Writings on the wall

German authors are waiting impatiently for their chance. While German film has finally found an international audience after decades in the doldrums, there is still no clear sign that this rising tide will lift the boat of German fiction, writes Derek Scally.

The Dublin Writers Festival has addressed that shortfall by inviting three leading German authors to discuss their work and contemporary German literature. One of the three guests, Berlin author Thomas Brussig, has written five well-received novels and recently co-wrote the screenplay for Heimat 3, the final part of the epic German trilogy that opens on Friday and will be screened during the festival. "The reputation of German literature abroad is appalling, that it's all so difficult and unreadable and of no pleasure whatsoever," says Brussig. "But in the last five years there is a definite new movement in contemporary literature and German readers have realised that things have improved."

Many of the popular successes in Germany of recent years have used Berlin as a backdrop, such as Russian Disco by Berlin-based Russian author Vladimir Kaminer and Herr Lehmann (published in English as Berlin Blues), a sardonic west Berlin answer to the wave of east German nostalgia, so-called "Ostalgia". The last years have seen some impressive literary debuts as well, including another author invited to the festival, Juli Zeh. The 30-year-old attracted critical praise for her first novel Adler und Engel (Eagles and Angels) and for her latest work, Spieltrieb, an immorality fable set in a west German school.

Thomas Brussig is one of the leading east German authors to emerge in the last decade. He was born in East Berlin in 1965 and worked as everything from plate-washer to hotel porter before beginning to write full-time a decade ago. Since then he has produced several plays and screenplays, but he is still best known for his five novels. Helden wie Wir (Heroes like Us) and Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee (At the shorter end of the Sonnenallee) have both enjoyed wider success as films, plays and, in the case of Sonnenallee, even a musical.

The vanished socialist state he was born into has been a dominant theme in Brussig's work. As a result, he found himself in the middle of the "Ostalgia" debate, spurred on by the success of the film Good Bye Lenin! He initially opposed the idea of misty-eyed memorialising of the GDR, but has since changed his mind. "Nostalgia is a normal human trait and it has to do with the nature of human memory that the GDR suddenly had so many good sides for people," he says. "But that doesn't make the GDR better than it was."

Brussig's work has been well received all over Germany despite (or perhaps because of) its clever treatment of eastern themes. He jokes that the first signs of real German unity - in people's heads - can be seen at his readings. "The reaction to the books east and west is extraordinarily similar," he says. "In the east, they ask me if the westerners like or even understand the books at all because they're so eastern. In the west they ask me if the easterners like the books at all because they have sometimes such terrible depictions of the GDR."

Brussig's greatest regret about the current rush to print with Germany's recent past is that authors aren't taking the time and effort to produce more literature. Instead there has been a run of journalistic treatments and a rash of memoirs of wildly varying quality.

Brussig says favouring the non-fiction approach, dealing in hard facts nailed to reality with a heavy-handed thoroughness, is symptomatic of the continued suspicion in Germany of the familiar, the German.

"Germans have such a difficulty in using the familiar for artistic purposes. People always ask me whether things in my books were really that way and they're always disappointed when they find out that I sometimes make things up," he says.

"I consider the Irish a far more artistically aware people. The original artistic solutions always come from there, you can still enchant with art. That's not the strength of the Germans. I miss the literary approach."

A careful combination of artistic magic and teutonic thoroughness is the hallmark of Brussig's most recent undertaking - co-writing the final installment of German film-maker Edgar Reitz's Heimat trilogy. Heimat, meaning home or homeland, began in 1984 as an 11-part television drama telling the story of the fictitious Simon family through two wars, dictatorship and the economic miracle. A second, 25-hour instalment followed in 1992.

"The word 'Heimat' was abused by both German dictatorships. The great achievement of Edgar Reitz is returning meaning to the word," says Brussig. "He hasn't given 'Heimat' back its original glory and haughtiness, but a kind of ambivalence." Heimat 3, a six-part, 680-minute marathon, begins as the Berlin Wall falls in 1989, and interweaves the continuing story of the Simon family in the west with the easterners they encounter.

If he'd had his way, Brussig says, he would have set the entire third part of Heimat in the east, where the greatest changes in German society have taken place in the past 15 years. Even so, Heimat 3 spends time and care with the disintegration of East Germany and its exploitation, dismantling and absorption into the west.

Brussig's collaboration with Reitz impressed critics in Germany and abroad with its sensitive handling of the issues of German identity and alienation in a time of huge global change and dislocation.

In many ways, the easterners have been a grounding influence in modern Germany, reintroducing their own notions of German identity to help rehabilitate the west German version, scorched by the materialism of the economic miracle and the fury of the 1968 generation.

"The West Germans had everything; they spoke at least two foreign languages and had friends around the world. We were left to ourselves in the east with our monoculture," says Brussig. "The continual ideological changes were resisted by the people and encouraged a certain 'thorough Germanness'. We never latched on to postmodernism at all in East Germany and I don't think we missed out," he laughs.

Former easterners such as Brussig have blown fresh wind and a more irreverent tone into the staid "Feuilleton" culture pages, the German literature scene, and even the ongoing debates about the big themes - such as national identity - that remain a central part of German life.

"'Germany' is a word I had to get used to saying without getting cramps. Germany ceased to exist with the Nazis, then we had the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic. But now we Germans cannot hide behind the division any more," he says. "There are no longer two halves but one whole Germany."

As if to highlight the newfound confidence of German literature, Brussig the author appears supremely unfazed about the chances of young German authors such as him cracking the English-language market.

"There's a German author very popular in France because everyone there thinks he's Italian. In Germany the literature of another country is regularly 'discovered'. Hungarian literature has been big here for the last decade," he says. "If it's the same abroad as it is in Germany, our time will come."

Heimat 3 is released on Friday. Berlin Republic is at Project on Sat, 8.30pm, as part of the Dublin Writers Festival

Germany has given us the world's biggest book fair, in Frankfurt, and a living literary legend in Günther Grass. As thanks, the world all but ignores contemporary German fiction.

In Germany, the import-export ratio for foreign to German novels is three to one and, measured by the purchasing of translation rights, the English-language market is ranked sixth behind countries such as Poland, Spain and the Czech Republic. The only translated work by Thomas Brussig is Helden wie Wir (Heroes Like Us), the comic story of the man who claims to be Germany's "missing link" - the man who breached the Berlin Wall.

Eagles and Angels by Juli Zeh is available from Granta, and Saint Martin's Press has published the English translation of Willenbrock, by Christoph Hein, the third German writer on the festival's discussion panel. The novel charts the disintegration of the life of a former East German engineer who appears to be one of the winners of unification until events start to undermine his existence. It has recently been turned into an acclaimed film by Andreas Dresen.

Two extraordinary modern German classics are Perfume by Patrick Süskind and The Reader by Bernhard Schlink.

You can expect a Thomas Mann revival this summer, as the 50th anniversary of his death approaches.