The Literary Benchmark: Steffen Martus and the Study of the Postheroic Present

In the world of literary analysis, few undertakings are as ambitious as attempting to map the evolution of a culture’s prose over several decades. Steffen Martus has stepped up to this challenge, producing a study that examines German prose from the last 40 years to analyze what he describes as the “postheroic present.”

Nach Popliteratur kommt New Adult: Steffen Martus blickt durch die deutsche Prosa der vergangenen vier Jahrzehnte auf die postheroische Gegenwart. Seine Studie ist auch ein Gegenstück zu Erich Auerbachs Klassiker „Mimesis“.

Martus’s work tracks the transition from “pop literature” to the “New Adult” genre, using these shifts in German writing to provide a window into contemporary society. By analyzing the prose of the past four decades, Martus aims to define the characteristics of a present era that has moved beyond traditional heroic narratives.

A Counterpart to a Classic

To understand the scale of Martus’s ambition, one must seem at the benchmark he is referencing. His study is positioned as a counterpart to Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, the seminal work by Erich Auerbach. In the same way that a modern athlete is measured against the legends of the game, Martus is engaging with a text that defined the field of literary criticism for the 20th century.

Auerbach’s Mimesis is not merely a book of criticism; it is a comprehensive attempt to build a unified theory of representation across the entire history of Western literature. For those unfamiliar with the text, it serves as a blueprint for how reality is captured in writing, spanning from the ancient world to the Modernist era.

The Origins of Mimesis

The history of Mimesis is as compelling as its analysis. Erich Auerbach wrote the work in German between May 1942 and April 1945. The conditions of its creation were far from ideal: Auerbach was teaching in Istanbul, Turkey, having fled Germany after the Nazis ousted him from his professorship in Romance Philology at the University of Marburg in 1935.

Despite these displacements, Auerbach produced a work of immense depth. Mimesis was first published in Switzerland in 1946 by A. Francke Verlag. It later reached a global audience via an English translation published by Princeton University Press in 1953, translated by Willard R. Trask. Since that translation, the book has remained a staple of literary study.

Mapping Reality: From Homer to Woolf

Auerbach’s approach in Mimesis was methodical and chronological. The book is organized into twenty sections, each analyzing one to three works from a specific period. Most of these sections begin with lengthy extracts provided in both the original language and English translation.

The scope of the work is vast, covering various literary forms including:

• Epic poetry
• Novels
• Plays
• Memoirs
• Letters

The analysis begins with a foundational comparison between the representation of the world in Homer’s Odyssey and the biblical account of the Sacrifice of Isaac in the Book of Genesis. The journey through Western literature concludes with an analysis of Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel, To the Lighthouse. By connecting these disparate points, Auerbach sought to demonstrate how the representation of reality has evolved over millennia.

While nearly all the selected passages in Mimesis are narratives, Auerbach did build a notable exception in section 12, where he analyzed an essay by Michel de Montaigne.

Why the Comparison Matters

By framing his study of German prose as a counterpart to Mimesis, Steffen Martus is signaling a desire to do for the recent past what Auerbach did for the distant past. Where Auerbach looked at the sweeping arc of Western civilization, Martus focuses on the specific trajectory of the last 40 years—from the rise of pop literature to the current “New Adult” trend.

This intellectual pivot suggests that the “postheroic present” requires its own comprehensive mapping to understand how modern society views itself and its reality. Much like Auerbach’s work provided a lens to spot the shifts from antiquity to modernism, Martus’s study attempts to clarify the shifts within the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

For readers looking to explore the foundations of this discussion, the full historical context of Auerbach’s work is available via Wikipedia.

The ongoing dialogue between these two works—one a mid-century classic and the other a contemporary study—highlights the enduring importance of understanding how literature reflects the society that produces it.