Karenina.it Express - Theories: Sub-Culture, Underground- & Pop-Literature in Germany
On Contemporary German Literature.
Sub-Culture,
Underground- & Pop-Literature, Live-Lit., Slam!Poetry and other
experimental Issues.
As the title makes
clear, the theme of this talk isn `t the so-called “conventional literature”. “Conventional
literature” for me means a kind of poetry that happens on the book fair,
mainstream literature, bestsellers - all that stuff. Underground, alternative
or independent literature - whatever: will then be a kind of literature that
you don `t find there. A kind of literature that isn `t published by the
big publishing houses, but that takes a part in the literary infra-structure -
sometimes it might be only a local or regional phenomon, but it can be (and I
want to tell you about this): it can be a national phenomon, too.
I have to admit,
that this difference is kind of virtual: in that the boundaries are floating
today. So it doesn`t mean at all, that conventional literature is bad, and
independent literature is the good one - both can be both. And it doesn `t mean
either, that underground literature has to be Bukowski-like, has to do with
drugs and drinking and sex - or that “conventional literature” would NEVER
treat these issues.
The reason, why I
talk about these independent things, is this: to deal with “literature” as a
text, it takes a precise text analysis, an exegesis, that `s quite academic and
maybe boring for you. So I ´m not talking about the material of
literature, i.e.: language, style, form or content - or about some special art
works, but about the cultural context in which literary activities are embedded
today. So, I want to illustrate the contemporary literary scene in present day
Germany, the vivid literary life as it happens everyday in the clubs and the
galleries and the festivals. If you want to know something about Günther Grass,
the most famous German novelist, you can go to the library, since he will be
translated in Japanese.
Do you ever go to a
reading? Why or why not?
I don´t know how
things are in Japan, but I do know that there some european countries, where
people are not used to poetry readings. In Germany, they were, but the art
product “reading” became so boring during the seventies and the eighties, that
young people weren´ t interested in it anymore. The conventional reading is - a
poet, sitting an a chair, in front of a table, with flowers and a water glass. And
then there is this silence: nobody in the can say a word.
The only exception
was through the influence of the American beat-literature: some of these poets
worked together with musicians, some integrated small performance elements in
their stage shows.
And there was a
German response, too: German beat poets in the end of the sixties, who tried to
build up a language of the subculture and proper German underground-literature.
They also had the aim to transcend the feature of “conventional reading”. The
most important of them was (and still is) Hadayatullah Hübsch, who performed
with free jazz groups in the seventies - then, nobody could understand this,
because he was the only one to perform in such a weird way. Hübsch developed a
certain music-based language-production, it `s quite similar to rap music. Here
`s one of him:
EXAMPLE ONE: H.
Hübsch: ARBEITEN!
The stress lies on
the words: “WORK! WORK! WORK! DRUGS! DRUGS! DRUGS! QUEUE UP FOR YOUR MEAL! QUEUE
UP FOR YOUR MEAL!!”. Thus, his poetry performance criticizes the hypocrisy of
the bourgeois society.
In the eighties
when I began these things, there was almost nothing: a desert, complete
wasteland (because I even didn`t know Hadayatullah Hübsch at that time). My
friends and I were influenced mainly by punk and the guitar music of that time.
We wanted to produce literature like punk songs - which is rather impossible,
because literature is not so immediate as music. In the beginning I made
cut-ups in the tradition of W. S. Burroughs, and a guy used to play trash
guitar.
But more and more,
we were getting into this form and developing a specific kind of stage
literature: “LIVE-LITERATURE” that can also happen without music, that just
presents a piece of poetry in a vivid way, so that young people can listen to
it and understand it: young people who might rather listen to music than read a
book. We were doing so, and then in the beginning of the nineties, some poets
from America came to Germany and they were doing very similar things to what we
did. They called it Slam!Poetry and all the German newspapers were talking
about this new thing from the USA. The journalists were not interested very
much in the fact, that several German poets had been doing this for years or as
in the case of Hadayatullah Hübsch for decades. They only took it as the
influence of the Americans: “Look, there are some German poets, too, who are now
reading like this!” That `s the way, the media is, but anyway no problem,
because they wrote, and they wrote very much. Literature has become very
popular, and it has become hip, a cool thing.
5 years before
everybody thought it was no more than an anachronism.
But what is
live-literature or slam!poetry, as the Americans call it? I`ll give you an
example of MY kind of live-literature:
EXAMPLE TWO: ALLE
HASSEN / HATE THEM ALL
So that `s only one
way, my way, but many German poets are doing stuff: they might read some funny
stories, but also experimental poetry in the Ernst-Jandl-style... Jandl is a
famous Austrian poet - is he translated into Japanese?
Here is a piece by
two younger austrian poets in this tradition, it `s in German: but I think, you
will feel the word-playing intensity of the texts:
EXAMPLE THREE: Ilse
Kilic - Oskars Moral (exzerpt)
EXAMPLE FOUR: Fritz
Widhalm - HUCH (exzerpt)
The first one works
with anagrammatic word plays: the whole thing has a sexual meaning, the vowel
“a” is signifying the woman “anna”, the “i”-occurrence is usually this one of
the man.
Fritz Widhalm `s
text is realizing a rhythmic prose, the “huch” is fit in like an off beat.
Many features of
conventional literature can be presented, too - the only thing is, that you
PERFORM it. That means two things: that you KNOW how to perform, and that the text is performable.
Because of this
“performance literature” poetry events are different as well: the most popular
form is a geniune American form, in fact: the Poetry Slam. Is this done in
Japan, also?
This is a
competition of poets: 10 of them might enter the stage one after another:
everybody has 5 minutes, and afterwards the public decides who is the best. He
or she is the “winner”, then.
This is quite
spectacular, and we organized one of the first events in Cologne (maybe the
first one in Germany): “The German Poetry Championship: Poets in the boxing
ring!” in 1993 (the most recent one took place in Berlin in 1997). It was what
the title says - the performers had to read in a boxing ring, surrounded
by the public (not only in front), which is really very hard. And we made
everything look like a sports event: the authors wore sponsor-t-shirts, there
were a lot of commercials and so on.
Since this time,
many, many poetry slams have happened, and it has become a mainstream on its
own. Me personally, I miss the ironic effect of these shows, which was very
important in our “championships”: people are really taking it SERIOUSLY now:
they WANT to win - so it `s no longer an ironic alternative to the
establishment and the book market, but it follows the same capitalistic
structure.
The good thing is,
that because of these new forms of poetry-presentation several young poets, 5
or 10 years younger than I, entered the scene in the nineties, and the
intentions of their literary activities differ a lot from the clumsy: serious
form, that poetry was supposed to have during the seventies and eighties. In
Germany, reading has really become very popular today: you could go into almost
every bar, club or discotheque now and tell them, that you want to have a
reading next month, and it won `t be a problem. Well, they don `t give you
money, but you get the opportunity to perform - making some money with the
entrance.
And they will be
delighted, because they know, it is good for the place, having poetry events. That
`s a big difference from the eighties. In my town, in Cologne, there were two
readings every week in 1985. Now there are 5 to 10 a day! This is good, because
you can see a lot, and because it makes poetry lose its sublime caracter - this
old-fashioned idea of poetry as a “holy text”.
An important new
issue in contemporary poetry, which is discussed a lot in German
avantguarde-theory-magazines is “pop” - “pop-literature”. Here, you see the
close connection again between contemporary popular music and poetry - for
people of my generation or even younger generations, music simply is a part of
daily life. The question of how to produce a real “pop-literature” and whether
some poets manage to fit into such a domaine, is hotly debated.
It is quite easy to
explain pop music - music which is popular, but that `s only the
surface. The pop theorists don`t think about Phil Collins, Tina Turner or
Michael Jackson when they consider the creative potential of popular music. They
are talking about very progressive things, which are quite unknown in
comparison with these stars of pop music: that means, they are talking about
“pop music” that isn `t really popular - a contradiction in itself.
And the same is
true for poetry: if pop literature is a very popular kind of literature, this
old guy Karl May (that every german child has read with his indian and desert
adventure tales): this Karl May should be the “King of German Pop Literature”! Maybe
he is, by the way - but what we usually expect of an intelligent pop music and
pop literature as well is the irritation - that it is not really clear
at all, what might be serious or ironical: this postmodern balance between
quotation, annotation and story. These pop literature texts might be artistic
products, in which the authentic penetrates the fictional, so that the
boundaries between both seem to become permissive.
What is fact? What
is fiction? What is faction?
What is the truth -
the artistic or the documentary or the artificial? What is the intention:
knowledge - entertainment - provocation? Perhaps, something from all...
I ´m sure about one
thing, literature won `t lose this special approach toward ironic
self-reflection AND entertainment. I think, nobody could stage the role model
of the one and only “genius” author (except: if he or she IS THAT ONE!). It was
very important for Germany and for german literature to get rid of this
ecclesiastical view on literature, because this perspective is one from the
last centuries.
At this point,
nobody can tell what will happen in the next few years, maybe “pop-literatur”
as a literary genre will become familiar, perhaps there will be a rollback, and
literature will become the serious: epistemological media again - maybe both.