Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies

The "beck'sche reihe" is a series of paperbacks intended to introduce students and interested members of the general public to a variety of topics in the humanities and social sciences. Robert Weninger, Professor for Modern German Literature at King's College, University of London, has written a monograph on the most important German literary controversies since 1945. The book covers twelve debates: Thomas Mann and innere Emigration; Adorno's injunction about the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz; Hochhuth's play Der Stellvertreter; Emil Staiger's 1965 vilification of modern German literature; Heinrich Böll's Spiegel essay on Baader-Meinhof; Rainer Werner Fassbinder's play Die Müll, die Stadt und der Tod; Thomas Bernhard's play Heldenplatz; Christa Wolf's story Was bleibt; Botho Strauss's rightward turn; Peter Handke's interventions on behalf of Serbia; Martin Walser's Friedenspreis speech of 1998 and his 2002 novel Tod eines Kritikers; and the wittily-titled chapter on the "ewigen Streit um Günter Grass." A sixteen-page bibliography provides full information [End Page 184] on all the contributions to each debate, and a short introduction, conclusion, and index round out the volume.

Since the reconstruction of many of these debates themselves have filled their own volumes, Weninger wisely foregoes any attempt to reproduce the debates in their entirety. He makes the effort, however, to cite or at least mention the main respondents in the discussions, usually literary critics for Germany's leading newspapers, publicly known intellectuals, and the like. Weninger often quotes lengthy passages, sometimes a page or more in length, in order to give the reader the flavour of the debaters' prose and argumentation. These contributions are all carefully cited in the thirty-two pages of endnotes. The discussion of each debate is roughly chronological, and Weninger's light but careful prose moves the story of each controversy forward in an agreeable manner.

The usefulness of the book – here, in one practical volume, is both a description of and very full bibliography for each of the debates being studied – is not without qualification, however. Weninger is often hesitant to push the discussion further or to come to conclusions about the debates that indicate new information on the questions at hand. Sometimes this may be unavoidable; after all, one wonders, what more can be said about the Christa Wolf controversy or the debate surrounding Martin Walser?

The difficulty arises when Weninger does provide a concluding word to some of the debates. It is often an opinion along the lines of the opinions that make up the debates themselves, and not an indication that he has done some original research or thinking on the matters being discussed. The chapter on Hochhuth, for example, lays out the controversy in a clear manner by presenting the charges made against Hochhuth and his defence by himself and others. In the conclusion to the chapter, however, Weninger abandons his impartiality (as is his right, of course) and argues, relying on John Cornwell's book Hitler's Pope, that Hochhuth had been right, that Pius XII's inaction with regard to the Holocaust was a shameful chapter in Roman Catholic church history, and that the Church must grant independent historians full access to the Vatican's archives in order to bring the facts to light. The difficulty here is that Weninger provides no evidence of any other research on where scholarship stands on the issue of Pius XII's culpability. Historians have revealed omissions and errors in Cornwell's argument (see the H-Net review by Rainer Decker of the Universität Paderborn), but Weninger ignores these. The point is simply that the debate surrounding the whole issue is far from settled, and Weninger's conclusions, based on opinion rather than research, do a disservice to his book.

In his concluding chapter Weninger addresses the question that would be in the minds of many readers...