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Chapter 11 - Karen Duve???s Dies ist kein Liebeslied (This Is Not a Love-Song)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2011

Stuart Taberner
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
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Summary

Dies ist kein Liebeslied (This Is Not a Love-Song, 2000) is the second novel by Karen Duve, one of a number of women writers who are regularly associated with the phenomenon of the Literarisches Fräuleinwunder (literary girl wonder). More a product of journalism than self-description, the Fräuleinwunder craze was one of the literary ‘events’ that occurred at the end of the millennium when the German Feuilletons announced in hyperbolic style the ‘miraculous’ emergence of a new wave of women writers. Duve, along with the others mentioned in Volker Hage’s article in Der Spiegel on 22 March 1999 – Judith Hermann, Juli Zeh, Jenny Erpenbeck, Julia Franck, Felicitas Hoppe and Zoë Jenny – is often regarded as typical of this younger generation and as representative of a new direction in German writing. In reality, of course, there is far more variety among these writers, and variation in ages, than the Feuilletons would have us believe. Moreover, the Fräuleinwunder was not the only literary innovation of the post-Wall era, nor was it an isolated phenomenon, following hard on the heels of another new trend, the German pop novel. Of those women writers singled out by Hage, Duve is, in the words of another critic, the ‘most grim of the ladies’. She is also, with the exception of Hoppe (b. 1960), the oldest by almost ten years. In generational terms Duve arguably sits on the cusp between generations – somewhere between Florian Illies’ ‘Generation Golf’, the German equivalent of Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, and the ’78ers – and this in-between status is replicated, it will be argued, with respect to the work’s position vis-à-vis feminism and postfeminism. On the one hand, her writing, while witty and humorous, has a darker edge to it and there are echoes of a 1970s-style feminist critique of postwar gender relations. On the other hand, her entertaining style and readability seem to suggest that she belongs more to a postfeminist generation. Moreover, her deft and playful use of genre, her mixing of high and low culture, can be seen as heralding a new relationship to international literary models and to global popular culture more generally. Similar to texts of the Neue deutsche Popliteratur (New German Pop Literature), Duve’s novel revolves around the themes of adolescence, music, drugs, parties, fashion and relationships. Rather than treating Duve as yet another ‘new archivalist’ (Baßler) and classifying Dies ist kein Liebeslied as new German pop (in contradistinction to the older pop), I propose situating Dies ist kein Liebeslied in a different, international context. This will involve, first, an exploration of Duve’s use of intertextuality in relation to German as well as international models and, second, a discussion of the work’s relationship to feminism and postfeminism. The term postfeminism, or what is also referred to as ‘third wave’, ‘power’, ‘neo’, ‘post’, ‘revisionist’, ‘dissident’ or ‘post-ideological’ feminism, is sometimes used to circumscribe the backlash against second-wave feminism that occurred in the late 1980s. More recently, however, postfeminism has been associated with the coming-of-age of a new generation of feminists. Postfeminists, according to Alyson Cole, like to think of themselves as being less dogmatic, less prudish, less averse to women’s power, less suspicious of money, consumerism and capitalism, and less hostile to beauty, fashion and popular women’s culture. One important distinction postfeminist scholars make between themselves and earlier feminists is with respect to women’s status as victims, with postfeminists eschewing the notion that all women are victims of all men. As we shall see, Duve’s response to many of the feminist issues raised in the novel continues in the feminist tradition while also displaying a strong affinity to postfeminism. In this chapter it will be argued that both Duve’s engagement with feminism/postfeminism and her use of intertextuality are indicative of a new globalising phase in German fiction that corresponds to the emergence of a new transnational literary culture.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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References

Finger, EvelynExzesse der TrostlosigkeitDie Zeit 47 2002 14Google Scholar
Johnston, SusanWomen and Domestic Experience in Victorian Political FictionWestport, CTGreenwood Press 2001Google Scholar

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