Chaos and Control: Indexicality and the Human Voice in Contemporary German Fiction

When affordable recording technologies hit the mass market in the 1950s and 1960s, German writers discovered new poetic possibilities. By capturing concrete vocal traces, or indexes, of human beings, sound technologies like radios, tape recorders, and answering machines promised access to concrete lives and, subsequently, began crowding the pages of German novels. In so doing, they also questioned the traditional role of the narrative voice. My dissertation advances the concept of literary indexicality by arguing that one of contemporary German literature’s greatest innovations is its intermedial translation of acoustic signals into written words. Literary indexicality reveals how fiction engages indexical effects—the traces of human bodies commonly recorded by non-literary media—by transporting the immediacy of disembodied voices from recordings into fictional narratives. In critical dialog with sound and media studies, narratology, and critical theory, I demonstrate how four German novels published between 1968 and 1999 employ literary indexicality for their own poetic means. While Hubert Fichte’s Die Palette (1968) employs voice recordings to make social outsiders physically present, Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina (1971) exposes how male power, amplified by technology, polices female voices. More recently, Marcel Beyer’s Flughunde (1995) explores the link between indexical media and the body politics of National Socialism. My last chapter on Rainald Goetz’s Abfall für alle (1999) shows how disembodied voices remain with us even when digital technology changes both writing and subjectivity. Critically engaging Diedrich Diederichsen’s theory of indexical artworks as well as technology-centered media histories like Friedrich Kittler’s, my exploration of literary indexicality in these novels advances the argument that it is our ability to read indexical media that will guide our humane usage of media technologies—–a lesson that literature is uniquely qualified to teach.