ON ITS PUBLICATION, Bodo Kirchhoff's Novelle Widerfahrnis (Encounter, 2016) was enthusiastically reviewed in nearly all major German-language newspapers, being hailed as a “masterpiece,” and as some of the best writing in German that year. However, after Kirchhoff was awarded the German Book Prize on October 17, 2016, a number of critical voices denounced the jury's decision as a “misjudgment,” based on the book's alleged lack of literary merit.

Widerfahrnis bears the genre description Novelle, although at 220 pages it has the length of a short novel. As the genre of the Novelle carries with it both the weight of the tradition of nineteenth-century masters like Theodor Storm, Gottfried Keller, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, or Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, and of expectations of a strict aesthetic form in relation to subject matter, the accusations of the text's lack of formal qualities goes right to the heart of the matter. However, few reviewers remarked on the text's qualities in relation to formal principles of Novelle writing, and only with reference to Goethe's famous definition of a Novelle as narrating a startling or unprecedented occurrence (“unerhorte Begebenheit”): “Since what else is a Novelle than an unprecedented occurrence.”

The “unerhörte Begebenheit” in Kirchhoff's Novelle is the “adoption,” or quasi kidnapping, of a migrant girl by a German couple in Sicily. Widerfahrnis tells the story of Julius Reither, a sixty-four-year-old retired owner of a small publishing house who, after selling off his declining business, has moved to an apartment complex at the foot of the Bavarian Alps. One evening he is visited in his flat by Leonie Palm, a fellow resident, who leads the complex's book club and who asks him to evaluate the manuscripts of her fellow residents. In the course of their conversations they decide to go on a spontaneous drive to the nearby Achensee; once there they continue their journey southwards, to the Brenner Pass and then further south to Italy. Both protagonists are childless and alone, Reither, because over twenty years earlier he persuaded his then partner Christine to abort her fetus, whereupon she left him, and Palm, because her teenage daughter committed suicide.