Karolle-Berg, Julia

English

John Carroll University

John Carroll UniversityCarroll Collected2017 Faculty Bibliography Faculty Bibliographies Community Homepage2017Crime Fiction in German: Der KrimiJulia Karolle-BergJohn Carroll University, jkarolle@jcu.eduFollow this and additional works at: https://collected.jcu.edu/fac_bib_2017Part of the German Language and Literature CommonsThis Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Bibliographies Community Homepage at Carroll Collected. It has beenaccepted for inclusion in 2017 Faculty Bibliography by an authorized administrator of Carroll Collected. For more information, please contactconnell@jcu.edu.Recommended CitationKarolle-Berg, Julia, "Crime Fiction in German: Der Krimi" (2017). 2017 Faculty Bibliography. 55.https://collected.jcu.edu/fac_bib_2017/55Crime Fiction in German: Der Krimi.Edited by Katharina Hall. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2016. xxxvii + 166pages. £75,00 hardcover, £24,99 paperback. £24,99 e-book.The last decade in particular has witnessed significant English-language scholarshipon German-language crime and detective fiction. These contributions notwithstand-ing, a comprehensive history of German-language crime and detective fiction (col-loquially referred to by the umbrella term Krimi) had yet to be written. KatharinaHall’s 2016 edited volume Crime Fiction in German: Der Krimi, which appears inthe “European Crime Fictions” series, addresses this lacuna by offering “a compre-hensive overview of German-language crime fiction from its origins in the early nine-teenth century to the post-reunification Germany of the new millennium” (1).An introductory chapter precedes essays written by five additional contributorsand Hall. The first thematic chapter chronicles the evolution of the Krimi in the 19th-century German-speaking world, the following two focus on Austria and Switzerlandin particular. The second half of the volume focuses on subgenres that emerged after1945, with forays into the Afrika-Krimi, the Frauenkrimi, historical crime fiction, andthe Fernsehkrimi. Each of the seven chapters after the introduction concludes with ashort excerpt of a representative text. Generous supplementary materials serve asbookends and include a map of the German-speaking area, a timeline of significantevents (political and literary), and an annotated bibliography of relevant primary andsecondary sources.Evident throughout the volume is an attentive editorial hand: the essays areconscientiously researched and engagingly written. Hall’s introduction serves as aneffective entrée into the volume, navigating the generic discourse and laying out keyterms and tensions. The introduction additionally offers précises of the subsequentchapters, bridging content gaps between them and linking the most salient themes ofthe volume to existing scholarship.Next, Mary Tannert provides an overview of early crime and detective fictionin German with the goal of documenting two complementary forces: social contextthat favors “causality and the exercise of inquiry and ratiocination,” and the emer-gence of narratives conducive to detection (33). Tannert explains how the criminal-justice system in German states developed during the 19th century and, drawing onlandmark crime narratives, shows how investigative models and notions of criminalitylikewise evolved. The resulting impression is that a more nuanced engagement withsocial class, criminality, and justice existed in late 19th-century German-languagecrime literature than frequently assumed.The next two chapters focus on the development of the Krimi in Austria andSwitzerland, respectively. In the former, Marieke Krajenbrink identifies distinctivecharacteristics of the Austrian Krimi such as “a marked sensibility for language,” theViennese inclination toward satire, and an “intense engagement with Austrian society”(51–52). Krajenbrink then considers influences to the genre since the 1960s: writerssuch as Peter Handke and Gerhard Roth, whose provocative deployment—and de-construction—of generic elements in anti-crime novels would inspire later writers inthe genre proper. The balance of Krajenbrink’s chapter focuses on contemporaryAustrian crime fiction, profiling established authors who incorporate distinctive fea-tures of this country’s Krimis while continuing the tradition of generic deconstruction.While Krajenbrink’s contribution focused primarily on crime fiction of the lastfifty years, Martin Rosenstock’s essay on the Swiss Krimi underscores a longer en-gagement with crime and detective fiction in that country. Consistent with most treat-ments of the Swiss situation, Friedrich Glauser and Friedrich Dürrenmatt enjoy prideof place here, but Rosenstock follows the lead of more recent scholarship that extendsthe trajectory of the genre both forward and back. Glauser and Dürrenmatt are nowlinked to early influences such as the 18th-century author François Gayot de Pitavaland Swiss author Carl Albert Loosli (1877–1959). Portraits of two contemporarySwiss authors who serve as standard-bearers of the Swiss legacy round out Rosen-stock’s analysis.The volume’s shift to a thematic approach is inaugurated by a chapter on theAfrika-Krimi. Here, Julia Augart provides a detailed typology of approximately 100works that have appeared over the last forty years, including featured countries, typesof investigators, and common plotlines. Given the relative novelty of the Afrika-Krimiin German scholarship, Augart focuses on introducing the genre rather than offeringan in-depth analysis of representative works. Augart’s brief but insightful treatmentof Bernhard Jaumann’s postcolonial Steinland (2012) at the conclusion of her chapterpoints to the tremendous potential of increased scholarly attention to the field.In a chapter on the Frauenkrimi, Faye Stewart explores how these works “con-test social inequality and celebrate new constructions of gender and sexuality” (100).Akin to Tannert’s analysis of the literary form as well as the context in which itemerged, Stewart situates a growth in women writing for and about women in thelarger cultural and political circumstances that facilitated the rise of the Frauenkrimiin the 1980s. Stewart retraces the contributions of women writers to crime and de-tective fiction from the 19th century onward, comparing them to works published afterthe Frauenkrimi became established as a distinct subgenre. Having assigned theFrauenkrimi’s birth to the mid-1980s and a momentous rise in socially critical womenwriters, Stewart then chronicles the genre’s development over the decades, includingits evolving social agenda, publishing landscape, and expanding cast of characters.Hall contributes two final chapters to Crime Fiction in German. In one devotedto the budding subgenre of historical crime fiction, she explores how, and to whateffect, recent German history is operationalized: some crime novels seek to raiseawareness of key moments in German history, some build on new approaches inhistoriography, some rework the prevailing historical narrative. She concludes with aclose reading of two historical crime novels which, at first blush, are generic antipodes.They were written sixty-five years apart; one is based on a true case from the ThirdReich, the other a counter-historical novel of a still-existent GDR. Ultimately, Hall’sjuxtaposition of these works underscores the manifold strategies through which thesubgenre takes on “weighty themes, such as the state’s capacity for criminality, policecorruption, and the often elusive nature of justice” (126).In recognition of the fact that television Krimis are also wildly popular in theGerman-speaking world, the volume concludes with a brief treatment of this form.Here, Hall chronicles the best-known series from both the FRG and GDR, highlightingCold War tensions and, more recently, efforts toward greater representation acrossgender and ethnicity.A perennial challenge of edited volumes is to provide thorough coverage of thetheme in question. Yet in light of the goal of Crime Fiction in German to offer a“comprehensive overview of German-language crime-fiction” (1), the omission of achapter on Germany, which would have taken up Tannert’s evolutionary thread andalso paralleled the regional focus of chapters on Austria and Switzerland, was some-what curious. Such an essay would have seemed a fitting place to treat Krimis of the1920s and 1930s, the prodigious publication of crime fiction under National Social-ism, crime fiction in the GDR, and the post-1945 West-German Soziokrimi. To besure, Hall develops these genres to an extent in her introduction, and treatment of thelatter two subgenres appears interspersed in the volume. But the shift of some contentfrom the introduction to a discrete chapter might have provided greater balance acrossthese crucial moments in the evolution of the Krimi, and more concretely redressedsome lacunae in this genre’s literary history. This point notwithstanding, the editor’sgoals to present an abundant corpus of primary literature and to synthesize existing,primarily German-language scholarship for a broad readership, are objectivesachieved in this volume without qualification. These accomplishments alone willquickly earn Crime Fiction in German recognition as a significant contribution toscholarship on the Krimi.John Carroll University —Julia Karolle-Berg

Crime Fiction in German: Der Krimi

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