Ulrich Breuer: Ungeschickt. Eine Fallgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, Paderborn: Brill Wilhelm Fink 2021.

• Kirk Wetters

Ulrich Breuer’s “Ungeschickt”, at least on the surface, is about a particular aspect of national character. In other words: a cultural stereotype. The historical reconstruction of tropes of nationality, often considered dubious generalizations, makes “Ungeschickt” challenging but also fascinating to read – and to review from a U.S. academic and non-native German perspective. Like all aspects of identity and national culture, especially those perceived as negative traits, the prejudice of Germans as clumsy or awkward must be borderline taboo. At least it was on the periphery of my own literary and cultural knowledge – not an aspect of German-ness that is likely to feature prominently either in the German language classroom or in U. S. graduate seminars. Given this somehow sensitive context, Breuer tactfully approaches the elephant in the room, in order to make the case that, for example, the difference between French lightness and elegance vs. German ponderousness and Schwerfälligkeit is not simply an arbitrary (and presumably false) preconception but articulates itself in a massive discourse that can be empirically traced over more than five centuries.