Taking a Slug of America

American writers such as Paul Auster or Jonathan Franzen sell far better in Germany than in their home markets. This reception says more about German readers than the authors themselves.

When Paul Auster presented his film, “The Inner Life of Martin Frost,” at the Babylon cinema in Berlin last fall, his presence whipped up an almost rock star atmosphere. Hundreds crowded into seats and lined the walls of the historic theater, enduring a forgettable performance to savor the author-turned-filmmaker’s literary and political quips in the Q&A afterward, in which he confessed that “between writing books I’m half-alive and half-dead” and that “Bush has been the worst disaster of my lifetime.”

For a writer who landed his greatest success two decades ago with “The New York Trilogy” (1987) and “Moon Palace” (1989), and whose stock has by and large been declining on the American literary scene ever since, Auster’s triumphant appearance in Berlin said more about the German public than it did about himself. German readers today have an unquenchable thirst for American fiction. And sometimes, as it may be in Auster’s case, the popularity American writers can achieve here rivals the acclaim they receive back home.

Take a look at some recent sales figures from Rowohlt, the most important publisher of current American fiction in German. While Auster’s first two major novels combined sold more than 650,000 German copies, Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections” (2002) posted sales of more than half a million; Jeffrey Eugenides’ Pulitzer Prize-winning “Middlesex” (2003) 360,000; Siri Hust-vedt’s “What I Loved” (2003) 365,000 and Nicole Krauss’ “The History of Love”(2005) sold 120,000 copies.

What is it about American literature that has so many Germans turning the page? “German novels might be very intelligent and well-crafted but you really don’t want to read them,” suggested Wolf-ram Eilenberger, author of “This is Not America” (2008) and currently a U.S.-based correspondent for the German cultural magazine Cicero. “Americans have a much clearer view and more interest in portraying everyday life because they don’t want to pretend to be intellectuals. That’s a big cultural difference.” He added that being forced to “work around the anti-intellectual tradition, it is generally easier for American authors to apply abstract ideas and still form an everyday narrative that is extremely readable – which is something German authors still struggle with.”

Or in colloquial terms, he says, “You know the new Bud Light campaign, ’The difference is drinkability’? For Germans [consuming] American fiction, the difference is readability.”

Daniel Haas, a cultural critic for the German magazine, Der Spiegel, and close observer of American literature, agrees that the “very good mixture of speculation and critique on the one hand, and dramatic, plot-driven narration on the other” turns Germans on to American prose.

Criticism leveled at contemporary German novelists – perhaps to a fault, Haas suggested – is that they are either light-weight genre writers churning out mysteries, romances and the like, or high-brow intellectuals restricted to only the most patient and persevering readers. There’s not much in between, the argument goes.

“Germans love American literature because it tells stories and is intelligent at the same time,” Haas said, citing John Updike and Philip Roth as leading realist voices whose stark, precise vision of American life has fascinated Germans for a generation.

More popular for their structural complexity and analyses of culture are Don DeLillo – whose 2007 novel “Falling Man” was translated instantly upon its American release and ran in installments in the German weekly Die Zeit – and Thomas Pynchon, an author that is hard to grasp by most English readers’ standards. Pynchon’s mammoth-sized “Against the Day” (1,600 pages) appeared last spring to a flurry in the German press and sold a stunning 20,000 copies. “I don’t know if it’s readable in the classic sense,” Haas admitted but “we are really interested – even in a very complicated book like that.”
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Meanwhile, Jewish American writers like Jonathan Safran Foer (“Everything is Illuminated,” 2002), Michael Chabon (most recently with “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” 2007) and Jonathan Lethem (“Motherless Brooklyn,” 1999) have captured a distinct tone of young, urban America that appeals to Germans on a very basic level.

Andrew Gross, an Arizona native who teaches American literature at the Free University of Berlin’s John F. Kennedy Institute, says many German students are drawn to American writers partly because their intense studies of the Holocaust in school dwelled on nationalism and racism.

“They come to American literature looking for the opposite of that: anti-nationalism and anti-racism, and they tend to find it in the literature about minorities and ethnic identity,” Gross said. “If you offer a course in Jewish American literature here, it’s full. On the Harlem Renaissance, it’s full. Students now are very nuanced in the way they think about America … [and] in Germany’s attempt to come to terms with its past, American literature has played a central role.”

Groundbreaking non-fiction books by Americans about the Holocaust have also caused a sensation comparable in Germany to that across the Atlantic, like Daniel Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” (1996), which condemned the German population for abetting the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews, and Norman Finkelstein’s “The Holocaust Industry” (2000), which fiercely tackled the reparations debate. “It was even my impression that Hustvedt, whose novel ’What I Loved’ uses the Holocaust as backdrop, was better known here than in the U.S.,” Gross added.

In the mainstream, “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen, has embodied the successful American novel in Germany in recent years, blending moderately paced drama with humor, depth and crisp portraits of an American society in conflict. The fact that Germans have become so familiar and comfortable with American pop culture since World War II – from music to TV to Hollywood – contributes to the sense here that American literature reads almost like home.

“We have a feeling that we know this everyday life, it’s accessible, [so] there’s not much cultural translation to start with,” Eilenberger said. Television series like “24,” “Lost” and “The Wire” are of increasing interest to the German literary crowd, he added, because they’re “very economical, very tense, very well-composed.”

Yet, as Germans remain the world’s leading readers of foreign fiction, almost the opposite can be said for America where less than a handful of German titles get published each year. Perhaps the day will come when original, contemporary voices like David Foster Wallace (“Infinite Jest,” 1996), Denis Johnson (“Tree of Smoke,” 2007) and Richard Price (“Lush Life,” 2008) will emerge from Germany as popular reads in the U.S.

For now, though, the trend keeps moving in the opposite direction.