Classifieds

LITERARY CRITICISM
apocrypha. Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin, who first
appeared in 1841 in “The Murders in the Rue
Morgue”, is commonly hailed as the first
detective hero. An eccentric and reclusive
lover of enigmas and conundrums, Dupin
“glories . . . in that moral activity which disentangles”, as his devoted companion and the
narrator of his three published adventures
describes him. Conan Doyle graciously
acknowledged Dupin’s pre-eminence in the
genre, describing Poe in 1920 as “the originator of the detective story”. Yet it is clear from
Tannert’s research that the genre of detective
fiction is also rooted in early stories such as
Müllner’s and Otto Ludwig’s Der Todte von
St.-Annas Kapelle (1839; The Dead Man of
St. Anne’s Chapel), described as “an early
example of the courtroom drama”. As to
why detective fiction had such a “rich and
early growth” in German-speaking countries,
Tannert highlights the region’s wide variety of
political entities, as well as legal and investigative structures, during the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.
Switzerland was the country in which
Conan Doyle tried to kill off his most famous
character, having grown bored of his investigations. After Sherlock Holmes plunged to
his death with Professor Moriarty at the
Reichenbach Falls, the author was abused by
heart-broken fans. One outraged lady wrote
to him, addressing him as “you beast”, while
another attacked him with her handbag.
Eventually Conan Doyle was forced to relent
and bring Holmes back from the dead. In his
Der Chinese by Friedrich Glauser,
Morgarten Verlag edition, 1939;
cover design by H. Schaad
essay, Martin Rosenstock uncovers a rich tradition of crime writing in Switzerland. Friedrich Glauser’s five novels from the 1930s
about the Swiss detective Jakob Studer – “a
man whose life may be buffeted by adverse
surroundings, yet is never derailed” – were
inspired by Georges Simenon’s Inspector
Maigret series, currently being republished
by Penguin Classics in a series of sparkling
new translations. Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s
Inspector Bärlach novels from the 1950s are
“morality tales set against the backdrop of
Swiss feelings of vulnerability to Nazi infiltration”. As Hall points out, crime fiction
flourished even under the National Socialists.
Some 3,000 novels with total print runs of
more than one million copies were published
from 1933 to 1945.
Inspired by German-language works such
as Alfred Döblin’s remarkable modernist
novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) and foreign novels, including the Martin Beck series
by the Swedish authors Maj Sjöwall and Per
Wahlöö in the 1960s, the Soziokrimi (social
crime novel) took a critical stance towards
contemporary society by depicting crime not
as an individual act but as the result of social
circumstances. However, on the other side of
the Wall, crime fiction authors in the German
Democratic Republic were faced with the not
inconsiderable problem of how to write at all
in a society in which crime had been officially
eradicated, without appearing to attack the
state. Perhaps partly for this reason, all novels
had to receive the imprimatur of the state
from 1963.
The first Kommissarin (female police
inspector) in German-language crime fiction
appeared in 1973, in Richard Hey’s Ein Mord
am Lietzensee (Murder at Lake Lietzen). As
Faye Stewart ably demonstrates in her essay,
the Soziokrimi was a forerunner of the Frauenkrimi, which emerged in the 1980s. Its
female sleuths exposed the inequalities and
hypocrisies of patriarchal, heterosexual
society while “exploring the rights of and
protection for children, minorities and other
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marginalized groups”. In her piece on Austrian crime fiction, Marieke Krajenbrink also
highlights the contribution of female writers,
including Auguste Groner (1850–1929), who
was responsible for “the first police detective
series in German-language crime fiction”.
Krajenbrink explores the role crime fiction
plays in the work of the Nobel Prize-winning
author Elfriede Jelinek, a keen reader of the
genre since her youth: “Jelinek injects a new
tone of radical feminist criticism to the crime
genre”.
Today, the genre is flourishing with some
600 published German-language authors of
crime fiction. As Julia Augart’s essay on the
Afrika-Krimi shows, it is both diverse and
outward-looking. The fall of the Berlin Wall
and the reunification of Germany have led
to a boom in Verarbeitungskrimis, crime
narratives that explore modern Germany’s
traumatic history. They include Volker
Kutscher’s Gereon Rath series, which has
sold 650,000 copies in Germany alone. In her
essay on the historical crime novel, Katharina
Hall focuses on Hans Fallada’s Jeder stirbt
für sich allein (1947; Alone in Berlin) and
Simon Urban’s alternative history Plan D
(2011), both of which use the genre as a
means to expose “the state’s capacity for
criminality” and to raise challenging questions about “the elusive nature of justice”.
Such novels amply demonstrate the richness
and maturity of the genre, one that can no
longer be dismissed as mere Unterhaltungsliteratur, or popular fiction.