The Political Novel in the Age of its Impotence: On Recent German Right‐Wing Fiction

Abstract While scholars have increasingly studied the German right's publishing strategies and literary politics, less attention has been paid to the literary texts as such. They are worth examining in detail, I argue here, because they reflect in exaggerated form a problem that troubles political novels more generally: the dwindling role of the novel in the twenty‐first century. Focusing on novels by Hoewer, Zierke, Strauß, and Schwaerzel, the article shows how these texts, by staging scenes where books have immense power, work to create the plausibility of their own efficacy. Such fantasies of literary efficacy, I suggest, are a hallmark of the political novel today across the ideological spectrum.