Hamburg dogma

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The Hamburg dogma developed based on Lars von Triers and Thomas Vinterberg's successful film " Dogma 95 ". At the turn of the millennium, the DOGMA group of authors wanted to spark a debate about the state of German literature by setting eight rigid rules in a "Hamburg Treaty". Its six first-time signatories turned against the West German " pop literature " of Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre , Christian Kracht and Benjamin Lebert at the time .

Authors of the "Dogma" group

In November 1999 these six authors passed the "Hamburg Treaty":

The following authors were added later:

The eight rules of the "Hamburg Treaty"

The "Hamburg Treaty" contains eight rules and brief explanations of these rules.

  1. Adjectives should be avoided.
    We differentiate between evaluative and defining adjectives. The judgmental adjectives must be avoided. Their meaning should be revealed in the text through other formulations.
  2. Feelings should not be named, but presented.
    We don't want to name feelings, but watch how they manifest themselves.
  3. Used metaphors are prohibited.
    Metaphors are only allowed if they create a new connection. In addition, all idioms are prohibited.
  4. It must be written in the present tense.
    The present tense is closer to the subject.
  5. A sentence has no more than fifteen words.
    The limitation of the sentence length is for the sake of understanding.
  6. The perspective must not be changed.
    A change of perspective ensures distance.
  7. The omniscient narrator is dead.
    The author should not rise above his text.
  8. Every text that fulfills the Hamburg dogma should be identified as such by the author.
    The labeling of the texts should read: This text fulfills the rules of the Hamburg dogma.

Work of the group of authors "Dogma"

The published writing rules for authors were partly amused - presented in the feature sections of newspapers, magazines and radio nationwide.

The "Dogma" authors set up their own website "www.hamburger-dogma.de" to document the response from the press and to enable a debate; it was only taken offline in 2011 after nothing new had been posted for years.

Events organized by the "Dogma" authors in Hamburg were "crowd pullers", although their quality was often not convincing. For example, the "Hamburger Morgenpost" wrote on the occasion of the first presentation: "However, disappointment spread rather quickly, which was not only due to the fact that many" Dogma "authors are poor readers. The stories of Gordon Roesnik, Anne-Dorkas Giesen or Verena Carl were quite irrelevant and did not affect the audience. "

From these readings, however - as the only practical consequence of the "Hamburg Treaty" - the organizer circle " Power - Organized Literature ", which has been successful for years in the Hanseatic city, developed . This group of authors successfully brought a mixture of " Spoken Word " and " Poetry Slam " onto the stage at different locations ( MoJo Club , Deutsches Schauspielhaus ) and published their own anthologies with readings.

criticism

The critics of the "Hamburg Treaty" accused its signatories of the "Hamburg dogma" being an "almost embarrassingly unsuccessful PR gag" to get people talking in times of rapidly changing fashions.

On the other hand, the educated bourgeois canon was reminded again and again and it was claimed that "great literature" could not be written according to "dogma rules". For example, the writer Stefan Beuse asked in the features section of the daily newspaper "Die Welt" whether Thomas Mann's " Die Buddenbrooks " or " Die Blechtrommel " by Günter Grass could be told from just one perspective and without judgmental adjectives.

In fact, even the "Dogma" authors found it difficult to write according to their own rules of the "Hamburg Treaty". Michael Weins alone published his much-acclaimed debut novel "Goldener Reiter" in 2002 based on the eight literary principles. However, Weins later stated on the homepage of the "power network" that he was increasingly noticing the "desire to subvert the rules". In 2003, at the end of his satire "Der Buchmesser", the journalist Rainer Jogschies noted rather shyly that he had not complied with all eight rules, since "the novel was largely written in the early 1990s": "There were the rules of the DOGMA group of authors not yet." However, in the reprint "Der Buchmesser. Reloaded", the text was heavily revised according to the rules of the "Hamburg Treaty", but the previous "Dogma" chapter was no longer adopted. The Nachttischbuch-Verlag only referred to its own website, on which only the "Dogma" declaration from 1999 is reproduced.

Ironically, in book reviews of former "Dogma" authors, however, it was mostly not mentioned that Gunter Gerlach , for example, always observed the rules of writing as his own stylistic device in his crime novels in the following years. And of all people, one of the harshest "Dogma" critics, the later "Power Club" activist Tina Uebel , wrote her debut novel "Ich bin Duke" in 2002 largely according to "Dogma" ideas.

Even the critics, however, often disagreed with themselves. In a review of Lou A. Probsthayn's novel "The User", Andreas Heidtmann, for example, did not associate eBay as the defining topic of the satirical novel from the outset , but saw the book primarily as an "Internet novel based on the Hamburg dogma". Long after the "Dogma" group of authors was dissolved in 2003, he repeated the conflict as follows: "Fortunately, there are only a few directors and even fewer authors who work according to the rules of these dogmas. Otherwise the world of film and literature would soon be impoverished. But Lou A. Probsthayn succeeds precisely thanks to this reductionist approach and thanks to the renunciation of classical narrative means, to develop an incredibly compact, dry style, which is charged with an immense wit. The strength lies in the playful definition of words and in the idiosyncrasy of the sentences this prose. "

The cultural scientist Christian Körner summed up: "If you take stock, the“ experiment ”by the Hamburg authors failed despite a (!) Successful novel debut and all similarities with the Dogma 95 movement."

Literature according to "dogma" rules

Individual evidence and explanations

  1. ↑ See in Matthias N. Lorenz: DOGMA 95 in context: Cultural studies contributions to authentication efforts in Danish film of the 90s. Berlin 2013 (especially chapter 3)
  2. ↑ For example, in the "Süddeutsche Zeitung" under the headline "The many great boys" or in the "Hamburger Abendblatt" under the heading "Thomas Mann would have no chance - authors proclaimed their Hamburg dogma ". In the "tageszeitung", Mechthild Bausch criticized methodically classifying "metaphors forbidden - Danish model: the chastity oath of the Hamburg literary" dogma "(see" die tageszeitung "of January 3, 2000, p. 24) and Nele Marie Brüdgam analyzed in the" Hamburger Morgenpost "in detail" Hamburg's contract of the authors - after the filmmakers now also the writers: Hanseatic poets establish "dogma literature" (see MoPo of November 30, 1999, http://www.mopo.de/news/die-hamburger -dogma-authors-in-sold-out-mojo-club-against-the-used-metaphors, 5066732,6431736.html )
  3. ↑ A press review was also available at www.probsthayn.de/1188.html - the page has since been shut down.
  4. ↑ The Hamburg DOGMA authors in the sold out Mojo Club - Against the used-up metaphors. In: Hamburger Morgenpost. March 31, 2000.
  5. ↑ When this group was dissolved in 2008, its own website was shut down: MACHT - Organized Literature. Archived from the original on January 25, 2009 ; accessed on May 9, 2017 .
  6. ↑ Christian Körner: On filming and writing - essay on the failed attempt to transfer the film concept “Dogma 95” to literature. Scientific term paper at the Free University of Berlin, winter semester 2004/05 (advanced seminar: "Storytelling in contemporary literature and film"; Lecturer: Dr. U. Kocher)
  7. ↑ Stefan Beuse: Give me a dogma! Ten Hamburg authors want to reinvent the language of literature. In: The world. February 11, 2000.
  8. ↑ The criticism was comprehensively described by Detlef Grumbach in "Deutschlandradio Kultur": Literary attacks from the "Power Club" - The authors of the Hamburg dogma ( http://www.deutschlandradiokultur.de/manuskript-literäre-attacken-aus-dem -macht-club-txt.media.6e113b80d3ed61e14468711beb04b932.txt )
  9. ↑ See Michael Wein's: Goldener Reiter. Hamburg 2002.
  10. ↑ Cf. Rainer Jogschies: The book knife. Berlin 2003, p. 124.
  11. ↑ See Rainer B. Jogschies: The book knife. Reloaded. Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-937550-16-9 , p. 147.
  12. ↑ The declaration is only available as a download from http://www.nachttischbuch.de/download.php?f5abee1b3c39c2c2d42f3458f5300695
  13. ↑ See also Lou A. Probsthayn: The user. Munich 2006.
  14. ↑ Cf. Andreas Heidtmann: Lou A. Probsthayn - The user. An internet novel based on the Hamburg dogma. poetenladen 2006 ( http://www.poetenladen.de/heidtmann-lou-probsthayn.htm )
  15. ↑ Christian Körner, see above