Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on Translations
- Introduction to the Contemporary Short Story in German
- 1 Berlin Shorts: The German Capital in the Short Story of the Twenty-First Century
- 2 The German Crime Story in the Twenty-First Century
- 3 Performance, Performativity, and the Contemporary German Kurzgeschichte
- 4 Cramped Spaces, Creative Bottlenecks: Sudabeh Mohafez’s Das Zehn-Zeilen-Buch and the Short-Short
- 5 Bodo Kirchhoff’s Widerfahrnis: A Novelle for Our Time?
- 6 The Liminal Space of the Short Story: Clemens Meyer’s Die Nacht, die Lichter and Die stillen Trabanten
- 7 Framing the Presence: Judith Hermann’s Lettipark
- 8 Of Unhomed Subjects and Unsettled Voices: Alois Hotschnig’s Die Kinder Beruhigte Das Nicht
- 9 Authorial Development and Fluid Spaces in the “Complete Stories”: Peter Stamm’s Der Lauf Der Dinge
- 10 On Disappearing: Reading Ulrike Almut Sandig with Sylvia Bovenschen
- 11 Metamorphic Becomings: Yoko Tawada’s Opium Für Ovid: Ein Kopfkissenbuch Von 22 Frauen
- 12 Melinda Nadj Abonji and Jurczok 1001: Performance, Politics, and Poetry
- 13 Rhizomatic Wanderings: The Writings of Gabriele Petricek
- 14 Trends and Issues in the Contemporary German-Language Short Story
- Appendix: Contemporary German-Language Short Stories in Translation
- Bibliography of Primary Texts
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
10 - On Disappearing: Reading Ulrike Almut Sandig with Sylvia Bovenschen
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 February 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on Translations
- Introduction to the Contemporary Short Story in German
- 1 Berlin Shorts: The German Capital in the Short Story of the Twenty-First Century
- 2 The German Crime Story in the Twenty-First Century
- 3 Performance, Performativity, and the Contemporary German Kurzgeschichte
- 4 Cramped Spaces, Creative Bottlenecks: Sudabeh Mohafez’s Das Zehn-Zeilen-Buch and the Short-Short
- 5 Bodo Kirchhoff’s Widerfahrnis: A Novelle for Our Time?
- 6 The Liminal Space of the Short Story: Clemens Meyer’s Die Nacht, die Lichter and Die stillen Trabanten
- 7 Framing the Presence: Judith Hermann’s Lettipark
- 8 Of Unhomed Subjects and Unsettled Voices: Alois Hotschnig’s Die Kinder Beruhigte Das Nicht
- 9 Authorial Development and Fluid Spaces in the “Complete Stories”: Peter Stamm’s Der Lauf Der Dinge
- 10 On Disappearing: Reading Ulrike Almut Sandig with Sylvia Bovenschen
- 11 Metamorphic Becomings: Yoko Tawada’s Opium Für Ovid: Ein Kopfkissenbuch Von 22 Frauen
- 12 Melinda Nadj Abonji and Jurczok 1001: Performance, Politics, and Poetry
- 13 Rhizomatic Wanderings: The Writings of Gabriele Petricek
- 14 Trends and Issues in the Contemporary German-Language Short Story
- Appendix: Contemporary German-Language Short Stories in Translation
- Bibliography of Primary Texts
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
FLAMINGOS (FLAMINGOS), Ulrike Almut Sandig's first volume of short stories, came out in 2010. Sandig was already well known as the author of two volumes of poetry, Zunder (Tinder, 2005) and Streumen (Streumen, 2007), followed in 2011 by Dickicht (Thick of It, 2018). In 2015 a second collection of stories, Buch gegen das Verschwinden (Book against Disappearance), appeared, followed in 2016, by a fourth poetry collection, ich bin ein feld voller raps verstecke die Rehe und leuchte wie dreizehn Ölgemälde übereinandergelegt (I am a field full of oil-seed rape give cover to deer and shine like thirteen oil paintings laid one on top of the other). Her first novel, Monster wie wir (Monsters Like Us), came out in July 2020. Sandig's multimedial work also includes radio plays, audio books, and collaborations with musicians, DJs, and other poets and translators.
Sandig's prose collections, both subtitled Geschichten (stories), immediately call attention to the significance of storytelling: “Es gibt mich gar nicht. Aber es gibt diese Geschichte” (I don't exist. But this story exists). This paradoxical statement in “Über mich” (About Me), the first story in Flamingos, implies that the writing subject changes through time, but the stories are always present, brought back to life in reading. The echoing titles of Buch gegen das Verschwinden and of the first story, “Gegen das Verschwinden” (Against Disappearance), indicate a cycle of stories with a purpose. We invent or read stories so that past and present will not just disappear: we tell stories against disappearance. In this essay we focus on Sandig but also discuss Sylvia Bovenschen's experimental text Verschwunden (Disappeared; 2008), where the leitmotiv of disappearance runs through many disparate short texts. The comparison highlights different traditions: Bovenschen's Verschwunden is descended from modernist Kurzprosa, the short prose sketches that flourished in the early twentieth century; Sandig's fluid prose echoes nineteenth-century forms such as the fairy tale or the poetic-realist Erzählung (tale). Yet Sandig's stories constantly undermine any surface impression of harmonious reality. In the face of collapsing political ideologies after the fall of the Berlin Wall, her loosely connected stories reflect different facets of an unstable world.
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- The Short Story in German in the Twenty-First Century , pp. 191 - 210Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2020