More German Book Award Reactions and German SF

Posted on October 9, 2013 by Cora

Denis Scheck, probably Germany’s most outspoken and snarkiest literary critic now Marcel Reich-Ranicki has left us, is even less happy about the German Book Prize than me. At any rate, he called awarding the Prize to Terézia Mora an “incredibly mistaken decision”, since Mora’s novel Das Ungeheuer (The Monster) was “torturous and whiny” and “the real monster in the book was the author”. Yes, German literary critics are what various angry young men and reviewer mean girls want to be when they grow up.

However, I not just like Denis Scheck, cause he can be hilariously snarky, but also because he is pretty much the only big name German literary critic who is genre-friendly. For example, he interviewed George R.R. Martin in his TV show and talked about James Tiptree Jr./Alice B. Sheldon on TV. And today, he discusses the state of the science fiction genre in Germany and elsewhere in the TV program Kulturzeit. The whole thing is well worth watching.

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The German Book Prize does it again and other literary news from Germany

Posted on October 8, 2013 by Cora

The German Book Prize 2013 has been awarded to Hungarian-German writer Terészia Mora for her novel Das Ungeheuer (The Monster). Spiegel Online, Tagesspiegel and the Süddeutsche Zeitung have more. Finally, here is a video interview with Ms. Mora about her novel.

Now I have expressed my disastisfaction with the German Book Prize selections before, both here and here. Now the good news is that Ms. Mora’s winning novel is not a middle class family saga set against the backdrop of German history like approximately eighty percent of previous winners. Instead, it is a sort of literary road movie featuring a disaffected middle-aged middle class man who travels through South Eastern Europe mourning his Hungarian-German wife who committed suicide. But then, tales of disaffected middle class people in their thirties and forties who are well off, but drift through life and refuse to grow up and become adults, can win the German Book Prize in a pinch, when there is no middle class family saga available. The 2006 winner, the novel Die Habenichtse (The Have-nots) by Katherina Hacker is another example. No, the trophy is not a baby, by the way. The baby is Ms. Hacker’s then newborn daughter.

Now I no more get the “disaffected middle class professional who refuses to grow up” subgenre than I get the “middle class family saga set against the backdrop of recent German history” subgenre. In particular, I always have problems figuring out what is so bad about the protagonists of those novels and why they are not considered proper adults. In Ms. Mora’s case, I suspect the reason is that her protagonist failed to notice that his wife was suffering from a deep depression that eventually led to suicide. Which would make him unobservant and potentially a jerk, but in what way is Ms. Mora’s forty-year-old protagonist not an adult? Privately, I suspect that accusations about characters not being “proper adults” are just veiled jealousy of people who manage to live a life free of marriage, children, mortgages and other attachments. But again, this does not apply to Ms. Mora’s protagonist, because he was married. And Terézia Mora explicitly said in the video interview I linked to above that her protagonist only becomes a full adult by the end of the novel.

Talking of protagonists we are supposed to dislike, because they allegedly refuse to grow up, I stopped reading Nick Hornby’s novels the moment I realized I was supposed to dislike his protagonists and sympathize with their annoying girlfriends, whereas I always sympathized with the protagonists (who were all geeks of some sort, so it was easy to sympathize, even if football or music are not my fandoms of choice) and hated the girlfriend characters.

But this is not supposed to be an indictment of Das Ungeheuer (the titular monster is the wife’s depression BTW), which I haven’t read. In fact, it seems as if very few people have read it, since Das Ungeheuer has only two customer reviews at Amazon Germany. Honestly, some of my stories have more and I have neither stellar sales nor a whole lot of reviews.

However, the German Book Prize is still sadly predictable. As for the supposed other favourites on the shortlist, Clemens Meyer’s novel Im Stein (In the stone) didn’t have a chance in hell, since it’s society epos set in the redlight district of a big German city and redlight districts are too alien and offputting for bourgeois middle class readers. Die Sonnenposition (The sun position) by Marion Poschmann had rather better chances, since it features the director of a psychiatric clinic in former East Germany shortly after the unification ruminating on his family history, i.e. it has the crucial ingredients middle class and family saga. Though in the end, the jury still went with Terézia Mora instead.

BTW, there actually was an SF novel on the shortlist for the German Book Prize, Nichts von euch auf Erden (Nothing of you on Earth) by Reinhard Jirgl, but unsurprisingly it didn’t win. For the record, I’m surprised it made the shortlist. A lot of people seemed to dislike Jirgl’s novel because of the faux futuristic slang he uses much of the time BTW. I wonder how they would have coped with A Clockwork Orange.

Interestingly, Terézia Mora also busts the prejudice that literary writers don’t write series and sequels, just in case John Updike’s Rabbit series hasn’t already done that. Because Das Ungeheuer is the sequel to Ms. Mora’s 2009 novel Der einzige Mann auf dem Kontinent (The only man on the continent), wherein the workaholic protagonist suffers from burnout and is saved by his wife, the suicide from the latter novel.

More German literature news: Bulgarian German writer Ilija Trojanow has been denied entry into the US, where he was supposed to speak at a conference in Denver. Officially no reason was given, but there are suspicions that an open letter that Trojanow and fellow German writer Juli Zeh wrote to Angela Merkel to protest NSA surveillance might have something to do with it.

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Some Thoughts on “Under the Dome” and my problem with post-apocalyptic fiction

Posted on October 6, 2013 by Cora

I finally got around to watching the last two episodes of Under the Dome tonight. I had to record them, because for some reason the show is inevitably broadcast when I’m at the monthly translators’ meet-up.

Now I have to admit that I never read the Stephen King novel the series is based on. I read quite a bit of Stephen King back in the 1980s, much to the consternation of my teachers, who hated Stephen King and all he represented. However, somewhere along the way I stopped reading King, though I did buy Joyland. I suspect Stephen King is one of those writers who are best read when you’re young and of course, his books always appealed to teenagers in particular, which is probably why parents and teachers in the 1980s hated them so much.

I didn’t have much hopes for the TV series. In fact, I only started watching it, because I’d heard good things from the US about the premiere (though interest seemed to have dropped off in latter episodes) and because there aren’t a whole lot of TV shows that appeal to me at the moment. I kept watching, because it was all rather intriguing. Besides, I like US small town stories and there are hardly any of them left on TV, compared to approx. fifteen to twenty years ago, when we had Twin Peaks, Northern Exposure, American Gothic, Picket Fences (okay, so it was crap, but it was a small town story), In the Heat of the Night and so on. The last shows along those lines were Jericho and Gilmore Girls, neither of which was even remotely good. Now Under the Dome, the TV show, is no Twin Peaks or American Gothic or Northern Exposure, but it was fun enough to watch.

Warning: There are spoilers in the following. Continue reading →

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Photos: Teutoburg Forest and Externstones

Posted on October 5, 2013 by Cora

Yes, I know I still haven’t posted my Norfolk photos, but I’m hip deep in class preparations at the moment. However, October 3 is unification day, which is a public holiday in Germany. And since the weather was sunny and gorgeous, we took the opportunity for a day trip to the Teutoburg Forest, which not just has some lovely scenic woodlands and hiking trails, but also a bunch of interesting monuments which are mostly located on top of mountains for some reason.

If the name sounds familiar, that’s probably because of the so-called Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD, when a group of Germanic tribesmen led by Arminius, Chieftain of the Cherusci, attacked and decimated three Roman legions under the command of Publius Quinctilius Varus, which ended the Roman reign in Northern Germany.

Ironically, the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest did not even take place in the area known today as the Teutoburg Forest or “Saltus Teutoburgiensis”, as Tacitus called it. For it turned out that either Tacitus or the historians or both were wrong and the battle took place in Kalkriese near Osnabrück, some seventy kilometers to the North of the previously assumed site.

It did, however, leave the Teutoburg Forest with a striking 19th century monument to a battle that never took place there, namely the Hermannsdenkmal, a monumental statue of Arminius, the victorious Cherusci chieftain, rechristened as “Hermann” by 19th century historians, because Arminius was not German enough. The Hermann monument was an example of 19th century German nationalism, which resulted in several very big monuments dedicated to important men (and they were all men – the female statues are all goddesses) dotted throughout Germany. Other examples are the Berlin Victory Column, the Monument to the Battle of the Nations in Leipzig or the Bismarck monument of Hamburg. Now I must confess that I have a weak spot for those monuments, even though I disagree with the politics behind them. However, they were fun places to visit, particularly as a child, when the political intent had long since evaporated. The Hermann monument is my favourite of the bunch, because how can you not love a 26 meter tall Germanic warrior with a winged helmet and a seven meter long sword? Who cares that he looks menacingly towards France, which is a neat trick, because given his location he has to look across the Netherlands and Belgium first and can only see France if he squints very hard. Okay, so he is an Arminia Bielefeld fan, but nobody is perfect.

Alas, I only got to see Hermann and his sword from afar during this day trip, so I don’t have any photos to share. However, both Wikipedia and the official site have more than enough to give you an impression of what he looks like.

But enough with the history, let’s have some photos, starting with another bit of false Romanism, namely the so-called Porta Westfalica, which is Latin for “gate to Westfalia”. The term does not originate in Roman times BTW, but is a 19th century faux Roman coinage. At Porta Westfalica, the river Weser passes through a gorge between the mountains of the Weserbergland and Wiehengebirge ridges. The “mountains” are not all that high, only 281 and 235 meters respectively. However, since they rise abruptly from rather flat land, the effect is striking. If you drive south on the highway A1, which passes through the gorge, you can see the Porta Westfalica mountains from quite far away. When I was a kid, I always thought that South Germany began at Porta Westfalica, because this was the point where you suddenly had mountains.

The Wittekindsberg, one of the two mountains flanking the Porta Westfalica gorge, also houses a striking monument to Kaiser Wilhelm I, which is visible from afar. The Kaiser Wilhelm monument is another example of the late 19th fashion for very big monuments depicting national icons and a popular destination for hikers and tourists. In my parents’ day, it was also a destination for school trips, but by the time I went to school the monument was no longer politically correct and thus no longer visited during school trips. Therefore I have to confess that I have never been at the monument, since my parents never took me either, cause my Mom got sick during a school trip to Porta Westfalica as a child and refuses to visit the monument ever since.

However, I got a really good shot of the Kaiser Wilhelm monument from the driving car this time around: Continue reading →

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Promo and plugs and my cousin goes indie

Posted on October 2, 2013 by Cora

Because October is the month of Halloween, Julie from Bards and Sages Publishing has set up a cross publisher bundle of horror and dark fantasy fiction over at DriveThruFiction. The bundle includes Letters from the Dark Side as well as a bunch of other good books, anthologies and short stories from several small press and indie publishers. Best of all, you you get 51.85 USD worth of fiction for only 13.99 USD.

The bundle function at DriveThruFiction is pretty neat in general. And so you can also get all three Silencer novelettes as well as all of our pirate stories in bundle form for a reduced price at DriveThruFiction.

Finally, my cousin Magnus Buhlert has joined the ranks of indie publishers and published two books via the German assisted self-publishing service epubli. Liberale in der Bremischen Bürgerschaft (Liberals in the Bremen city parliament) is a history of the Liberal party FDP in the Bremen state and city parliament and probably more of niche interest. Abgefahren is a collection of short stories and annecdotes about adventures and misadventures while travelling by rail in Germany. There is also a YouTube video about Abgefahren, featuring an interview with and some excerpts read by the author.

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The latest political plagiarism scandal

Posted on September 29, 2013 by Cora

In the aftermath of the German general election last weekend, we have been seeing heads rolling (metaphorically of course – no one is guillotining politicians) on a scale unseen since the French revolution. Victims so far include Philipp Rösler and Rainer Brüderle of the liberal party FDP, Peer Steinbrück of the Social Democratic Party SPD and Jürgen Trittin, Claudia Roth and Renate Künast of the Green Party (but not Katrin Göring-Eckardt, unfortunately).

So several major German political parties (I’m still including the FDP, even though they got kicked out of parliament) are already suffering from a leadership crisis. This is about the worst possible time for another political plagiarism scandal (just click on the “plagiarism” tag for discussions of earlier scandals). And yet it seems we’re in for another, because Frank Walter Steinmeier, one third of the leadership trio of the Social Democratic Party (the other two thirds are/were Peer Steinbrück who already resigned and Siegmar Gabriel), has been accused of plagiarising his doctoral thesis. Of course, we don’t know whether the accusations are justified and I haven’t seen any side by side comparisons yet. Still, this is bad news for a man who might well have been Germany’s next foreign secretary, a post he already held from 2005 to 2009.

I was quite shocked by this, because unlike previous political plagiarists Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg (still ranting in the New York Times, which obviously has no issues with plagiarists) or Silvana Koch Merin, Steinmeier never struck me as the type to do this.

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Back from the UK plus some random observations about Norfolk, TV and the elections

Posted on September 28, 2013 by Cora

Okay, so I’m back from Norfolk. Actually, I got back late Wednesday evening, but I needed yesterday to take care of things that didn’t get done while I was gone. I also took lots of photos, so there will be photo posts in the near future.

But for now, here are just some random observations about Norfolk, British TV and the German elections:

  • The Norfolk Broads are probably the least British looking part of the UK I have ever visited. In fact, the region looks uncannily like the Netherlands or Northern Germany (and of course it is only a short hop – 30 minutes by plane – to Amsterdam). “England dressed up as Holland”, I described it at one point.
  • Consequently, the works of the so-called Norwich School of 19th century landscape painters, many of whose works can be seen in the museum at Norwich Castle, part of a collection assembled by the mustard magnate J.J. Colman, bear a striking resemblance to the works of Dutch and Flemish landscape painters, while some of the later works on display reminded me uncannily of the works of the Worpswede painters to the point that I said, “If you told me that this was a work by a lesser known Worpswede artist, I’d totally believe you.”
  • At first glance, Norwich International Airport looks just like any other small regional British airport. However, if you try to fly out of Norwich, they charge you an “airport development fee” of ten pounds per person. There’s no notice, no advance warning, they simply won’t let you through the departure gate unless you pay up. Though they have a nice elderly lady explaining to you that you must pay, probably because they hope that justifiably enraged passengers won’t take out their anger on a little old lady. Now this one of the worst cash grabs I’ve ever seen. Oh yes, and guess who doesn’t have to pay, since they board through a separate gate? The heliport passengers bound for the gas platforms. To be fair, local British people hate that charge, too.
  • As for the German general election, I pretty much called it in my post last week, though I didn’t expect the liberal (libertarian in the US sense) party FDP to get kicked out of the national parliament altogether. I also didn’t expect Angela Merkel’s victory to be quite so decisive. Still, the signs seem to point towards a great coalition, though the Social Democratic Party is still playing coy (and making demands, having apparently forgotten that they only got around 25% of the vote) and a coalition between Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party and the Green Party is still in the cards as well, as is theoretically a coalition between the Christian Democrats and the Left Party (Dracula coalition?), though that would never work (might be fun to watch, though). Meanwhile, we’re also seeing a metaphorical rolling of political heads (finger-flipping Peer Steinbrück is the latest casualty) unseen since the French revolution.
  • The BBC News election coverage, while not bad, was certainly rather basic, particularly regarding the smaller parties. I had to resort to the Internet to find out how the Left Party or the Pirates did, though a BBC reporter did interview Anke Domscheit-Berg of the Pirate Party as well as  Gayle Tufts, an American entertainer living in Germany. But the highlight of the BBC election coverage was clearly a BBC reporter attempting to explain German parties and coalitions with the help of gummybears and licorice, which was absolutely hilarious. “She forgot the Left Party”, I said, “Were dark red or purple gummybears out? And what party are the white gummybears supposed to represent? The Pirates? The AfD?”
  • I’m really happy that the xenophobic anti-Euro, anti-foreigner, anti-everything party Alternative für Deutschland did not make it into parliament, though I’m kind of pissed that they got 4.8% of the vote. But then, there has always been a certain number of xenophobic arseholes in Germany, though the more moderate of them used to vote CDU.
  • Meanwhile, the British equivalent of the Alternative für Deutschland, the UK Independence Party held its annual conference during the time I was in the UK, where a leading member caused a scandal by calling female members of his own party “sluts”, hitting a journalist and later threatening to shoot that same journalist or maybe his own party chairman. Britain certainly has more colourful xenophobic jerks than Germany.
  • The Labour Party also held its conference in Brighton, while I was in the UK. And of course, the conference got a lot of coverage on the British news programs, much to the annoyance of my friend and myself, since we couldn’t have cared less. “So when is their election anyway?”, my friend asked me during yet another interminable report about the Labour conference. “In 2015”, I replied. “So they’re making all that uproar for an election that won’t be until 2015? From all the speechifying I’d have thought it was next month or so.” And indeed, there was more campaigning on display at that party conference two years before the next general election in the UK than there was anywhere two month before the German election.
  • Our neighbours in Austria are also having a general election this weekend. They also have one of those online quizzes which ask you questions on policy and then determine which party is the best fit for you. It thinks I should vote for the Austrian communists or the Pirate Party BTW.
  • Meanwhile, I was very pleased by the extensive coverage the BBC gave to the shopping centre siege in Kenya, especially since from what I could glean from German news sites, the German media had relegated the topic to the “And further news” block near the end of the main news programs, which – as I was once told point blank – is for topics such as disasters in foreign countries which are too big to ignore, but not considered relevant for German viewers/readers. “But I think an earthquake in India is relevant”, I said, “I don’t think German political blather is necessarily relevant.” So that’s one point where the BBC is better than the German news media. It does not automatically consider terrorist attacks affecting mainly people of colour irrelevant.
  • While on the topic of TV, is it me or has the quality of British TV declined significantly? For while I was there, there was almost no decent drama on the telly. There was an episode of New Tricks with a conclusion so stupid it made me actively angry, there was Orphan Black, which has gotten a lot of good press in the US, but which totally failed to impress me, there was Downton Abbey, which I can’t stand at all, and there was a new show called By Any Means, which looked halfway decent. Oh yes, and I saw a trailer for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. which looked really good (more once I watched it). Still a disappointing yield overall.
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In Norfolk

Posted on September 22, 2013 by Cora

I’m sitting here in a pub/coffee shop in Norwich, using the free WiFi to check my e-mail and the election results, cause BBC News isn’t all that adequate regarding the smaller parties.

Unfortunately hotel WiFi isn’t working properly, so I don’t know when I’ll be able to post again.

But I took lots of photos.

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Off to the UK

Posted on September 20, 2013 by Cora

In a few hours, I’ll be flying off to the UK. I don’t know how good my Internet access will be, so expect light blogging and don’t be surprised if I can’t respond to every comment rightaway.

I had planned for some pre-written posts to go up while I’m away, but didn’t get around to it. However, there will be photos, when I get back.

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A few words about the German general election

Posted on September 20, 2013 by Cora

This Sunday, Germany will hold a general parliamentary election. If this fact has escaped you so far, you’re not alone, for supposedly more than half of all young voters aged 18 to 29 have no idea that there is an election. Continue reading →

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