Open Access

In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the world, writers were racing to produce timely accounts, with texts that ranged from reported narratives to poems and short pieces that resembled spontaneous snapshots more than well-thought-out compositions. Short texts that cannot necessarily be assigned to a single genre but that fit well into an anthology seem to be the trend, as some quickly published anthologies on COVID-19 show. [...] Above all in France, the "journal du confinement", or "confinement diary" - or "corona diary", as I will call it in the following - became highly popular as a genre during the pandemic. This phenomenon seems to have been not only international in scope but represented in various media. As a new genre, the corona diary emerged at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, following in the footsteps of two traditional literary branches. First, it had a strong affinity with the literary serial: published as different instalments in newspapers or as video and audio on the internet, the corona diary can be seen as following in this tradition, which until recently was threatened with extinction. As a serial work - and as a quickly written text published in a newspaper - the corona diary can be understood as a revival of this phenomenon, even if its episodes do not build on each other in a linear fashion and therefore need not necessarily be read one after the other. Secondly, the "diary" genre has been undergoing a revival. [...] This genre seems to have spread most quickly at the beginning of the pandemic in the francophone context in particular. Examples include Wajdi Mouawad's corona diary, published on YouTube and SoundCloud, Leïla Slimani's publications in Le Monde, and Marc Lambron's contributions to Le Journal du Dimanche. Although there are a few examples of German-language quick-response literature centered on the pandemic, the corona diary would seem to be a largely neglected genre in the German-language context. [...] One exception in this regard is the work of Thomas Glavinic, whose texts were published in the daily newspaper Welt. Described as a serial novel, the contributions constitute more of a diary than a novel, as I aim to show.

Rezension zu Carl Einstein, Briefwechsel 1904-1940, éd. par Klaus H. Kiefer et Liliane Meffre, Heidelberg-Berlin, J. B. Metzler, 2020, 666 p.

Die intellektuelle Ausbeute literarischer Jubiläen und Gedenkjahre fällt in der Regel mager aus. Viel Nippes wird zu solchen Anlässen auf den Markt geworfen. Runde Geburts- oder Todestage von Schriftsteller*innen zeugen so oft unfreiwillig von jenem vielfach beklagten Prestigeverlust der Literatur, gegen den ihre mediale Verwertung gerade anzurennen versucht. Große Namen sind für diese Schieflage besonders anfällig, nur selten erscheinen zu ihren Jahrestagen ambitionierte Neudeutungen ihrer Werke. Es dominiert die gediegene Traditionspflege und ein mitunter verschmitzter Respekt - der schlimmste von allen. Aus diesen Gründen haben Gedenkjahre aber stets eine seismographische Funktion, denn an ihnen lässt sich ablesen, wo ihre Jubilar*innen und deren - oder gar die - Literatur öffentlich gerade stehen. Das Kafka-Jahr 2024 macht hier keine Ausnahme. Anlässlich seines 100. Todestags am 3. Juni ist mit Kafka einem Autor wiederzubegegnen, der nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg zum Inbegriff moderner Literatur avanciert ist. Anders als etwa Thomas Mann, Robert Musil oder Marcel Proust hat Kafka unzählige Nachahmer*innen gefunden und im Gegensatz zu ihnen - im Gegensatz selbst zu Goethe - wurde Kafka kaum je ernsthaft vom Sockel gestoßen. Vermutlich wird er sogar mehr gelesen als sie alle zusammen. Außerhalb des deutschen Sprachraums ist das zweifelsohne der Fall und es dürfte nicht zuletzt an seiner guten Übersetzbarkeit liegen. Ausgerechnet Kafka, eine Art ewiger Sohn, wurde zum Heiligen Vater der neueren Literaturgeschichte.

In 2015, author Merle Kröger located an entire novel on the Mediterranean: on a body of water that has had to be considered not only a highly frequented connective zone but at the same time a strictly observed border region. The events around which everything in this novel centers are the maritime distress of a refugee boat with a damaged motor off the Spanish coast; the boat's sighting by a cruise ship with the telling name 'Spirit of Europe'; and the encounter of both with a Spanish coast guard rescue vessel and with a container ship. The novel's original German title, "Havarie", whose literal English translation "average" fails to convey the word's complex meaning, is the nautical designation for malfunctions and accidents suffered by maritime vehicles; and it is also the older insurance-technical term for contributory distribution in the salvaging of a ship (above all through jettisoning of freight and the "sacrifice" of certain parts of the ship). The title of the 2017 English translation, "Collision", opens up a third dimension: the collision of different seascapes in a shipwreck's context. Correspondingly, both the polylogic contents and the multi-perspectivism of Kröger's novel attach a different relationship to the world and the environment to different kinds of boat: the "boat people" on their very basic water vehicles see their situation above all through the prism of circulating stories and rumors, myths and fables; on the cruiser, we find a temporally removed economy of consumeristic attentiveness that allows the sea to vanish beneath a "display" of the all-encompassing service and entertainment offerings; and the coast guard ship is fully oriented toward speedily detecting and approaching a target. [...] As the afterword itself underscores, the book, although a work of fiction, was based on documentary research. And its starting point was found footage - the jetsam of a data-ocean. Namely, by coincidence Kröger, together with her collaborator, the filmmaker Philipp Scheffner, came across a YouTube video recorded by the Northern Irishman Terry Diamond in 2012 off the Spanish coast, on board the "Adventure of the Seas". They researched the background, met Diamond, obtained the relevant radio recordings from the Spanish coast guard, and finally interviewed and filmed both the cruiser's personnel and a number of refugees. When in 2015 Mediterranean crossings from North Africa multiplied and the mass media issued alarmist reports of a "refugee crisis," Scheffner and Kröger wanted to do more than simply contribute their already-produced documentary film to the image flood. They decided on a new approach involving something like parallel literary and filmic action: Kröger shaped what had been researched into a possible scenario; and Scheffner worked with the video recordings as image material and with both the radio and interview recordings as sound material.

In a radical shift from Hans Blumenberg's account of the classical trope, "Shipwreck with Spectator", the existence of the spectator is no longer grounded in their safe detachment from shipwreck, but from their fearless involvement in it. In this article, I will shift focus once again, from those involved, lifesaving spectators of shipwreck to the immediate actors, or rather: the actor-network of sea travel, which includes shipping companies, crews, passengers, and ships. This actor-network, with the sailing crew at its core, has been subsumed into a binding code of behavior in distress ever since the 1852 foundering of the Royal Navy steam frigate HMS Birkenhead at Danger Point, off the Western Cape of Africa. The code's two key imperatives - "women and children first" and "captain goes down with the ship," henceforth known as the Birkenhead drill - were safely embedded in Victorian morals by popular life guides. [...] Based on this shift of attention, I will look at two different articulations of this dilemma, the "Jeddah incident" of July 1880 (a shipwreck that never happened), and the sinking of the Titanic of April 1912 (a shipwreck that has been happening ever since), and unfold the translation of each case in a modern novel: Joseph Conrad's "Lord Jim" for the former, and Franz Kafka's "Der Verschollene" ("The Man who Disappeared") for the latter. I will pay particular attention to the role of professional ethics as drivers of the narrative in both cases, and I will highlight how the two authors, while using an almost identical plot structure, pursue different strategies of fictionalizing the Birkenhead dilemma.