Recently I wrote about how (unfounded) charges of plagiarism dogged the great poet Paul Celan and may have contributed to his suicide in 1970. How times have changed! Now actual plagiarism is embraced as evidence of "authenticity" and propels books onto the bestseller list. At least that is what is happening in Germany with teen sensation Helene Hegemann and her novel Axoloti Roadkill. When it turned out that sections of her book were lifted verbatim from another author Hegemann seemed to embrace plagiarism as a literary principle:
"Das, was wir machen, ist eine Summierung aus den Dingen, die wir erleben, lesen, mitkriegen und träumen", schrieb Hegemann. "Originalität gibt's sowieso nicht, nur Echtheit." [What we do is the sum of the things that we experience, read, observe and dream. There is no originality, only authenticity.]
More on the Hegemann plagiarism affair at Debora Weber-Wulff's plagiarism blog.
So far, I have resisted reading Axoloti Roadkill, but there has been one very amusing development. Büchner-Preis winning poet Durs Grünbein came to the defense of Hegemann with a piece in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung entitled ""Plagiat"". Grünbein lifted the text for this from a newspaper article by Gottfried Benn published in 1926 entitled - "Plagiat". Benn seems to scoff at the very notion of plagiarism:
Was heißt demgegenüber Entlehnung, was Plagiat oder Herkunft des Materiellen, man vergesse doch nicht, dass diese Begriffe in Sphären liegen, die ohne Raum und ohne Atem sind. Seit es Welten gibt, wo immer sich Reiche des Geistigen bildeten, gab es nur eine einzige Sphäre, in der alle Begriffe des Seelischen Maß und Halt, Verurteilung oder Rechtfertigung enthielten, die Sphäre des Schöpferischen, die Kunst.
(What, by contrast, constitutes borrowing, what is plagiarism or origin of the material. Lest weforget that these are terms in the spheres, which are breathless and space-less. Ever since worlds have existed, wherever spiritual realms were formce, there was only one sphere which contained all the terms of the spiritual dimension and support, condemnation or justification, the sphere of creativity, art.)
Benn was defending the 1926 novel Das verlorene Kind by Rahel Sazara from charges of plagiarism.
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