Goethe. Hesse. Brecht. Grass. Schiller. Mann. Von Kleist (thank you, bookshelf). Some of the greatest writers of all time, and all of them bastions of the German language. But will 17 year old Helene Hegemann, author of the bestseller “Axolotl Roadkill” be counted amongst them? This is doubtful on two counts: Firstly, because her massively over-hyped oeurve is just a conglomerate of “oh so alternative, Berlin youth culture” clichés, and secondly, because she didn’t even write said cliches herself. Huge chunks of the novel were ripped off from a book by a 28 year old blogger who goes by the name of Airen.
The story of a disenfranchised youth taking loads of drugs, going to loads of techno parties and generally throwing tantrums about the establishment and the adult/corporate world has been a huge success in Germany. The book’s publishing house, Ullstein, has already printed 100,000 copies, and, barely 2 weeks after it hit the shelves, “Axolotl Roadkill” is in its third edition. High brow German newspapers like the Sueddeutsche Zeitung and Frankfuerter Allgemeine Zeitung have lauded the work as a “literary sensation”. In light of the recent plagarism claims, the most hilariously ironic review would have to be when the FAZ journalist described the author’s work as “so seductively individual that some hundred other authors will surely try and copy the Hegemann style and fail miserably.” But the German media world are less than chuffed with her now.
And how has the 17 year old Myspace enthusiast/ aspiring novelist responded to these plagarism claims? She seems pretty blasé about the whole thing. Stealing other people’s works is, according to her just, er, “intertextuality”. In a statement released this week, she wrote:”Very many artists use this technique… by organically including parts in my text, I am entering into a dialogue with the author”. In this case, I’m calling dibs on The Tin Drum. I’m sure Guenter Grass wouldn’t mind if I took a few chapters of Oskar Matzerath running riot in the post war moral vacuum in Danzig, and just transposed them into an Oxford setting. (“Down it, fresher!” cried the rugby lad. Oskar screamed so loud as to shatter the surrounding windows of the college bar.) The author went on to claim that; “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity.” I suppose this was the mantra by which she wrote the entire book. Minus the authenticity part.
So why did such a silly book get so many gold stars in the first place? Why didn’t a book brandishing the blurb “The radical voice of the Noughties generation” make its target readership collectively cringe? I think its success is symptomatic of how Berlin youth culture is in denial, and is desperately clinging to its vanishing anti-corporate identity of old and of how the majority of the Berlin “alternative” crowd are now a bunch of rich kids who don’t need to find jobs because their parents pay for them to put on art galleries and wear designer hemp clothes. It’s a far cry from the city’s days as a squatters haven; especially now that the final iconic squat was shut down at the end of last year. Thus, a book that reminds Berliners of just how alternatively debauched they really are would of course sell like hotcakes. Especially when targetted at those young’uns who are just piecing together their fishnet attire in preparation for their first visit to Berghain.
