SOURCE: Donahue, Neil H. “Scents and Insensibility: Patrick Süskind's New Historical Critique of ‘Die Neue Sensibilität’ in Das Parfum (1985).” Modern Language Studies 22, no. 3 (summer 1992): 36-43.

In the following essay, Donahue speculates on the relationship between the formal pastiche of Das Parfum and parallel developments in New Historicism, demonstrating how the novel's parody of Peter Handke's Die Stunde der wahren Empfindung (1975) informs its satirical critique of the 1970s “Die Neue Sensibilität” movement in German literature.

Patrick Süskind's sensational novel Das Parfum: Die Geschichte eines Mörders (1985) resonates with echoes of German literary traditions. Despite its high profile as a popular bestseller, Das Parfum constitutes a dense montage of allusions to German narrative traditions of the grotesque, of existential Angst, of vitalism and the Übermensch, of folkloric myth as a critique of reason, of Romantic fascination with criminality, and of the psychology of aesthetic decadence and...