The English don’t read German literature. This is not, I suggest, because of our vulgar prejudice towards the Germans for being the people they are and having the history they do. That over-repeated Fawlty Towers episode, those ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ commercials and endless how-we-won-World-War-II documentaries keep such unselective loathing robustly alive, but in the case of books and authors the reason for our indifference is altogether simpler. Since most of us don’t speak the language, where are we to get hold of them? When, outside a secondhand bookshop, did you last stumble across a translation of Annette von Droste Hulshoff’s 1842 novella Die Judenbuche, a highly original fusion of thriller-writing, social analysis and meditation on the nature of truth? How easy to pull off the shelf at Waterstone’s is Paul Celan, whose works, if George Steiner is to be believed (though sometimes he isn’t), represent the alpha and omega of postwar European poetry? And who will give us an English version of Andreas Gryphius’s Baroque tragedy Catharina von Georgien, whose heroine finally does the decent thing by preferring a glorious martyrdom to worldly vanity ?
To those clinging to stereotypes of Teut- onic efficiency and regimentation there ought to be something comforting in the sheer untidiness of German literature.
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