REVIEW: Ronald M. Schernikau: “SMALLTOWNNOVELLA”
Cover, SMALLTOWNNOVELLA by Ronald M. Schernikau. Image Courtesy Ugly Duckling Presse.
REVIEW
SMALLTOWNNOVELLA
By Ronald M. Schernikau, Translated by Lucy Jones and with an Afterword by Ben Miller
Softcover ($14)
Ugly Duckling Presse
By Michael Workman
Readers interested in this first-ever translation of Ronald M. Schernikau’s SMALLTOWNNOVELLA should start with Ben Miller’s thoroughgoing afterword for the volume, published over at the Baffler. In it, he lays out much fascinating backstory to Schernikau’s personal life and the socio-political contexts in which he worked, contours crucial for understanding why this novella is more than another queer adolescent coming-of-age story: Schernikau was born in 1960 in Magdeburg in East Germany, smuggled by his mother to the West as a child, and raised in a small, socially conservative town where class tension, Cold War division, and criminalization of homosexuality shaped both his daily life and early writing. Miller traces how, after writing the novella as a teenager, Schernikau moved to West Berlin in 1980, bringing with him an already volatile mix of leftist politics, cultural theory, and queer subcultures, before later choosing to study and live in East Germany again out of a committed, if contradictory, belief in socialism. Throughout this trajectory, Miller shows how Schernikau’s queer life—often muted or displaced in his early fiction—was inseparable from the political pressures and ideals of his time, making SMALLTOWNNOVELLA not just a personal story of desire and alienation, but a document of life shaped by Cold War ideology, class struggle, and the author’s fraught search for a livable queer identity.
When Ronald M. Schernikau’s novella first appeared in German as Kleinstadtnovelle in 1980, it was remarkable both for its subject and for the age of its author. Schernikau was still a teenager and had not yet completed high school when the book was published by Rotbuch Verlag; the first edition had to be reprinted just a few days after its release, signalling a rare and immediate impact for such a young writer. The novella’s frank engagement with gay coming-out in a small West German town stood out at a time when LGBT literature was far less visible in mainstream publishing and when homosexuality was still heavily stigmatised socially and legally in both East and West Germany. In a retrospective essay, Ben Miller and Nicholas Courtman note that the book “catapulted its 18-year-old author … into the bookstores, feuilletons, and talk shows of German literary and cultural life,” driven primarily by its subject matter and by Schernikau’s precocious authorial persona.¹ Commentators including Axel Schock have since placed Kleinstadtnovelle in the context of a burgeoning queer literary canon, where its early articulation of a working-class queer sensibility helped it gain recognition among readers and critics attuned to alternative voices in German literature.²
Schernikau’s early affiliation with the German Communist Party (DKP) and his later involvement with socialist and leftist circles in West Berlin further framed the novella as part of a broader countercultural and political moment in German letters, one in which queer identity, class critique, and radical politics were active components of daily life. Kleinstadtnovelle quickly became recognized as an incisive depiction of queerness and small-town alienation, helping establish Schernikau’s reputation in literary and queer cultural conversations that were only just beginning to open up in Germany.³ At the same time, its emphasis on inwardness, affect, and everyday experience positioned it near the orbit of what German critics called Neue Subjektivität—the post-1968 “new subjectivity” that turned from overtly programmatic politics toward personal voice and lived feeling—while, in an international context, it can be read alongside developments such as New Narrative, a loosely affiliated movement that emerged in San Francisco in the 1970s, combining autobiographical material, queer experience, and formal experimentation. Though historically and geographically distinct, Neue Subjektivität and New Narrative share a concern with making subjectivity a political site, and Schernikau’s novella participates in this broader late-twentieth-century turn by insisting that the private, queer self is itself a field of cultural and political struggle.
This is where my historiography would usually break away into a direct review of the text, but I’d like instead this time to present something closer to a comparative analysis. It’s useful as well to draw parallels in queer lit not just of the time, but also to analyze the voices each author chose to utilize as a way of better understanding these artistic resonances. For example, while reading SMALLTOWNNOVELLA, I couldn’t help but consider Schernikau in the light of Kathy Acker’s The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula. Both use youthful or unsettled narrative positions to interrogate identity, power, and desire — but do so with very different formal strategies. Schernikau’s novella opens with an acerbic stream-of-consciousness that collapses gender categories and reflects raw self-questioning—“i am afraid. am female, am male, double…want to reach myself.” Take, as well, the following passage:
“on the way here, he met martina and, in a bold mood, told her: hey, we’re doing a show, five gays in a studio. why you? well, because. oh, right. and she’ll sit by the radio like everyone else from school and afterwards everyone will know. and if someone says, i don’t advertise that i’m gay, but i don’t hide it either, that’s too easy. perhaps purposely wearing the pink triangle, the symbol for gays in concentration camps, is just an odd overstatement of our own isolation, but defamation comes in all kinds of forms—helplessness, embarrassment, laughter, or therapy. how normal is b? he’s encouraged to wear makeup: is that the new red champagne color that’s in fashion? he asks lenkel during a test, pointing to her fingernails. no, she laughs, says: if you like it, why don’t you wear it? it would definitely suit you! b is stunned, and laughs back, saying, nah, come on! lenkel replies, why not? doesn’t bother me, anything goes these days! b says, if only, and carries on writing. buy it, suits you, says laura, when they’re shopping downtown. this? it’s for girls. that’s silly, says laura, like who cares.”⁴
This scene grounds queerness in the textures of daily life—school, gossip, jokes, clothes, embarrassment—while Acker’s work refuses that kind of social legibility altogether. Black Tarantula is built not on linear introspection but on appropriation and a kind of performative collage: her narrator’s quest for identity is enacted through a network of borrowed voices and texts that destabilise conventional autobiography. This method anticipates the emergence of New Narrative, a loosely affiliated San Francisco–based movement in the 1970s and 1980s that combined autobiographical material with formal experimentation, political urgency, and explicit attention to the body, sex, and power. New Narrative writers rejected both realist confession and abstract formalism, insisting that personal experience—especially queer and marginal experience—had to be written through, not smoothed over, even if that meant fragmenting story, voice, and genre. Acker’s early novel foregrounds “appropriation … [as] central to the narrator’s quest for identity,”⁵ weaving together fragmented influences and cultural detritus in a way that refuses stable subjectivity. This reflects Acker’s broader commitment to experimental forms, where identity and desire are always policed by language and economic structures—an approach scholars read as a deliberate interrogation of narrative authority and selfhood. Acker would become one of the most visible figures associated with the New Narrative lineage: her early collage practices, her use of plagiarism and pastiche, and her staging of the self as unstable and performative helped define the movement’s core tension between lived experience and radical form, opening a space where subjectivity could be both politically charged and formally undone. Take, for example the following passage:
“The Black Tarantula moves to San Francisco. The windows are two huge eyes staring at me, any person can become part of these composite insect eyes, I sit against the white walls of the enclosed room and gibber. The walls are all white. The walls of an asylum. The walls of a hospital. The walls are going to close around me, are closing around me: crush me. I start to scream. The walls are the legs of a huge spider. I walk into the room, a woman flips up to me, do I want to be in her poetry class I’m new here she’ll help me. I tell her to go to hell. P runs up to me, hugs me, loves me, arranges everything. I’m famous (I see A who’s with a blonde small girl friend, he looks exactly like me and has the opposite name so we have to become good friends I don’t care who he fucks I don’t care about sex and heterosexual sex always fucks up friendships, I’m scared it will fuck up this one; T platonically falls in love with me, I see D and sleep with him everything happens perfectly. Someone even offers me a job. (I’m scared to go outside alone, I’m scared everyone will hate me, everyone’s watching me everyone doesn’t know me.)”⁶
In it, Acker stages subjectivity as a state of sensory and linguistic overload rather than coherent interiority. The “I” is immediately placed under pressure: windows become watching eyes, walls become institutional and then monstrous, space itself turns predatory. Identity is not narrated as something discovered or clarified but as something besieged—by surveillance, by institutions, by sudden social demands. Even moments that might conventionally signal arrival or success (being welcomed, becoming “famous,” being offered a job) appear as part of the same destabilising rush, folded into breathless syntax that refuses hierarchy between panic, desire, recognition, and fear. The rapid shifts—from asylum to poetry class, from terror to fame, from platonic love to sex—make the self feel less like a stable agent than like a surface on which events violently register.
Acker’s formal strategy makes identity legible only through breakdown: collapsing sentences, abrupt shifts, and spiraling parentheses stage the self as something continually undone by language, surveillance, and social demand. Recognition appears inseparable from threat, intimacy from spectacle; to “be” is always also to be watched, named, and invaded. Narrative disintegration thus becomes political, refusing the idea that queer or marginal identity could be stabilized through confession, development, or belonging.
Set against this, Schernikau’s work locates the emerging queer self within a hostile but legible social world, insisting on voice and testimony inside provincial West Germany’s heteronormative limits. Where Schernikau leans toward the inward, affective emphasis associated with New Subjectivity, Acker charts New Narrative’s postmodern strategies of fragmentation and appropriation. Yet the two movements overlap in their shared investment in subjectivity as a political site: both treat the “I” not as private essence but as something produced under pressure. Schernikau renders that pressure through social encounter; Acker renders it through formal violence. Together, they show two avant-literary strategies—queered testimony and narrative revolt—each exposing how selfhood is shaped, constrained, and contested by power.
What makes SMALLTOWNNOVELLA endure is not only its historical position as an early queer text, but the way its language still vibrates with the risk and refusal that defined its early success. Schernikau does not aestheticize suffering; he lets it speak in its own unfinished grammar—the book’s emotional force lies in its refusal to resolve itself into moral lesson or narrative triumph. Instead, it offers something rarer: the texture of a life learning how to speak while being told not to. Read now, in Lucy Jones’s supple translation and as part of Ugly Duckling Presse’s “Lost History” series, SMALLTOWNNOVELLA feels less like a living document—one that reminds us how class and politics are pressures on the self, the voice of which may linger, quiet but persistent, and in that persistence continues to show how literature can make room for lives that history tried, and failed, to erase.
Michael Workman is Editor-in-chief of Bridge.
FOOTNOTES
1 Miller, Ben, and Nicholas Courtman. “I Embrace You All: Ronald M. Schernikau and the Queer Left.” Los Angeles Review of Books.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/i-embrace-you-all-ronald-m-schernikau-and-the-queer-left/
2 Schmidt, Gary, and Merrill Cole, eds. Quertext: An Anthology of Queer Voices from German-Speaking Europe. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. https://uwpress.wisc.edu/Books/Q/Quertext
3 Miller, Ben, and Nicholas Courtman. “I Embrace You All: Ronald M. Schernikau and the Queer Left.” Los Angeles Review of Books.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/i-embrace-you-all-ronald-m-schernikau-and-the-queer-left/
4 Ugly Duckling Presse, SMALLTOWNNOVELLA, by Ronald M. Schernikau, trans. Lucy Jones, afterword by Ben Miller (Brooklyn, NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025), publication page, https://www.uglyducklingpresse.org
5 Schock, Axel. Die Bibliothek von Sodom: Das Buch der schwulen Bücher. Berlin: Verlag rosa Winkel, 1997. Places Schernikau and Kleinstadtnovelle within the canon of German gay literature and early queer autobiography.
6 The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, by The Black Tarantula (San Francisco: TVRT Press, n.d.). The early 1970s edition was published under the pseudonym “The Black Tarantula,” later identified as Kathy Acker; this text is widely considered a foundational work in her early experimental and proto–New Narrative phase.
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