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European Crime Narratives

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The issue of what could be said to be specifically European in European popular culture cannot even start to be addressed without taking into account the problem of multilinguism. To assess the Europeanness of European popular culture therefore requires considering the impact of translation policies on the transcultural circulation of works of fiction across the continent.

As is well known, the history of crime novel has long been marked by the cultural hegemony of Anglo-American popular fiction. Beginning with the immediate transnational fortune obtained by Arthur Conan Doyle’s adventures of Sherlock Holmes already at the end of the 19th century, and continuing through the import of the all-American dime novel format in all European countries in the early 20th century, the language of crime fiction has long been indisputably English. Although more or less mature forms of detective fiction emerged in different countries, none of them really acquired significant circulation outside their respective linguistic areas until a relatively recent time.

Transcultural influences of French crime fiction[edit]

Conferming France’s unique position in the “World Bourse of Literary Values” (Casanova 2004), a partial exception to the Anglo-American hegemony on the crime fiction was represented by the early transcultural interest in the work of Emile Gaboriau, whose detective Monsieur Lecoq was already entertaining international audiences by the late 19th century, even becoming an inspiration for Sherlock Holmes. France further proved its “cultural exception” to the aggressive marketing of Anglo-American cultural products at the dawn of the 20th century, responding to the increasing popularity of foreign fiction with a couple of criminal antiheroes – Arsène Lupin and Fantômas – who had readers of many different languages cheer on their serial exploits (Dall’Asta 2009). Additionally, what is no doubt the most relevant transcultural phenomenon in classic European crime literature since the time of Sherlock Holmes – the transnational/transmedia saga of Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret, started in 1929 – was introduced to European readers between 1931 and 1932, with translations in English and Italian.

The 'curious' case of German-language crime fiction[edit]

Traumas and transformations affecting the economic and political structures are not without an effect on the forms of cultural expressions. This is shown graphically by what has been called “the curious case of German-language crime fiction” (Kutch and Herzog 2014). Before WWI, German publishers were major players in circulating detective fiction across Europe, managing both the import and translations of numerous American dime novel series in several European languages. The dynamic company founded by Alwin Eichler in Dresda in 1905 had branches in various European cities as early as 1907-1908, which soon started publishing numerous parallel detective series form the U.S.A., including the adventures of the prototypical American detective, Nick Carter. Once defined “a multinational corporation of marvel” (Lacassin 1993), the company was also extremely active in promoting the circulation of narrative content among different European countries, such as translating British and French original stories into German and using the American format to adapt original German fiction for foreign audiences. Eichler was forced to stop operations around 1912, perhaps as a result of the financial complexities of his company, just before the burst of WWI came to definitely end Germany’s attempts to hegemonize the market of European popular literature. While Germany kept producing huge quantities of crime fiction (about 3,000 novels with print runs of over one million appearing between 1933 and 1945, according to Hall 2016), few of them were ever translated into other languages in the following years, and if they were, they were likely to be offered in adaptations promoted as genuine American fiction. Probably the product of German popular culture to gain the largest transnational circulation during the 1920s were the modernist and expressionist films created by directors like Fritz Lang, which made frequent use of the formulas of detective fiction to offer, as discussed by Sigfried Kracauer in an important book of 1947, a disturbing portrait of the collective anxieties that prepared the advent of National Socialism.  Any critical stance was lost in German-language crime fiction in the following years, while transcultural exchange was repressed all across the continent by the effects of different conflicting nationalisms.

While the existence of a true tradition of German-language crime fiction is a much debated issue still today (Hall, “Der Krimi”, 2016), its impact on the dissemination of American narrative standards and formats is no doubt more consistent than thought so far. Especially after 1945 – while German “highbrow” or modernist writers like Friedrich Dürrenmatt were appropriating Noir narrative conventions to write profound reflections about the crimes of National Socialism – crime TV dramas that adapted the American model gained considerable importance in the production of West German television, turning West Germany into an early specialist in the genre. A domestic detective production also appeared in East Germany during the postwar years. The confrontation between these two identities of the German detective genre came to its peak with the production of Polizeiruf 110(1971-1990), a long running East German series that was put in place as a counterpart of the West German series Tatort (1970 -). While the popularity of these shows has been confined to the Germaphone area of Europe, their contribution to the innovation of the narrative and production structures of the European crime genre cannot be downplayed. Especially Tatort, still running after almost half a century, has been experimenting a “federal” model of representation that has anticipated similar solutions later adopted by a number of American series. Moreover, Germany has acquired a prominent position in the international market of crime tv dramas since well before 1989, establishing Inspector Derrick as a global transcultural icon.

The emergence of European “regional” crime fiction[edit]

Starting in the second half of the 20th century several different “indigenous crime fiction cultures” (Pepper 2016), began to appear across the continent. Alongside with the appropriation of the genre’s narrative structures by modernist authors such as Carlo Emilio Gadda and Leonardo Sciascia in Italy, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor in France, Friedrich Dürrenmatt in Germany, a number of new popular strands of crime narrative appeared in different countries. The phenomenon of French polar novels and movies gained wide international acclaim during the 1970s as a distinctive national style of creating crime stories. Noir writer Thomas Narcejac even intervened in the historiographical debate about the genre by distinguishing a specifically French line of development from Gaboriau to Simenon (Dall’Asta and Pagello 2016). In the same period, dozens of ultra-popular low-budget “poliziottesco” crime films from Italy also made their way in the international distribution network.

By the end of the 1970s, all major TV networks in the continent had gained considerable experience in the domestic production of crime dramas. The situation remained different in East Europe, where, apart from West Germany, Czechoslovakia was the only other country where the possibilities of crime TV drama for political propaganda were thoroughly explored, particularly in the series Thirty Cases for Major Zeman(1974-79). At the same time, “media system internationalization in Central and Eastern Europe took the form of an influx of media and media content from the Soviet Union and other ‘fraternal’ countries” (Karol Jakubowicz, quoted in Downey and Mihelj 2016, 164).

The introduction of private commercial broadcasting and satellite transmission in the 1980s changed dramatically the scenario of European television. This change was accompanied by anxieties and fears that European television would come to be Americanized. Many politicians and scholars warned against the risk that “an essential outlet of national culture and identity would be lost” (Esser 2007, 163). Yet in fact, what has been observed since then is an apparently opposite (but actually complementary) trend toward the production and promotion of local content in both the literary and the audiovisual sphere.

References[edit]


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