Former Defense Minister Guttenberg isn’t the only prominent German whose magnum opus has recently turned out to be totally corrupt; a celebrated Kosovo war account has been revealed as a fake.
We all know that trends arrive in Germany a little later than in the States, much to the chagrin of those of us who’ve had to live through manias for frozen yogurt and cupcake shops, Ray Ban sunglasses and keffiyeh scarves twice. Looks like the same holds true for high-profile memoirs that turn out to be a pack of lies.
Daniela Matijević was a German soldier in Kosovo in the late nineties. When she returned home, suffering from PTSD, she began to write a novel about a soldier in Kosovo. At some point while working with editors at Heyne Verlag, it was decided that Matijević’s piece would be more moving (and easier to move) as memoir. So Mit der Hölle hätte ich leben können (I Could Have Lived with Hell) was published as nonfiction. The problem is that it’s not.
Matijević’s book is nightmarish, gory, disturbing. In a much-publicized episode, she claims that German soldiers ate dog meat to stay alive. But you really didn’t find those kinds of conditions in Kosovo at that point. No one can verify her stories, or even really take them seriously if you think about it. As Michael Martens wrote in an FAZ article, “Her Kosovo is more like the outskirts of Stalingrad in winter 1942.”
So why was she the darling of the German media this summer? Did they not read the book?
Martens suggests a different reason. Matijević has foreign roots. She’s a woman in the army. She suffers from PTSD. And she’s a lesbian.
“At the sight of so many minority groups together in one person, the protective instinct in the heart of an upstanding German journalist seems to triumph over the due diligence of a reporter. Minority-philia rules. Whoever claims to be an outsider or a victim, of whomever or whatever, is allowed anything.”
It’s important to note that the FAZ is a conservative publication, as German newspapers go. So when the opportunity presents itself to hold an anti-minority, anti-left-leaning-journalist rant, what dutiful defender of the Leitkultur wouldn’t indulge? Can we blame Martens for that little gleeful vociferation?
I don’t think he’s wholly wrong. Criticizing minorities makes people uneasy. Especially when Matijević’s PTSD supposedly stems from the incidents described in the book. But that’s a journalist’s job. However, Martens has ascribed too much intentionality the the journalistic love-fest. Cowardice, laziness, and complacency are plenty to make a book like this a success, without any active “protective instinct” at work.
I think the brunt of the blame would be better leveled at the editors at Heyne, who clearly benefited from turning a blind-eye to the book’s flaws (and possibly were aware of the them long ago, since they first encountered the book as a piece of fiction). Though they shouldn’t rely on it, journalists expect that a book from a major publisher went through some sort of editorial process. Heyne, on the other hand, was taking on a manuscript from someone with acknowledged mental-emotional problems.
This text by Amanda DeMarco is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
