Stuart Taberner

A New Modernism or 'Neue Lesbarkeit'?: Hybridity in Georg Klein's Libidissi

Since unification, critics Ulrich Greiner and Frank Schirrmacher, influenced by Karl Heinz Bohrer, have called for a return to a supposedly repressed modernist tradition in which aesthetic transcendence and subjectivity were valued more highly than any moralising agenda. Other editors and writers such as Uwe Wittstock, Martin Hielscher and Matthias Politycki, however, have promoted a so-called ‘Neue Lesbarkeit’ based on Anglo-American models stressing readability and story-telling. In both cases, the guiding motivation has been the desire to define a space for German writing within the globalised literary market place. Georg Kleins Libidissi presents a model of a possible third way between a form of modernism that would retreat into the ghetto of the German literary tradition and imitation of the Anglo-American mainstream. The present article thus reveals the manner in which Kleins novel plays with hybridity: hybridity of genre and influences insofar as the book alludes to the Anglo-American tradition of the spy novel and hybridity as a means of resisting globalisation and the eradication of local cultures.

Emerging Writers: Introduction

The first part of this introduction provides an overview of debates on the ‘right’ direction to be taken by German writing since unification in 1990. The second part gives a brief synopsis of some of the issues raised by a selection of papers from the symposium on ‘Emerging Writers in the German-speaking World’ held at the University of Leeds in May 2001, and offers some preliminary conclusions.

Memories of German Wartime Suffering: Russian Migrant Nellja Veremej’s Berlin liegt im Osten in Context

This article returns to a question posed by Andreas Huyssen (and others), namely whether and how minority writers can “migrate into” a German memory culture that is largely shaped by the “ethnic German” memory of German responsibility for the Holocaust. Here, however, the focus is on two “other” ethnic German memories that are arguably repressed in today’s Germany, namely German wartime suffering and the forty-year history of the German Democratic Republic. The article offers a close reading of Russian migrant writer Nellja Veremej’s 2013 novel Berlin liegt im Osten as a highly unusual—even unique—literary engagement with these “non-integrated” German pasts that not only critiques present-day Germany’s memory culture but also challenges what the novel frames as its self-satisfied liberal nationalism. A brief concluding section speculates on how “big history” and growing global consciousnes of the Anthropocene might impact our engagement with twentieth-century German and even world history. (ST)

The Limits of Hospitality

This chapter returns to the early 1990s and the large-scale immigration to Germany after the end of the Cold War from around Eastern Europe (including many Jews from the former Soviet Union), refugees and asylum seekers from the wars in the ex-Yugoslavia, and elsewhere in the world. It posits the “shock” that this large influx caused for the Federal Republic’s self-understanding and explores debates on the obligation to extend hospitality to “strangers.” Readings of novels by Terezia Mora, Richard Wagner, and Olga Grjasnowa reveal the gulf between Germany’s image of itself as open to otherness and the reality of prejudice and discrimination, the characterization of border-crossers as “queer”—and the eventual commodification of this queerness—and (in Russian-Jewish writer Grjasnowa’s later work) the more recent transformation of the debate on transnationalism.

Transnationalism in Contemporary German-Language Novels

This chapter offers an overview of recent novels in German that engage directly or indirectly with transnationalism. The case is made that transnationalism is a key theme in writing by not only minority but also nonminority authors, and the chapter explores key similarities and differences in how writers of different backgrounds approach transnationalism as not only an opportunity but also a source of anxiety. The chapter presents four broad categories of contemporary engagement with transnationalism: lived transnationalism, the literary archive of transnational trauma, global opportunities and anxieties, and “worlding a world.”

A Rooted Cosmopolitanism

This chapter draws out the theme that is implicit throughout Transnationalism and German-Language Literature in the Twenty-First Century, namely cosmopolitanism. Close readings of Christian Kracht’s Imperium, Ilija Trojanow’s Der Weltensammler, and Christa Wolf’s Stadt der Engel focus on the question of whether a “rooted cosmopolitanism” might be possible; that is, an openness to the world, and to otherness, that is not at odds with attachment to the nation but rather rooted in it. In this chapter, the debate on transnationalism has moved from the focus on the concrete and particular—the arrival of refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants—to the abstract: is it possible to belong to a nation and to the world at the same time? Each of the novels examined offers a different response to this question—and to this extent, they embody the ambivalence of transnationalism itself as it simultaneously provokes both utopian optimism and acute pessimism about “the world.”

Conclusion: The World Within?

In this chapter, the theoretical innovations that underpin the study are restated. Subsequently, a set of themes and ideas that flow through the chapters are made explicit: the extent to which Germany still exists as a nation rather than simply a “transnational space” across which diverse people move, transnationalism as neoliberalism versus transnationalism as potential cosmopolitanism, and the nation as the grounding for a new, more genuine “worldliness.” The salience of these themes for our understanding of contemporary Germany is explored in greater detail—but also their salience for today’s global debates on “nation” and “world” too. The book concludes by suggesting that it may be unrealistic to hope that German-language authors should be able to “think beyond the nation,” given the geopolitical and economic challenges of the global present. Instead, it might be more fruitful to concentrate on the ways they engage creatively and productively with the “world within.”

Mobile Citizens: Mobile Cultures

In this chapter, the implications of a return to the nation as the potential source of comfort from the ravages of globalization/neoliberalism are explored further. Chapter 4 begins with a wide-ranging survey of literary texts concerned with the increased mobility associated with transnationalism, differentiating between those individuals who travel freely and easily and those who are forced to move. Subsequently, close readings of novels by Daniel Kehlmann, Felicitas Hoppe, and Feridun Zaimoglu show how access to the wider world is not necessarily perceived as an opportunity—it also provokes anxieties relating to provinciality, the relative position of one’s home nation in the global system, and fears of cultural colonization. Specifically, this chapter examines the three authors’ efforts to define/position national culture in relation to dominant global discourses. Again, the possibility of transnational solidarity is raised in these—and many other—texts, even as they insist on the Germanness of German culture.

The possibilities and pitfalls of a Jewish cosmopolitanism: reading Natan Sznaider through Russian-Jewish writer Olga Grjasnowa’s German-language novel Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt (All Russians Love Birch Trees)

Abstract In his Jewish Memory and the Cosmopolitan Order (2011), Natan Sznaider shows how Jewish thinkers both before and after the Holocaust have advanced universalist ideas out of their particularist Jewish identities, connecting the Jewish experience to contemporary cosmopolitan concerns such as Human Rights, genocide prevention and international justice. Sznaider focuses on Hannah Arendt and illustrates how this post-Holocaust Jewish thinker both defended her rootedness in her Jewish identity and drew universalising conclusions from it. This article explores Sznaider’s notion of a ‘Jewish cosmopolitanism’ in tandem with a close reading of Russian-Jewish writer Olga Grjasnowa’s 2012 German-language novel Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt (All Russians Love Birch Trees). The empathy Grjasnowa’s protagonist feels for the plight of Palestinians reveals her commitment to a universalist ideal of Human Rights even as she remains rooted in her Jewish identity: her activism draws on the transmission of the trauma of the Holocaust down through the different generations of her family. At the same time, Grjasnowa’s novel also suggests some of the limitations – and indeed problems – of Sznaider’s conceptualisation of a Jewish cosmopolitanism.

Born Under Auschwitz: Melancholy Traditions in Postwar German Literature

the final part draws together conclusions and discusses the issues that emerge from the research and the way in which policies emerged over time. For many readers, the most fascinating section of the work is Chapter 10 which provides an account of the tensions and debates that ensued in each of the then 25 member states during the reform discussions: some were for solidarity between richer and poorer members, some for cutting expenditure at all costs, some for making haste more slowly. The internal politics of each nation were tested to the limits, and the revision of cohesion policy was, inevitably, at the heart of the contested notion of ‘ever-closer union’. For students of EU politics, post-graduate researchers, civil servants and policy-making officials in local government and other supplicants at the doors of the Brussels glass palaces, this volume will make valuable reading. It presents long-term research in an accessible format and, where necessary, utilises theoretical concepts to assist in grasping the complexities of one of the EU’s flagship policies. However, all three authors do not flinch from exposing some of the dysfunctions, even incompetence arising from the fact that the budget deal-making process is counterproductive to policy formation. For example, the scope for allocating structural and cohesion funds in line with development needs has been constrained by the increasing complexity and opacity of the eligibility and finance allocation mechanisms. Many programmes have been delayed, administrative complexity has convinced more than a few potential beneficiary organisations to withdraw. The authors conclude, ‘Clearly there are no easy answers’; (271) but it is evident that ‘the centrality of the budget to the state of European integration limits the scope for reform’ (271). The reader is left with the clear feeling that the need for what they term ‘the quality of spending’ (272) requires the Commission to generate meaningful results data and provide reporting to both member states and individual spending programmes.