German Biofiction from Nietzsche to the Present

There have been critical reflections about biofiction dating back to the 1930s, and while scholars like Ina Schabert, Alain Buisine, and Martin Middeke made compelling cases for taking the literary form seriously in the 1990s, it was, in my estimation, the 2012 publications of Lucia Boldrini (Autobiographies of Others) and Monica Latham (“‘Serv[ing] under two masters’: Virginia Woolf ’s Afterlives in Contemporary Biofictions”) that set the current boom in biofiction studies into motion. What makes the critical work of first-rate scholars of biofiction like Todd Avery, Riccardo Castellano, Alexandre Gefen, Katherine Scheil, and Virginia Rademacher so valuable is that they have provided us with conceptual models for seeing in texts and movements from the past significant shifts in thinking and aesthetics and new forms and ways of literary signifying. In my own work, I will always be indebted to Avery, whose insightful research about Lytton Strachey’s daring experiments with biography contributed to what would become the first major boom in biofiction, which occurred in the 1920s and 1930s.1 After reading Avery’s work, I was able to see Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra with new eyes—I now believe that his text is when biofiction first came to fruition and is, in many ways, the work that provides a blueprint for the best biofictions over the last 140 years. As a scholar, I have been teaching, researching, and writing about Nietzsche since the 1990s, when I had the good fortune to study with Daniel Breazeale and Wolfgang Iser. But not once during those years did I entertain the idea of treating Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a biofiction—it was Avery (and Hans Renders) who inadvertently nudged me in a new scholarly direction that enabled me to see Nietzsche’s text as biofiction. But that shift made me realize something significant, specifically about German literature. Early twentieth-century German writers produced an enormous number of first-rate biofictions, even though they were rarely seen, categorized, or interpreted as such. Interpretation is crucial here, because the literary form invites but also simultaneously discourages https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2023.2190221