genre.

An exciting new voice in German fiction is Caroline Wahl. Her debut novel, 22 Bahnen (22 Lengths; DuMont Buchverlag 2023) has jumped to the forefront of the SPIEGEL-Bestseller-List and shortlisted as Independent Bookseller’s Favorite Novel 2023. Heartwarming, fine, merciless and tender at the same time, the story offers a sharp portrayal of small-town attitudes and the struggles faced by Tilda, a young woman left to bring up her sister because of her mother’s alcoholism. Tilda’s lack of self-pity and humor carry the story. Ultimately, she finds happiness somewhere between responsibility and freedom.

Elena Fischer’s debut PARADISE GARDEN (Diogenes 2023) comes in a line of strong coming-of-age road movie novels reminiscent of Wolfgang Herrndorf’s TSCHICK which was well-received also in Japan. PARADISE GARDEN is a wise and touching novel about a girl that loses her mother, sets out to find her father and finds her own voice.

A bit of an immigrant myself I have always been fascinated by literature that bridges different cultures. Authors of “migrant background” provide fresh insights and often challenge common ideas and preconceptions. A growing number of such authors has enriched the German literary scene with their unique take on German culture.

Necati Öziri’s literary debut, VATERMAL (Birth Mark, Ullstein, 2023), portraits a family whose lives and bodies are marked by social and political circumstances in Turkey and Germany. Necati Öziri outlines the big questions of our present: what role models are given to us? How can transgenerational traumas be healed? “Heavy stuff, written as lightly as a feather.” (Özlem Sarikaya)

One of the most popular immigrant authors has been Wladimir Kaminer. His highly entertaining stories on Russians in Germany have been hugely successful over the past 20 years. Recently, in light of the war in the Ukraine, Artur Weigandt’s DIE VERRÄTER (The Traitors, Hanser Berlin 2023) has earned much attention. The journalistic novel is set in his hometown Uspenka, a village in the vast steppe of present-day Kazakhstan, where roads, cows, and people run parallel. The events that took place in Uspenka could have happened anywhere in the USSR: Its people were repressed, coerced and deported. When the Soviet Union collapsed, many of them abandoned Uspenka to start a new life abroad, and thus became traitors to their homeland. Weigandt forces himself to confront his own roots, and vividly describes how frightening home can be, especially when war breaks out.

Challenging his audience with questions on justice and dignity, Ferdinand von Schirach keeps touching a nerve with his stories, novels and plays. His most recent work, REGEN (Rain, Luchterhand 2023), is a narrative in the form of a theatrical monologue: A man comes drenched from the rain into a bar and thinks about crime and punishment, about the great and the terrible of our time, about human dignity, loneliness, love, loss and failure. “How to live, how to live? Questions that the monologue touches. Casual, but not without answers.”- Christian Eger / Mitteldeutsche Zeitung

The genre of Crime Fiction seems to become more and more popular worldwide. Germany is no exception. The range stretches from humorous cozy crime such as David Safier’s MISS MERKEL on the former chancellor and her doggy (Rowohlt), over Rita Falk’s provincial crime series around the local police officer Franz Eberhover set in a Bavarian village (DTV), to hardcore thrillers by Andreas Winkelmann (Rowohlt). Interestingly, more and more German crime authors place their novels in scenic parts of France, Italy and other popular holiday destinations.

One of my personal favorites, however, is Oliver Bottini, 4-time-winner of the prestigious German Crime Fiction Award. His series around the female chief inspector Louise Boni has received high critical acclaim. His intelligently crafted spy novels have been compared to Frederic Forsythe’s classic The Day of the Jackal and to Don Winslow’s works. There are only very few who can write with such insight on difficult themes such as ethnic cleansing in the Balkans (DER KALTE TRAUM The Cold Dream), illegal gun trade in North Africa (EIN PAAR TAGE LICHT A Few Days of Light), and most recently the war in Iraq (EINMAL NOCH STERBEN Dying once more).

In the Feel-Good-Genre Carsten Henn’s Der Buchspazierer (Books To Go On, Piper, 2020) has been aptly described as “somehow hugging you when you read it, it really pulls you into its arms.” (Deutschlandfunk). In this story the small-town German bookseller Carl Kollhoff delivers his books to special customers in the evening hours after closing time, walking through the picturesque alleys of the city. These people are almost like friends to him, and he is their most important connection to the world. When Kollhoff unexpectedly loses his job, it takes the power of books and a nine-year-old girl to make them all find the courage to rebuild their bonds with each other.

The immense popularity of Henn’s novel in Germany and worldwide is especially intriguing in the light of its Japanese siblings – Michiko Aoyama’s WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR IS IN THE LIBRARY (青山美智子著「お探し物は図書室まで」ポプラ社)　and　Satoshi Yagisawa‘s　 DAYS AT THE MORISAKI BOOKSTORE (八木沢里志「森崎書店の日々」徳間書店) – having met with equal success. As many countries seems to focus more and more on its homegrown literature, themes and interests increasingly overlap.