A New Modernism or ‘Neue Lesbarkeit’?: Hybridity in Georg Klein's Libidissi

Since unification, critics Ulrich Greiner and Frank Schirrmacher, influenced by Karl Heinz Bohrer, have called for a return to a supposedly repressed modernist tradition in which aesthetic transcendence and subjectivity were valued more highly than any moralising agenda. Other editors and writers such as Uwe Wittstock, Martin Hielscher and Matthias Politycki, however, have promoted a so‐called ‘Neue Lesbarkeit’ based on Anglo‐American models stressing readability and story‐telling. In both cases, the guiding motivation has been the desire to define a space for German writing within the globalised literary market place. Georg Klein's Libidissi presents a model of a possible third way between a form of modernism that would retreat into the ghetto of the German literary tradition and imitation of the Anglo‐American mainstream. The present article thus reveals the manner in which Klein's novel plays with hybridity: hybridity of genre and influences insofar as the book alludes to the Anglo‐American tradition of the spy novel and hybridity as a means of resisting globalisation and the eradication of local cultures.