7 - The time and the place of the nation

Summary

Now that's a real German! Everywhere in the world you see them standing around brooding about why they can't move like other people. And most of the time they try to prove that the reason is their intelligence, and then they start to teach the rest of mankind.

Sten Nadolny, Die Entdeckung der Langsamkeit

The Germans always come too late.

Thomas Mann, “Deutschland und die Deutschen”

Writers were caught off guard by German reunification as much as politicians and the general public. For GDR writers, reunification meant the collapse of their state and hence of a portion of their own self-identification. Most West German writers were probably closer to Patrick Süskind in their lack of interest in the “German question” and in viewing reunification more as an unwelcome revisitation by an anachronistic national problem than as the longed-for return of national sovereignty. For them, their nation was far removed in time and space, a distant memory. Speaking for his entire generation of West Germans born in the first postwar years, Süskind wrote, “Austria, Switzerland, Venetia, Tuscany, Alsace, Provence, yes, even Crete, Andalusia, and the Outer Hebrides – and I am speaking only of Europe – were infinitely closer to us than such dubious geographical constructions as Saxony, Thuringia, Anhalt, Mecklen- or Brandenburg.” Jakob Arjouni describes the main character in one of his novels as having the following relationship with one of the five states of the former GDR: “Mecklenburg-Western Pommerania sounded to him like Swasiland.”