German science fiction
German science fiction literature in the modern sense appeared at the end of the 19th century with the writer Kurd Laßwitz, while Jules Verne in France had already written most of his Voyages extraordinaires and H. G. Wells in Great Britain was working on the publication of his novel The Invisible Man.
[2] Kindermann's account is particularly noteworthy for the attention it pays to the technical aspects of his imaginary journey: description of the sky map, calculation of the distance between Mars and Earth, and use of Franceso Lana-Terzi's theory of vacuum (1670) to move an aerostat through space.
At the end of the eighteenth century, in another field, the German writer Jean Paul (1763-1825) wrote a short story entitled Der Maschinenmensch (The Man-Machine), which parodied both the possible mechanization of all human actions (waking up, chewing, writing, etc.)
The story is a pastiche of the Bildungsroman, a literary genre typical of classical German literature, full of often convincing technical anticipations in fields as varied as weaponry, military strategy, religion, education, justice, social life and so on.
[11] In the cometary wake of Jules Verne's Hector Servadac,[12] Friedrich Wilhelm Mader offers German youth an interstellar voyage to distant Alpha Centauri with Wunderwelten (Wonderful Worlds), an educational and entertaining novel published in 1911.
The author gave free rein to a cosmic imagination that raises the question of the ontological link between the individual and the universe, without developing the purely technical elements typical of the genre.
Following Germany's defeat in World War I, the science-fiction landscape of the Weimar Republic was marked by a tenacious spirit of revenge that produced a plethora of militaristic works in which the German engineer, suddenly promoted to supreme defender of the humiliated nation, invented new and extraordinary weapons capable of making the enemy forget its odious Treaty of Versailles.
[23] One of the most popular and prolific futurists of the period was undoubtedly Otfrid von Hanstein, whose dozen or so novels were quickly adapted to English -at the express request of the famous publisher Hugo Gernsback.
Technical anticipation and socialist ideals were also the hallmarks of authors like Werner Illing, whose novel Utopolis appeared in 1930 with Der Bücherkreis, a publisher close to the Social Democratic Party (SPD) of the time.
At the heart of Hans Dominik's novels are scientific invention and technical extrapolation, synthesized in the central figure of the German engineer whose coveted discovery promises to improve the lot of the world's citizens.
While the author is positively in favor of a federal union of European states, he also shows a marked concern for the maintenance of German hegemony over Europe and, more generally, of the white race over the rest of the world.
Treibstoff SR (RI Fuel, 1940), Hans Dominik's last novel, was even sent as a Christmas present to German troops stationed at the front, despite the shortage of paper and manpower in printing works at the time.
[27] Officially supported by the Nazi regime, Hanns Hörbiger's theory of glacial cosmogony continued to fuel the imaginations of futurists of the period,[28] as did radium's atomic energy and brain waves, first measured in 1929 by German physiologist Hans Berger.
The concept of Lebensraum, theorized by Adolf Hitler to justify his expansionist policy, prompted some authors of the period to take up the ambitious Atlantropa project by German architect Herman Sörgel: the construction of a dam across the Strait of Gibraltar linking Europe to the African continent.
Over the course of the series' one hundred and fifty issues, Sun Koh, a Mayan prince, heir to the throne of Atlantis and archetype of the Aryan race, undergoes many trials before returning to his homeland, accompanied by his faithful British bellboy, Hal Mervin, and black boxing champion, Nimba.
Walter Ernsting's favorite themes at the time were the nuclear threat against the backdrop of the Cold War, and the possible extraterrestrial origin of mankind -an idea he would later take up with Swiss ufologist Erich von Däniken.
The series exploited all the narrative and literary resources of space opera and military SF, developing a science fiction that initially focused on action and adventure before moving, a little later, onto a more spiritual and philosophical path.
[32] At the same time, Austrian-born writer Herbert W. Franke began his literary career with two novels, Das Gedankennetz (The Thought Network, 1961) and Der Orchideenkäfig (The Orchid Cage, 1961), which question notions of reality and virtuality while exploring the resources of the human brain.
Inspired by the great literary role models Jules Verne, Kurd Laßwitz and Hans Dominik, East German SF developed independently, cut off from American production, which was censored in socialist countries.
From a socialist point of view, the only possible legitimization of anticipation literature is utopia, the socio-historical concept that serves as both the foundation and the culmination of the work of social transformation being carried out in the countries of Eastern Europe.
The 1950s, marked by the workers' novel and the political context of the Cold War, saw the emergence of a utopian literature, relatively uniform in its themes, which on the whole presented a victorious communism that had definitively abolished hunger, disease, money and crime.
As part of the Stanislas-Lem-Klub's activities, student Rolf Krohn was disbarred for life from the University of Dresden by a secretary of the Socialist Party, who accused him of making anti-socialist remarks and opening the door to enemy ideology.
These years were marked by a great diversification of literary production, with an offer aimed at all audiences (youth, teenagers, adults), sweeping across all genres (from trivial literature to deeply philosophical novels with complex structures) and delving deeper into purely stylistic and formal aspects.
He was soon joined by Michael Marrak, with his critically acclaimed novel Lord Gamma (2000), and Frank Schätzing, with The Swarm (Der Schwarm, 2004), an American-style techno-thriller that earned its author first place on the 2005 bestseller list for all genres.
[41] Others, such as Angela and Karlheinz Steinmüller, who have moved into the field of economic forecasting, continued to publish a few anticipation novels, but above all attempt to give a better understanding of East German science fiction with historical and critical works on the socialist period.
It published stories by young German authors and American writers who were still little known in Germany at the time, with the notable exception of Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Jack Vance, Murray Leinster, A. E. van Vogt and Isaac Asimov.
From the 1970s onwards, the major German publishers entrusted their specialized collections to renowned science fiction writers, who brought out the best of Anglo-Saxon production in translation and endeavored to promote quality German-language works.
German anticipation first appeared after World War II, when Fernand Nathan Éditeur published three novels by Otfrid von Hanstein[48] in its "Aventures et voyages" collection for young people.
In the 1960s, the "Le Rayon fantastique" collection, directed by Georges H. Gallet at Hachette and Gallimard, made a foray into German literature with a novel that was already thirty years old, Druso, by Friedrich Freksa.
[49] Finally, the renowned "Ailleurs et Demain" collection, edited by Gérard Klein at Robert Laffont, publishes two German novels, Zone zéro by Herbert W. Franke[50] and L'étoile de ceux qui ne sont pas encore nés by Franz Werfel.
