Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies

Bernward Vesper's Die Reise represents, in hindsight, a seminal text of the "New Subjectivity" in West German literature of the 1970s. Through his complex hybrid Romanessay (the book's subtitle), Vesper becomes a symbol of how the 1960s student protest movement was already inscribed with a subjectivity new to the postwar period, yet known to the German intellectual tradition, namely in romanticism. The text mobilizes nostalgia as a constructive mode of historical narration in the autobiographically inspired protagonist's search for a concept of subjectivity. Vesper challenges the taboos surrounding subjectivity in the wake of the "death of literature" at the peak of the student protest movement of the 60s, demonstrating that nostalgic subjectivity is, in fact, a rebellious mode, replete with utopian striving. Indeed, utopia and nostalgia prove to be in an open-ended, nonteleological, dialectical interrelationship - akin to the Dialectic of Enlightenment of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno - that recasts the narrative of transition from the "death of literature" to the "New Subjectivity." This narrative of transition reveals that the commonly proclaimed dichotomy between the 1960s utopian student movement and the 1970s inward turn toward subjectivity is simplistic and misleading. While there is clearly a move toward the subject in the 1970s, away from defunct ideals of a harmonious collective - Peter Schneider's Lenz (1972) illustrates this - the roots of the "New Subjectivity" lie beneath the revolutionary topsoil of the 1960s in trail-blazing texts such as Die Reise.

By way of brief contextualization for this article, the "death of literature" is understood metonymically as the historical and ideological peak of the student movement as seen in texts such as Karl Markus Michel's tone-setting article. He writes about the end of bourgeois l'art pour l'art, and for the purposes of this article, the metonymy functions as a marker for the cultural move against bourgeois individualism in favour of an idealized collective. "New Subjectivity" is read here in much the same manner as by Sabine von Dirke, who writes: "Literary critics coined the label New Subjectivity, which is today often used to designate the 1970s as a coherent literary epoch" (69), and she goes on to argue that this is a problematic generalization that does not actually pay tribute to the complexity of the literature of the time, seeing it as [End Page 349] a direct response to the "failed" student movement of the late 1960s. She advocates the reasonable position that, "[a]lthough a single epithet such as New Subjectivity does not suffice to capture the complexity of the literature of the time, it nevertheless articulates the dominant paradigm" (70). In this spirit, Vesper's Romanessay is surely one of the profoundest literary moments in the rereading of the post-1968 phase and clearly prefigures the paradigm of "New Subjectivity."

This hybrid novel (Berendse) is comprised of three main narrative horizons that trace the trajectory of nostalgia toward utopia in a narrative of the road that lays bare the roots of the inward turn that would characterize a significant segment of post-1968 literature. These narrative horizons are (in no particular order): the description of a road trip and comment on the contemporary context of the late 1960s; a detailed account of an LSD trip; and, finally, memory excurses that recount the narrator's childhood in the authoritarian household of the infamous and unrepentant Blut und Boden author Will Vesper. The text develops a concept of rebellion against the backdrop of the experience of the student protest movement that pretended to a strictly objective focus, but Vesper's nostalgic impulse pushes utopian ideas of the New Left beyond the restrictions of such antisubjective ideology and toward a new form of "subjective" rebellion that informs his text as a constant process of (literary) resistance. In so doing, he raises the crucial question of how to reframe the literary and historiographical discourse on the transitional phase from the 60s student movement to the "New Subjectivity" of the 70s. This article focusses on some salient contextual evidence and historical circumstances of the novel, showing how these...