Kurt Kusenberg and the Realization that We Live in an Absurd World. Comic Relief in a Hopeless Situation: The Rediscovery of a Major German Literary Voice

Literary scholarship is deeply familiar with the work by the German-Czech writer Franz Kafka and some of his French contemporaries and successors, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Albert Camus, Saul Bellow, Donald Barthelme, and Cormac McCarthy, all of whom addressed the absurdity of modern life. Their messages about the loss of meaning and rationality reverberate with us today maybe even more than ever. The very willingness to acknowledge that life can be absurd represents the first step in coming to terms with it more constructively and without falling into despair. The next step would be to find this absurdity rather laughable, but none of those famous authors revealed any sense of humor. However, the German author Kurt Kusenberg (1904–1983), today mostly forgotten, was bold enough to take the proverbial bull by the horn and to write scores of highly entertaining, though in essence rather troubling short stories that undermine all our notion of meaningful reality and yet invite us to laugh about this realization. This laughter proves to be not deconstructive, as we would expect from absurd literature, but reconstructive, reminding us of the relativity of our world ruled by contingency.