4 - Murder in the Weimar Republic: Prejudice, Politics, and the Popular in the Socialist Crime Fiction of Hermynia Zur Mühlen

Summary

FOR A LONG TIME, any treatment of crime fiction in German literary studies inevitably attempted to address the supposed lack of a specifically German tradition. Crime literature, like so much popular fiction, was judged to have a literary worth inversely proportionate to its popularity. In the 1960s, when formalist and structuralist critics helped to make crime literature a credible object of academic attention, research was nevertheless subject to certain trends, which converged to exclude the majority of Krimis. When faced with the wealth and diversity of crime-related fiction, researchers who were keen to rehabilitate the genre according to the values of the bourgeois canon tended to select and elevate exemplary works by certain famous writers to become the yardstick by which other works would be measured.

Trends in Anglophone research encouraged the common practice of establishing a direct line of descent from “the father of the crime novel,” Edgar Allan Poe, via Wilkie Collins and Arthur Conan Doyle, to the British “golden age” of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and G. K. Chesterton, and to the American “hard-boiled” school of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Of course, in practice, the development of crime fiction was never so straightforwardly linear as this explanation suggests. Such an account suppresses profound differences of emphasis and intention, as well as ignoring gaps and variations in the development of the genre. Moreover, the dominance of Anglophone literature and, accordingly, research within Krimiforschung resulted in the common assumption “daß es überhaupt keine Detektiverzählung gibt, daß die wenigen Autoren von Detektiverzählungen Einzelgänger seien, daß die Gattung in Deutschland keine Tradition gebildet habe” (that there is no such thing as the detective story, that the few authors of detective stories are loners, that the genre did not establish a tradition in Germany).

The 1970s brought about a change to such attitudes. Contemporary German crime novels by writers such as Hansjörg Martin and Friedhelm Werremeier flourished, and critics began to acknowledge the existence of crime fiction produced outside the Anglophone world. “There is evidently a substantial place for a critique of crime fiction that is neither hidebound or complicit with the politics and certainties of Anglo-American attitudes.” Attempts to redress the bias in Krimiforschung resulted, on the one hand, in studies that highlighted the thriving genre among German authors since the 1970s.