«Wir haben jetzt die Demokratie, das ist kompliziert genug». Zur Krise demokratischer Systeme und Auflösung des Politischen in «Munin oder Chaos im Kopf» von Monika Maron

In the light of the profound changes that have affected both the political scenario and the political role and forms of engagement of literature over the past thirty years, Monika Maron’s novel Munin oder Chaos im Kopf (2018) seems particularly topical. If analysed through Hannah Arendt’s remarks on the nature of politics and Zygmunt Bauman’s thoughts on our “besieged” society, the narrator’s shocking experience can be seen as both the consequence and the reflection of a failure of our democratic systems, as well as of our traditional idea of politics itself.

Ästhetischer Dünger

ZusammenfassungDie Neue Rechte betreibt seit 2000 eine umfangreiche Literaturpolitik. Aktionen im Literaturbetrieb, eigene Publikationen sowie ein expandierender Literaturjournalismus (der neben Büchern und Zeitschriften auch Internetblogs, Podcasts und Videos umfasst) werden mit zunehmendem Geschick und Erfolg dazu genutzt, neurechte Ideologien im Kulturbetrieb zu verankern. Dies zeigte sich u.a. in der 2020 um die Schriftstellerin Monika Maron geführten Debatte, die der Aufsatz zum Ausgangspunkt nimmt, um die wichtigsten metapolitischen Strategien neurechter Literaturpolitik vorzustellen: eine Veränderung des Lektürekanons, eine politische Funktionalisierung von Ästhetik und ästhetischer Erziehung sowie literaturbetriebliche Aktionen. Abschließend wird am Streit um den Debutroman von Simon Strauß diskutiert, wie sich angemessen (auch literaturwissenschaftlich) auf neurechte Literaturpolitik reagieren lässt.

The Yugoslav Wars 1990–1999 in contemporary literature in Germany and Austria

In this article, the literature on the wars in the former Yugoslavia is critically examined. The inter-pretive patterns of these wars aim at the authors’ confrontation with the “West that has gone wild” (Handke) and its colonial mentality, which manifests itself in the politically determined friend-enemy ascriptions. The writing about the wars also expresses a presumption whether or not we are in a state before “the war” (Monika Maron) and preparing for a new European tragedy through the language of hatred. On the whole, the article attests a responsible attitude by all authors, regardless of their position on the sides of the conflicts that are manifested in this high-quality literature.

‘MEMORY’ AND ‘OBLIVION’ IN CONTEMPORARY GERMAN LITERATURE

This article explores the concepts of memory and oblivion as dominant themes in the revision and reconstruction of the past in contemporary German literature. Michel Foucault’s method of discursive analysis and Jan and Aleida Assman’s memory theory are used to analyse narrative strategies employed by contemporary German authors. Historical, sociocultural, media, and psychological discourses are viewed as contributing to the formation of protagonists’ individual memories. The trajectory along which ‘functional memory’ transmutes from ‘comforting oblivion’ to the ‘loss of identity’, as depicted in the novels Abschied von den Feinden by Reinhard Jirgl and Animal triste by Monika Maron, is analysed in the context of the cultural trauma experience. A consequence of the traumatic experience is the splitting of the self and intrusion, which is expressed through random tormenting remembrances eluding narrative description. To the fore comes silence, which fulfils a narrative-theoretical function. Contemporary German novels written after 1989 are marked by asymmetry between cultural and individual memory. This asymmetry is manifested at the level of the protagonists’ speech and communicative disorders as well as in the inviability of memories beyond local spaces. Auto-communication, mediated reflection, de(re)construction of memories, and conscious oblivion become the principal models for the formation of individual, social, and national identity.