Stuart Taberner

Bernhard Schlink

The theme of the book is the Holocaust and questions of guilt, as it tells the tale of Michael Berg and his affair with Hanna Schmitz, who turns out to have been a guard at Auschwitz and who later hangs herself. This edition makes the German text accessible to students, providing the full German text, with a substantial Introduction, Commentary, Vocabulary and Bibliography in English. Bernhard Schlink's novel "Der Vorleser" ("The Reader") has sold over 500,000 copies in Germany, 750,000 in the USA, 200,000 in Britain, and 100,000 in France. It has been translated into 25 languages.

Der Vorleser

The profound political and social changes Germany has undergone since 1989 have been reflected in an extraordinarily rich range of contemporary writing. Contemporary German Fiction focuses on the debates that have shaped the politics and culture of the new Germany that has emerged from the second half of the 1990s onwards and offers the first comprehensive account of key developments in German literary fiction within their social and historical context. Each chapter begins with an overview of a central theme, such as East German writing, West German writing, writing on the Nazi past, writing by women and writing by ethnic minorities. The authors discussed include Günter Grass, Ingo Schulze, Judith Hermann, Christa Wolf, Christian Kracht and Zafer Senocak. These informative and accessible readings build up a clear picture of the central themes and stylistic concerns of the best writers working in Germany today.

Writing in the Berlin Republic

Contemporary German Fiction

Clare Flanagan

Cultural Perspectives on Division and Unity in East and West

1949/1989

New essays for students of German's best-known living author and his works, including The Tin Drum.

The Cambridge Companion to Günter Grass

Literary fiction in Germany has long been a medium for contemplation of the 'nation' and questions of national identity. From the mid-1990s, in the wake of heated debates on the future direction of culture, politics and society in a more 'normal', united country, German literature has become increasingly diverse and seemingly disparate - at the one extreme, it represents the attempt to 'reinvent' German traditions, at the other, the unmistakable influence of Anglo-American forms and pop literature. A shared concern of almost all of recent German fiction, however, is the contemporary debate on globalisation, its nature, impact and consequences for 'local culture'. In its engagement with globalisation the literature of the Berlin Republic continues the long-established practice of reflection on what it is to be 'German'. This book investigates literary responses to the phenomenon of globalisation. The subject is approached from a wide range of thematic and theoretical perspectives in twelve chapters which, taken together, also provide an overview of German fiction from the mid-1990s to the present. The book serves both as an introduction to contemporary German literature for university students of German and as a resource for scholars interested in culture and society in the Berlin Republic.

German Literature in the Age of Globalisation

This volume presents a new approach to the political engagement of three major West German authors, Uwe Johnson, Günther Grass and Martin Walser. Whereas analysis of intellectuals' participation in the political upheaval of the late 1960s has tended to focus on speeches written in response to contemporary events, this book examines works of fiction for the way in which authors reflected upon their engagement in a more contemplative medium. Examination of these literary reflections reveals a mismatch between writers' confidence as public intellectuals and their private anxiety. Beginning with a survey of intellectual engagement until the late 1960s, the present volume moves onto a theoretical discussion of the legitimacy of authors' public interventions. Three chapters are devoted to the fiction of Uwe Johnson, Günther Grass, and Martin Walser. Uwe Johnson's fiction embodies retreat, an acknowledgment of political impotence. Günther Grass's novels present the failings of the engaged intellectual as exemplary to an audience which is expected to learn from this inadequacy. Finally, Martin Walser's intellectual characters stylise private weakness to appeal to a middle-brow audience titillated by the public figure's confession of impotence. In Walser's work, political engagement degenerates into pure form, into a Camp gesture of authors' obsession with their private selves.

The Public and Private Uses of the Author in the Work of Uwe Johnson, Günther Grass and Martin Walser, 1965-1975

Distorted Reflections

Lyn Marven

Presents fifteen new German-language novelists and a close reading of an exemplary work of each for academics and the general reader alike.

Emerging German-language Novelists of the Twenty-first Century

Frank Finlay

A collection of essays offering a nuanced understanding of the complex question of identity in today's Germany.

Culture, Politics, and Literature in the Berlin Republic

Recasting German Identity

Günter Grass is Germany's best-known and internationally most successful living author, from his first novel The Tin Drum to his recent controversial autobiography. He is known for his tireless social and political engagement with the issues that have shaped post-War Germany: the difficult legacy of the Nazi past, the Cold War and the arms race, environmentalism, unification and racism. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1999. This Companion offers the widest coverage of Grass's oeuvre across the range of media in which he works, including literature, television and visual arts. Throughout, there is particular emphasis on Grass's literary style, the creative personality which inhabits all his work, and the impact on his reputation of revelations about his early involvement with Nazism. The volume sets out, in a fresh and lively fashion, the fundamentals that students and readers need in order to understand Grass and his individual works.

Explores the performance of aging in the "late style" of Günter Grass, Ruth Klüger, Christa Wolf, and Martin Walser.

The Mannerism of a Late Period

Aging and Old-Age Style in Günter Grass, Ruth Klüger, Christa Wolf, and Martin Walser

This book examines how German-language authors have intervened in contemporary debates on the obligation to extend hospitality to asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants; the terrorist threat post-9/11; globalisation and neo-liberalism; the opportunities and anxieties of intensified mobility across borders; and whether transnationalism necessarily implies the end of the nation state and the dawn of a new cosmopolitanism. The book proceeds through a series of close readings of key texts of the last twenty years, with an emphasis on the most recent works. Authors include Terézia Mora, Richard Wagner, Olga Grjasnowa, Marlene Streeruwitz, Vladimir Vertlib, Navid Kermani, Felicitas Hoppe, Daniel Kehlmann, Ilija Trojanow, Christian Kracht, and Christa Wolf, representing the diversity of contemporary German-language writing. Through a careful process of juxtaposition and differentiation, the individual chapters demonstrate that writers of both minority and nonminority backgrounds address transnationalism in ways that certainly vary but which also often overlap in surprising ways.

Transnationalism and German-Language Literature in the Twenty-First Century

Paul Cooke - See C80107

Paul Cooke

The first major study of the contemporary German debate over "normalization" and its impact across the range of cultural, political, economic, intellectual, and historical discourses.

Beyond Normalization

German Culture, Politics, and Literature Into the Twenty-first Century

Karina Berger

First comprehensive look at how today's German literary fiction deals with questions of German victimhood.

Germans as Victims in the Literary Fiction of the Berlin Republic

Elisabeth Herrmann

Carrie Smith-Prei

Investigates the concept of transnationalism and its significance in and for German-language literature and culture.

Transnationalism in Contemporary German-Language Literature

These accessible and informative essays explore the central themes and contexts of the best writers working in Germany today.

Diversity is one of the defining characteristics of contemporary German-language literature, not just in terms of the variety of authors writing in German today, but also in relation to theme, form, technique and style. However, common themes emerge: the Nazi past, transnationalism, globalisation, migration, religion and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and identity. This book presents the novel in German since 1990 through a set of close readings both of international bestsellers (including Daniel Kehlmann's Measuring the World and W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz) and of less familiar, but important texts (such as Yadé Kara's Selam Berlin). Each novel discussed in the volume has been chosen on account of its aesthetic quality, its impact and its representativeness; the authors featured, among them Nobel Prize winners Günter Grass, Elfriede Jelinek and Herta Müller demonstrate the energy and quality of contemporary writing in German.

Stuart Taberner

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