The genres of documentary novel of the “Neue Sachlichkeit” and the problem of cognition

Abstract

We consider genre typology of documentary novels of “Neue Sachlichkeit”: a “report” novel, a “novel of fact” and a documentary montage novel. The proposed classification is based on the different nature of the interaction of narrative and document in these types of novels. In the “report” novel the narration is conducted from the point of view of the observer, the literary text appears as a testimony, the document of an era. The “novel of fact” is based on real documents that are partially or fully integrated into the artistic whole. In the montage novel fragments of documentary material and narrative are connected with each other associatively, resulting in a fragmentary image of the world. We analyze the novels of 1920s – early 1930s by J. Roth, A. Doeblin, E. Ottwalt, E. Reger, R. Brunngraber and E. Koeppen. We substantiate the conception, that the problem of cognition acquires special importance in the documentary-fiction novels of “Neue Sachlichkeit”. On the one hand, the hero of the novels is trying to understand the changed social reality. On the other hand, documentary-fiction novels of “Neue Sachlichkeit” require special way of reading: they are designed to activate the reader's perception, to teach the reader to recreate a complete picture of reality based on the comparison of different ways of its image: narrative, evidence and documents.