SOURCE: Adams, Jeffrey. “Narcissism and Creativity in the Postmodern Era: The Case of Patrick Süskind's Das Parfum.” Germanic Review 75, no. 4 (fall 2000): 259-79.

In the following essay, Adams explores the relation between Süskind's personal identity and literary persona as projected in the themes and characters of Das Parfum, demonstrating how the text undermines the conventional opinion that a literary text exclusively belongs to its author.

The Poetics of Melancholia and Mourning

One of the most celebrated younger writers in contemporary German literature, Patrick Süskind owes his fame mainly to his literary debut, the monodrama Der Kontrabaß, an overnight success and the darling of the German stage in the 1980s, and to the novel Das Parfum: Die Geschichte eines Mörders, an international best seller that quickly became one of the most read German novels since Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks and Erich Maria Remarque's Nichts Neues im Westen...