German Authors and Genres

German-language guest worker, foreigner, migration and migrant literature is history, and soon intercultural literature will be too. Michael Stavaric writes in his second language (German) and, like many of his colleagues with a native tongue other than German, sees himself as a universal author, concerned solely with the aesthetic quality of his texts.

Born in Brno in 1972, Stavaric is indeed writing the European literature of today – modern and inscrutable, precise and playful. Very much au fait with the media, this Viennese author creates literature that is somewhere between Kafkaesque gloom and the blogosphere.

Inline skating and poetry

For more than ten years, Michael Stavaric, a graduate with a degree in Bohemian studies and journalism, was assistant lecturer in inline skating at the sports university in Vienna. At the same time, he worked for the Czech Republic’s embassy in Vienna. Both roles fit in beautifully with his persona as a cosmopolitan, communicative literary figure, a man of the world who uses e-mail and Twitter on a daily basis. A poet of today, fashion-conscious, smart and sexy, educated and witty, multilingual and multifaceted. And an outstanding translator of Czech to boot.

So what about his literature? In 2000, he entered the public arena when he published a volume of poetry entitled Flügellos. As tends to happen these days with volumes of poetry brought out by small publishing houses, the collection received little or no attention, and his following literary attempts – prose texts, a children’s book – did not fare much better. It was not until two novels were published in quick succession, stillborn (2006) and Terminifera (2007), that the literary world in Austria, Germany, Switzerland and elsewhere became aware of this Czech writer from Vienna.

Two other novels followed: Magma (2008) and Böse Spiele (2009). Ten years on from “Flügellos”, Michael Stavaric is a German-language author who has been awarded a multitude of prizes and stipends and whose ability to write is now well-known in the big wide world – if this were not the case, he surely would not have been appointed guest lecturer at Rutgers University New Brunswick in New York in 2009.

“stillborn”

The central theme of stillborn is “the question of identity, embodied by the example of an outsider whose ostracism and (self-) alienation is portrayed as a paranoia-like ego-split”, notes Renata Cornejo, a Czech expert in German studies. Elisa, the protagonist in stillborn, and Lois, the main character in Terminifera, are “stateless, uprooted souls who have become alien to themselves”, oddballs, outsiders, people who cross the borders between madness and normality.

Elisa, who has been physically and socially disadvantaged all her life, is an estate agent who likes to spend time in empty apartments, and probably even burns down flats and houses – how else is one supposed to interpret this behaviour other than as her desperate attempt to obliterate traces of the past? As an attempt to forget the terrible crime that her mother once committed, clearly out of love for her daughter?

In any case, stillborn is gripping, and what is immediately noticeable is Michael Stavaric’s unconventional approach to narrative conventions – and to language. Perhaps one really can only write like this if one has switched languages and thereby become highly sensitive to the subtle nuances and hidden connotations of one’s new tongue.

“Terminifera”

Terminifera, a text narrated in scenes whose linguistically artistic fragments can be put together individually by the reader however he desires. Why are the protagonist’s best friends spiders or locusts like the eponymous Terminifera and other fearsome creatures that are well-known from a multitude of horror films? Where do Lois’ fantasies come from? Is he in fact a man? Or perhaps a woman after all?

“The inner emptiness and ‘burned-out nature’ of the characters, their inability to feel anything at all, is explained as being the consequence of physical and psychological damage”, remarks Renata Cornejo. Lois suffers from the consequences of physical abuse in a children’s home: his Frankenstein-like actions, not affected in the least by emotions such as love or fear, follow unfathomable mechanisms. Spock from Starship Enterprise likewise appears as a half-Vulcan alter ego of the main character. Lois’ subversive double-view also influences the narrative structure, which features changing perspectives, breaks and linguistic irritations. Stavaric uses literature to demonstrate what a sense of non-belonging can mean.

“Magma”

“These days I am perceived as a native writer in Austria”. This is what Michael Stavaric noted in an interview with Katrin Hillgruber after he had received the 2008 Chamisso Sponsorship Prize for his first two novels. His third novel, which can also be read as the third part of a trilogy, confronts the reader with a nameless and omniscient first-person narrator who can remember right back to the beginnings of the world.

This man, a sales assistant in a rather shabby Viennese pet shop, reveals himself to be an aged and brilliantly disguised Mephisto, who was played a major part in shaping history – that is to say if this eccentric, blustering old man didn’t simply imagine it all. What Stavaric is interested in in his rousing “linguistic firework” are the doubts about what is passed down historically from one generation to the next, and particularly about its optimistic attitude towards progress, Beate Tröger writes in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper. Rarely has one been “so charmingly taken in” by a work of literature, she continues.

“Böse Spiele”

The main character in the sequence of spoken scenes entitled Böse Spiele is a first-person narrator, as nameless as the two women between whom he finds himself. It is all about love in unstable times, and “the interweaving of contemporary gender discourse with fragments of different myths” results in a “great male lament” (Meike Feßmann): only what has become of love? The rhetorical sophistication and associative structure of the text are remarkable – and the reader should not be put off by the use of indirect speech which predominates most of the time.

Stavaric unfolds a love triangle in which the seed of death is already inherent, and does so with a wealth of images and allusions, and at times also somewhat spasmodically, but above all with an absolutely magnificent sense of rhythm. Böse Spiele is “first and foremost a linguistic game, situated close to the battle front but hoping all the same for peace talks” believes Christoph Schröder. In this spoken play, named a “novel”, it is incidentally only the first-person narrator and a few crows who survive the universal war of the genders. Love only fares so-so, but what art of language!

Linguistic art: local, global, surreal

Michael Stavaric is still, and of course will always remain, a Viennese author of Czech origin. At the same time, however, he is a globally active and aesthetically advanced literary figure of the 21st century, one who captures the surreal, the absurd and the grotesque in highly sensitive textual patchworks; he is also, it goes without saying, an excellent artist of the German language. We certainly have not heard the last of him.