Verlorene Posten. Krise und Zeit in Goetz’ "Johann Holtrop" und Timms "Vogelweide"

This paper analyzes the different ways in which the crisis is codified in two novels: Goetz’s Johann Holtrop (2012) and Timms Vogelweide (2013). The crisis of the New Economy in the 2000s profoundly transforms the lifes of both main characters, respectively a top-manager and the owner of a software company, but with divergent outcomes: while Holtrop strives unsuccessfully to recapture his place in the world (and in this he reproduces in a neurotic way the time-accelerating mechanisms of the crisis), Eschenbach in Vogelweide retreats to an uninhabited North Sea island. There he resists the compulsion to optimize time, and thus to dramatize and teleologize the time of the crisis; he discovers a language that has not been colonized by the crisis – he gains time, „lifetime“. This paradigm shift from „world-time“ to „lifetime“ (Blumenberg) has narratological relevance to a literature of crisis that seeks to elude the dominant, media-driven crisis discourse with its rhetoric of salvation and condemnation.