It was a great moment of national reckoning when the writer Mohsin Hamid, having come from Lahore to talk about his new, daring novel How to get filthy rich in rising Asia, asked the simple question, sitting at the Bar 1000 Cantina (“is that still around”, Maxim Biller had asked), having just had a delicious Peruvian ceviche, infront of him a platter of Sushi and Sashimi too big to finish: “Why”, he asked, “is there no German writer born in the last 50 years who is known in the world?!” Why, in other words, is there the Chilean Bolano, the French Houellebecq, the Japanese Murakami? And why does a society which so very much insists on its cultural heritage produce, well, nothing that the world wants to read? No Thomas Bernard of a new generation, no Ingeborg Bachmann, just and always Die Blechtrommel, Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum. There was Sebald, there is Daniel Kehlmann, Mohsin knows him, he descibed his style as playful and a little magical. There was a sense of confusion at the table. A small group of literary critics of the nicer sort. But no names, no: Come on, Mohsin, don’t you know x and y?! There are Ingo Schulze and, yes, the above Maxim Biller who have been featured at the New Yorker. But the German Murakami? My explanation was: German’s are so used to avoiding or addressing the big questions because they are afraid that all they see, again and again, will be their own guilt – that they put a cushion between them and the World, a cushion called literature. But is that the only explanation?