“We can trust the MDMA-guy, he’s my best customer”, Screenshot: Phone Guide Germany

Helene Hegemann, 17 years old, has written a very successful novel debut: “Axolotl Roadkill”. It is about a 16-year-old girl, who finds herself in a deep depression after her mother died. She lives in a flat share with her brothers and sisters, she rarely goes to school – prefers taking drugs, hanging out at “Berghain” and destroying herself in general. Trying out different concepts of living, she wears her self-destruction like a fashionable accessory.

Regarding the bestseller-list of the magazine “Der Spiegel”, Hegemann’s “Axolotl Roadkill” is listed on the second place, which means, Hegemann overruled vampires etc. She also received many rave reviews, critics were fascinated about her ability to combine different languages, such as youth slang, internet terms or intellectual language. Last week, she was nominated for the price of the Leipzig Book Fair – the winner of the fiction category will receive 45 000 Euro. Even though it is very unrealistic that Hegemann will be selected.

"Axolotl Roadkill" by Helene Hegemann, Image: Ullstein

A reason for this may surely be the discussion about her copyright misdoings. Some passages of “Axolotl Roadkill” were obviously copied from the blogger Airen’s book “Strobo”. He or his book aren’t mentioned anywhere in Hegemann’s novel. So Hegemann declares Airen’s thoughts as her own, because she didn’t indicate the specific passages as quotes. Contrary to that, a sentence from David Foster Wallace’s story “John Billy” is explicitly mentioned as a quotation – Hegemann’s publishing company Ullstein officially asked Kiepenheuer & Witsch for permission to use the phrase. Why is that? Just because Wallace is more prominent? Anyway. It is quite clear that Hegemann made a mistake here. But the now arising doubts about the author’s writing talents are absolutely inappropriate. Bad luck for Hegemann – unfortunately she got herself in the eye of cultural-pessimism-internet-critics who are always on the prowl for prominent enemy concepts. Those young internet hooligans. Disrespecting old wise men, disregarding supposedly eternal values.

Agreed – we desperately need an innovative copyright law facing the demands of the digital age. Hegemann is right when she defends herself pointing out today’s media consumption habits. The handling of information, of texts has changed in a radical way during the last couple of years. Actually, we have been knowing that “everything is quotation” for a much longer time. Long before postmodernism authors like John Dos Passos or Alfred Döblin constructed their texts by using different quotes – advertisements, announcements etc. Since with postmodernism concepts like “meaning” and “identity” became unstable, this way of thinking is nowadays more and more significant. Because with digital platforms, social networks and blogs, information is getting transient. People generally tend to project a huge part of their identities into the digital space, which makes them more fluent, more diverse.

Not hiding the fact that a literary text isn’t based on an author’s omniscient world-outlook, that it consists of a huge number of other texts (maybe famous ones) can be a virtue instead of something to wrinkle intellectual noses about. The ideal of an almost god-like, ingenious author should have vanished with Goethe’s age (yes, goodbye Mr. Grass!).