A culture diary through the German literary scene, where markets don’t exist (except where they do), and everything is in crisis (except the books themselves).

FEBRUARY 28, 2023

I had made a friend in high places. It was September, a few months before Russia attacked Ukraine, and I was lonely, on a yearlong fellowship in Berlin, and eager for someone to talk to. You can imagine my excitement, then, when an invitation arrived: A German writer had read my recent work and wondered if I’d discuss relevant themes — literature and climate change — on a panel in Zürich hosted by the local Literaturhaus. I would be paid 500 Swiss francs ($532) for participating. My train tickets and hotel would be comped.

To those of us accustomed to a U.S. literary ecosystem defined by publishing oligopoly, expensive MFA programs, and heavily marketed book launches, the idea of a “house for literature” insulated from market forces has immediate appeal.

The Literaturhaus Zürich occupies a six-story neo-Renaissance building in the old city center, a short walk from the main station. It is a gathering place for readers and writers, many of them international, an institution at once imbricated in the local publishing market and, also, external to it. The first thing that struck me when I arrived was that no one was selling anything; there were plenty of books in the library, but none being immediately peddled to the assembled crowd. On the panel, one author spoke knowledgeably about nuclear energy, another about the literary responsibility to address climate change. Afterward, over dinner at a local Italian chain, the conversation alighted on the inexhaustible topic of transatlantic comparison, in particular the differences in literary culture between Europe and the United States. I mourned aloud the fact that there simply wasn’t the same funding for the arts in the States. As we rose to leave, a Swiss woman with connections to literary publishing confessed quietly and in confidence, “You know, when I really want to read a good story, I read the Americans.”

To those of us accustomed to a U.S. literary ecosystem defined by publishing oligopoly, expensive MFA programs, and heavily marketed book launches, the idea of a “house for literature” insulated from market forces has immediate appeal. There are 15 official Literaturhäuser scattered throughout Germany, Austria and German-speaking Switzerland, with additional institutions operating under other auspices. Similar houses, can be found throughout Europe — especially in France and Scandinavia — but the networking relationship between the German-language versions is unique, suggests Managing Director Ursula Steffens, who oversees accounting and financing for “cross-house” collaborations across 15 core members. A recent month’s worth of German-language programming at Literaturhäuser throughout central Europe included a reading of work by formerly incarcerated writers and a Saturday morning event for children starring Vampirkaninchen (“vampire bunnies”). At the Leipzig Haus, authors investigated Western blind spots in Eastern Europe against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, while the Stuttgart outpost awarded an annual prize for literature addressing economics and work. (This year’s winner connects the “difficult conditions” of contemporary agriculture to the “more general disappearance of meaning from modern life.”) Tickets range from 5 euros ($5) in Berlin to 20 Swiss francs ($21) in Zürich. (That’s Switzerland for you.)

The Literaturhäuser were created after a 1984 study called “A Report on the Situation of Literature in Berlin” was introduced in the city Senate. Only 0.5% of the city’s culture budget, the study found, was reserved for literature, a “neglectful” state of affairs that the cultural minister sought to rectify. Two years later, the first Literaturhaus opened its doors in the German capital. Situated in the ritzy neighborhood of Charlottenburg, the Berlin outpost features a garden, a restaurant with glass arcades and a quaint basement bookshop. In previous lives, the historic building served as a splendid private residence for an early Arctic explorer, a reception center for foreign students, and, leading up to World War II, a convalescent home; after the war, it was a soup kitchen.

Today, many of the literature houses occupy equally storied buildings. (Köln’s is in an old brewery; Leipzig’s sits atop the site of an important bookstore destroyed in the war; Hamburg’s occupies a historic villa.) While their sources of funding vary — Hamburg and München, for example, rely on foundations established by prominent local newspapers and publishers, respectively — all receive some form of state or local support. As Janika Gelinek, the co-director of Literaturhaus Berlin, told me, it’s precisely because her institution is supported by public funding that she doesn’t have to worry about whether the programming is profitable or bestselling. “Maybe they’re not a bestseller yet,” she says of the authors she invites to speak, “but they could be one day.” A prize-winning Swiss author who writes in German told me that for writers whose work is considered “difficult” and who may therefore be less likely to win slots in for-profit (if not especially profitable) venues like bookstores, the Literaturhaus network provides a crucial source of income and support. “Most authors in the German-speaking space don’t live off [book] sales, but from events and readings,” said Stefanie Stegmann, director of Literaturhaus Stuttgart, which runs on an annual budget of 1.2 million euros (approximately $1.27 million), and where authors generally receive between 500 and 800 euros per event.

In the final weeks of 2022, the broader Literaturhaus schedule also included visits from international superstars like Celeste Ng, Asli Erdoğan and Deborah Levy; a panel on feminist short stories; workshops for high school students; a discussion of Switzerland’s hot-and-cold relationship with the European Union; debates on social and literary responses to the climate apocalypse; and many a German-language fiction or poetry debut. I booked myself tickets for a live broadcast on the end of capitalism and a two-day festival about the role of literature in dystopian times. They shared a common query: How to address a world in crisis?

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Berlin, Feb. 2022: DEUTSCHE ROMANTIK

The first time I attend a Literaturhaus event in Berlin, it is for a lecture on Pan-European Romanticism. The author argues that the early Romantic movement, often seen as a characteristically German phenomenon, can in fact be traced to philosophers and writers located throughout the continent. The discussion quickly veers into territory bound to preoccupy any expat writer: whether it’s still possible, in our globalized age, to categorize literature (let alone its readers) in national or regional terms.

There is an imperative, in American publishing spheres, to reach as many readers as possible, as quickly as possible, and critics lament the effect such pressures have had on literary fiction, which increasingly borrows tropes from fantasy, YA and other marketable genres in a bid to pump sales.

If most constructions of national literature are little more than convenient heuristics for universities, the author says, there is a firmer division between European and American literary culture. You can feel the influence of market pressure on American fiction, full of riveting plots and absorbing storylines. European writers, by contrast, hone their skills in slightly less ruthless economic circumstances thanks to public funding, and also skew more esoteric.

The word he uses is “akademisch.”

This was not the response to the crisis in literature — not the definition of literary crisis — I was used to. Across the pond, an entire generation of writers has internalized the fact that it is publishing books in a market of no confidence, even as globalization and English-speaking hegemony tilt the scales enormously in the Anglosphere’s favor. (Germany alone constitutes the second-largest European market for English-language books outside the U.K. In 2021 it was the third-largest market for books globally, behind the United States and China.) There is an imperative, in American publishing spheres, to reach as many readers as possible, as quickly as possible, and critics lament the effect such pressures have had on literary fiction, which increasingly borrows tropes from fantasy, YA and other marketable genres in a bid to pump sales.

How do you address times of crisis if the chosen mode of address, literature, is itself in crisis?

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Berlin, Nov. 18, 2022: THE END OF CAPITALISM

Capitalism ends on a Monday night at 19:00 and the room is packed. Attendees without seats lean against florid pink wallpaper and matching floor-length curtains. A popular local channel, Radio Eins, is streaming the event live. As the room dims, a red light to the side of the stage switches on, signaling that the broadcast has begun.

“Akademisch” is hardly the word for literature’s role this evening: The featured author, veteran economics correspondent Ulrike Herrmann, has penned a rallying cry of a bestseller on the climate crisis and the “myth” of green growth. Her interviewer, seated across the stage from her at a small table, seems skeptical. He dives in: If green growth is indeed a sham, he asks, does Herrmann mean to suggest that Chancellor Olaf Scholz and leading politicians in his coalition are lying when they say that economic growth can be paired with climate-friendly policies? Why aren’t climate experts recommending the end of capitalism? Herrmann, flippant and confident, as if used to such questions, is evasive: “Yes, I was also surprised that I, a journalist, was the one who had to write this book,” she says, suggesting it ought to be a politician's job. We laugh. She argues that politicians push the myth of green growth simply because, unlike reporters such as herself, they have nothing to gain from telling the unpopular truth, which is that in order to reach and maintain emissions goals, growth-dependent capitalism must end.

The younger attendees in my row wear N95 masks, lifted intermittently for polite sips from pints of beer. The older crowd, more visibly excited, abstains from both masks and alcohol. From the discussion, it becomes clear that a central catchphrase of the book is to “return to 1978,” a reference to baseline levels of consumption and energy use in West Germany that year. To bring about such a rapid economic contraction, Herrmann finds precedent in the planned economies enacted in the U.S. and U.K. during World War II, reassuring the audience that we could keep certain medical and technological advancements, even as the economy shrinks by up to 50%. “I was alive in 1978,” she jokes. “It was great!”

Many in the room were alive in 1978, when a quarter of Germans lived under a planned economy in the DDR. During the Q&A, people want to know: How could such an economic contraction come about peacefully and democratically? What global institutions could possibly coordinate in order to end capitalism — easier to imagine, as they say, than the end of the world? And what about developing countries? Why does Herrmann have to be so pessimistic? It's a debate that carries well beyond the room.

Berlin, Nov. 20-21, 2022: LITERATURE IN DYSTOPIAN TIMES

Literatur in dystopischen Zeiten is a two-day festival, and its backdrop is the war in Ukraine. At its most heated moments, it becomes a referendum on national identity and a writer’s choice of language. There are appearances from Ukrainian poets who write in Russian and who’ve suddenly become ravenous for foreign words in English and German; Russian expats who now prefer to identify as Germans who happen to write in Russian; and former East Germans whose own senses of national identity were turned upside down in the process of reunification. For all the participating authors, identity and language — those fundamental prerequisites of literature — have been thrown into flux by recent history.

The event proceeds in Russian and German, and the war — der Krieg — is never far from anyone’s mind. Judging from the number of those in the audience wearing headphones for simultaneous translation, I estimate about half of us are multilingual. A moderator on the first panel, about language’s capacity to capture extremes, asks Russian-language Ukrainian poet Sergej Soloviev, whether his work realizes, lexically, the tangible effects of memory. The poet pauses. “You’d need 10,000 years to answer that question. I’m afraid we don’t have that kind of time.”

My neighbor in the audience is a Hungarian waiter. When I tell her I’m interested in what brings people to the Literaturhaus, she explains that she’s an admirer of a German novelist on the stage. An aspiring writer herself, she tells me she’s still unsure about which language to choose: German or Hungarian. I ask if she’s worried about the sustainability of literature itself in our dystopian moment. She hesitates. “Maybe this is a stupid answer, but no,” she replies. “I don’t worry. Literature is always there.”

Next up is a panel on love in times of war: “When there’s war,” a Russian-speaking panelist says, “we must produce its opposite.” I catch a man lingering by the door. He isn’t convinced about this talk of love as antidote. He’s also an author — a poet in Russian — though he’s been in Germany for the past 10 years; recently, he’s been traveling to Ukraine on journalistic assignments. “I think to understand a war,” he says, “you need to be there. You need to have skin in the game.”

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Basel, Dec. 6, 2022: AN EVENING WITH ASLI ERDOĞAN

At the Basel Literaturhaus, the audience is seated at small round tables, as in a cabaret. My immediate neighbor is a Turkish Swiss psychotherapist. He has an idea for a novel based on material gathered from his practice; recently, he’s begun dictating a first draft by tape recorder.

The speaker tonight is Asli Erdoğan, one of Turkey’s most important contemporary literary and political voices, whose early, genre-bending book The Stone Building and Other Places, an associative meditation on loss and memory rooted in impressions of her native Istanbul, has recently appeared in German (Requiem für eine verlorene Stadt). She is one of those writers whose celebrity immediately hushes the room. Sold-out, banner events like these reflect the mandate for contemporary urgency, but they are also part of the Literaturhaus strategy of using big names to help support riskier ventures. Numbers are “recovering,” the network's Managing Director Ursula Steffens says, but in the early days of the pandemic, there were times when ticketed audiences could dwindle to three or four. “That’s not something even a Literaturhaus can afford.”

Steffens, who has a background in publishing, also mentions the importance of price fixing for helping literature thrive despite the vagaries of the market. In Germany, publishers and booksellers — from Amazon to your local feminist punk bookshop — agree on a price for titles before publication, preventing the discount wars that, since the 1990s, have increasingly forced American brick-and-mortar booksellers to operate at razor-thin profit margins and publishers to avert risky, low-volume titles. (Amazon can even swallow negative profit margins on books if it drives traffic for other products.) The result of this race to the bottom is a book market that funnels ever more resources toward bestsellers and market-proven formulas, which thins out opportunities for everyone else; in Germany, by contrast, the predictability of sales from mass-market titles helps fund literature in translation and emerging authors.

Asli Erdoğan is a big draw in the West, if no longer in her own country. A novelist, feminist, supporter of Kurdish rights and former newspaper columnist, her criticism of President Tayyip Erdoğan’s (no relation) authoritarian regime landed her in prison for four months in Turkey in 2016; she lives in exile in Germany now. When the interviewer opens with this summary of her harrowing biography, Erdoğan wryly warns, “If we start talking about politics, we’ll never get back to literature.”

During the conversation, Erdoğan returns repeatedly to the idea of “shattering” and being shattered; her book’s fragmented structure is an argument, an intention, fundamentally related to her experiences as a woman in the time and place in which she was born. Without a powerful intellectual as a husband or else the backing of a prestigious institution, she asserts, it was a very lonely business to be a woman writing as politically and publicly as she was. Ironically, it was in the women’s prison that she felt least alone. “The solidarity of women is an extremely powerful thing,” she says. The audience that evening is overwhelmingly female, and under the spell of Erdoğan’s bitter but giving charisma, it’s hard not to feel something of what she means.

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Feb. 2023: MY DESK

Behind the German-language programming curated in response to unspeakable threats — war, dictatorship, climate change — there lies an enormous assumption that I suspect Americans are less likely to share: the belief that literature has tangible effects on our world order; that it is a meaningful part of the anti-war or climate effort; that because it receives public funding, and is therefore part of the public sphere, the failure to guard against the onset of real-world dystopia is a personal one.

The irony of this transatlantic contrast, of course, is that the force behind the Anglophone cynicism, the American publishing industry itself, is in large part owned by Germans. The American behemoth Penguin Random House belongs to the conglomerate Bertelsmann, which recently withdrew its bid to acquire the third-largest American publisher, Simon & Schuster, after the U.S. government blocked a potential merger on antitrust grounds in the summer of 2022. Meanwhile, prestigious imprints known for mixing high literature with mass-market titles, including Pan Macmillan, St. Martin’s Press, Henry Holt, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, are owned by the German company Holtzbrinck. (The fourth-largest American publisher, Hachette Book Group, belongs to the French parent company Lagardère.) Over the past two decades, American publishing has sold out to the Europeans, and the Europeans, apparently, are giving American literature the squeeze. Or at the very least, privately-held conglomerates like Bertelsmann, which snapped up Random House in 2019, clearly see America as an attractive growth opportunity — a market ripe for plucking bestseller titles on which publishing's bottom line depends.

Of course, what looks like business strategy may simply be a difference in literary perspective. “Ambiguity, ambivalence, gray zones, shadows,” Stefanie Stegmann, the director of the Stuttgart Literaturhaus, says, “everything that in this moment is made so much more difficult by the war in Ukraine, literature is able to reveal." It's worth asking what comes first: This kind of belief in literature, or market protections?

To American ears, the European literary sentiment might seem out of touch, maybe even akademisch. It demands a desperate, even anachronistic sense of responsibility from the world. (“We’re just writers,” Erdoğan says during the Q&A. “You can’t expect everything from us.”) Meanwhile, Americans are busy tearing out page turners. The next Great American Novelist is muttering to herself at her desk right now, delaying the dental appointment she cannot afford, Surely the next book will be the one to break out … Maybe she’s not a bestseller yet, but in America, anything is possible.