Rewriting Guilt: The Ethics of Unreliable Narration in Postwar German Literature

91O Reviews arranger, and conferencier, do stand out as remarkable forwhat theyachieved under tryingcircumstances; others such as Gertrude Bodenwieser, the founder of a ballet school inAustralia, were equally remarkable. But there are no international figures or outstanding dramatists inLang's account. Some of theperformers did manage to make careers inAustralian theatre, film,and TV, and some of the exiles' enthusiasm for theatre almost certainly did transfer to awider sphere, but cabaret programmes and Bunte Abende tend to be for themoment, and small-scale community and mi nority theatre cannot compete with real world-class professional theatre. The real significance of such theatrewas what itmeant for the identity of theGermans and Austrians living inAustralia. It is doubtful, therefore,how farone can agree with Lang's finalclaim: thatwithout thisGerman-language theatrical activity theSydney Opera House might never have been built. INSTITUTE OF GERMANIC AND ROMANCE STUDIES J.M. RITCHIE Words fromAbroad: Trauma and Displacement in Postwar German JewishWriters. By KATJAGARLOFF. (Kritik: German Literary Theory and Cultural Studies) Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 2005. xii+ 252 pp. $49.95. ISBN 978 o-8 I43-3245-0. Katja Garloff's book offersa rich and persuasive study of theworks ofGerman Jew ishwriters of the survivor generation in the context of diaspora theories,which have frequently ignored or elided a consideration of Jewish cultural paradigms. Look ingparadigmatically at authors received inpost-war West Germany, including Peter Weiss, Gunther Anders, Nelly Sachs, and Paul Celan, Garloff tests the applicability of recent diaspora theories to thepredicament of post-Shoah Jewish culture, arguing that diaspora constitutes itselfat the juncture of creativity and critical intervention. She makes her case through a critical consideration of diaspora theorists, including Homi K. Bhabha, Stuart Hall, and Paul Gilroy, who have made important contri butions to current understandings of diaspora while only partially reflectingon the Jewish diaspora before the Shoah or ignoring italtogether. Against the positive con struction of dislocation as the site of incursion intohegemonic cultural discourses by Bhabha, Rosi Braidotti, and others, Garloff brings together the theoretical strands of diaspora, trauma, and testimony studies to show how the study of post-war German Jewishwriters instead highlights the intersecting traumatic and creative aspects of displacement. Garloff sets out with explorations of Theodor W. Adorno, whose I959 essay title 'Words fromAbroad' she borrows forher own book, as well as ofGulnther Anders and JeanAmery, todemonstrate theperceived or real dissonance of emigrants' voices from contemporaneous German debates on Germany's past and present. She goes on tomap inmore detail PeterWeiss's production of a tension between self-chosen and catastrophic dislocation inhis visions of cosmopolitanism. The next substantial chapter is dedicated toNelly Sachs's construction of the Jewish diaspora in rela tion to her references toZion. Garloff takes issue with the predominant reading of these passages as indications of Sachs's Zionist beliefs, and instead develops an in terpretation of Sachs's conception of Zion as ametahistorical sign ofmemory and cross-cultural encounter between Jews and non-Jews beyond geographical confines. From hereGarloff proceeds to the most complex and stimulating chapter ofher book, inwhich she discusses Paul Celan's ceuvre. She reads his I963 volume Die Niemands roseas attempting toundermine theboundaries of text, time, and geographical space in order to commemorate the destroyed Eastern European Jewish diaspora while creating, through itshistorical encryptions, a transitory alliance of readers. MLR, I02.3, 2007 91I At times, the breadth of approaches forming the theoretical core threatens to ob scure theclarity of theargument, aswhen Garloff moves from trauma theory's notion of testimony as a reconstitution of collectivity to the conception of the communal aspects of diaspora in theworks of Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin-a broad sweep both risking the generalization of concepts of community and neglecting to account for theworkings of art as distinct from other forms of enunciation. Moreover, the author herself leans towards an over-positive reading of diaspora in privileging it as the site of critical intervention into homogenizing constructions of cultural and personal origins. One wonders ifthese findingswould have taken on a different twist had textsbyGerman Jewishwriters received in theGDR also been considered, as the undifferentiated 'German' of thebook's title indeed seems topromise. On thewhole, however, Garloff's book succeeds in linking the often...

This article explores how Günter Grass constructs food and appetite as politically charged mechanisms for negotiating postwar German guilt in The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, and Dog Years. Drawing on food studies, psychoanalysis, trauma theory, and cultural memory discourse, it argues that Grass develops a form of gastric historiography, wherein consumption, digestion, and bodily refusal become metaphors for the ethical and psychological reckoning with Nazism. Grass’s grotesque depictions of feasting, starvation, Eucharistic parody, and regurgitation position the body as both archive and agent one that bears the imprints of ideological excess and moral resistance. The article contends that culinary imagery in the Danzig Trilogy constitutes not an ornamental grotesquerie, but an urgent symbolic language through which guilt is internalised, contested, and expelled. Through this lens, Grass reframes historical accountability not simply as a narrative task, but as a bodily ordeal of what the conscience can swallow, and what it cannot

Reviewed by: The Poetry of Louise Glück: A Thematic Introduction Reena Sastri The Poetry of Louise Glück: A Thematic Introduction. Daniel Morris. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2006. Pp. xi + 274. $42.50 (cloth). “Don’t listen to me; my heart’s been broken,” begins Louise Glück’s “The Untrustworthy Speaker”; to a flower in the title poem of her poetic sequence The Wild Iris (1992) are given the words, “whatever / returns from oblivion returns / to find a voice”.1 The voice of Glück’s poems arrests and engages, offering what Glück has said she seeks in poetry: “the sound of an authentic being,” an “immediacy, [a] volatility” that gives poems that achieve it “paradoxical durability.” Such authenticity is wholly distinct from “sincerity’s honest disclosure”: “Poems are [End Page 583] autobiography,” she concedes, “but divested,” not just of “chronology” and “anecdote,” but of “personal conviction”; in the work the poet “strives to be free of the imprisoning self.”2 The first single-authored book on one of America’s most important contemporary poets (a collection of essays edited by Joanne Feit Diehl appeared in 2005), Daniel Morris’s study of Louise Glück commands attention. As the title indicates, its aims are nonetheless modest. Quoting generously, reading sympathetically, and providing pragmatic critical terms, Morris has written a useful introduction. Although the book does not proceed chronologically, the introduction offers a brief overview of the poet’s work, from the Plathian Firstborn (1968), through ten ambitiously evolving collections including the oracular Descending Figure (1980), the plainspoken Ararat (1990), and the myth-saturated Triumph of Achilles (1985), Meadowlands (1996), and most recently Averno (2006). Morris sees Glück as primarily autobiographical, investigating, analyzing, and revising the self. He compellingly highlights her revisions of myth, religion, literature, and her own work. Reading Glück as “postconfessional,” he rightly links her with both modernist and so-called confessional precursors. Consistently keeping the poems in the foreground, he carefully avoids claiming too wide an interpretive reach for his critical paradigms, some of which persuade more fully than others. The most central paradigm—autobiography—proves the most problematic, but also the most suggestive for future work. Readers will benefit from Morris’s thorough bibliography and generous citations of others’ articles and book chapters. And they will be served well by his inclusion of the poems, many entire. Morris approaches Glück’s work through several related themes: “desire, hunger, trauma, survival, commentary, autobiography, nature, spiritual witnessing” (2). These “keywords” govern chapters in Part One. The first usefully introduces “desire” and “hunger,” emphasizing not just the link between anorexia and writing in the now familiar “Dedication to Hunger,” but more importantly the “spiritual hunger” (Glück’s phrase) driving her work (36). Although he invokes theoretical models, desire in Morris’s account is primarily a relatively straightforward narrative of longing: for the beloved, for recognition from others, for poetic achievement. The chapter on “commentary,” perhaps the most original, argues that Glück’s poetry practices a form of textual interpretation, or “creative commentary,” corresponding with the Jewish tradition of midrash: “a reading process, an interpretive activity, [and] a creative cast of mind” (61). “[A]s an interpretive practice rather than as an essential identity formation,” Judaism provides “a model of revision” (97). Sustained readings of poems that rewrite Biblical stories, including the haunting “Lamentations,” trace different revisionary strategies. Reading Glück next as a “trauma artist” and poet of “witness,” Morris calls her untrustworthy speakers “paradoxically reliable witness[es] to trauma, precisely because unreliable” (102); the poems “produce authenticity” through “unreliable narration” (112). While those paradoxes persuade, more frequently the trauma theory feels at odds with the poetry. The next chapter, “Challenging Trauma Theory: Witnessing Divine Mystery,” is brief but suggestive, addressing poems engaged with the Christ story. Its argument—that they challenge, or modify, trauma theory—doesn’t speak to the poems’ resonance, to which Morris clearly responds; he might have further developed links with central themes discussed elsewhere: prayer, god as fiction, the conflict between spirit and flesh. In Part Two, four chapters focus on individual volumes. The chapter on The House on Marshland (1975)’s revisions...

This article examines representations of migrants in Jenny Erpenbeck’s 2015 novel Gehen, Ging, Gegangen and Bodo Kirchhoff’s 2016 novella Widerfahrnis. I locate these texts in historical and literary contexts, the roots of which can be traced to the first generation of postwar German literature, particularly the works of Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass. In both Grass’s and Böll’s postwar fiction, German experiences of the war and its aftermath are foregrounded, and focus is placed on German postwar trauma, while the Jewish victims of the Holocaust remain in the background. This article proposes a thematic continuum between the postwar texts of Böll and Grass and the more recent novels Gehen, Ging, Gegangen and Widerfahrnis: in each literary era, the experience of the white German male is foregrounded, effectively erasing the experience of marginalized figures.

198 SHOFAR Spring 1996 Vol. 14, No.3 souls" but preserved the consensus behind the popularity of the Fascist regime as long as he tilted toward the latter. When Mussolini took a radical turn toward "fascist revolution" in both foreign and racial policy in the late 1930s, he broke the consensus and alienated the military, civil service, and diplomatic elites who ultimately triumphed over the weakened and vacillating Duce of 1942-43 and shaped the policies that thwarted Nazi Germany, protected Jews, and preserved Italian honor. In this reviewer's opinion, Carpi could have strengthened his book by expanding the historiographical section and explicitly engaging the arguments of other historians of Italian Jewish policy and rescue, such as Meir Michaelis, Jonathan Steinberg, and the late Menachem Shelach. Christopher R. Browning Pacific Lutheran University Insiders and Outsiders: Jewish and Gentile Culture in Germany and Austria, edited by Dagmar C. G. Lorenz and Gabriele Weinberger. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994. 365 pp. $44.95. Insiders and Outsiders is an ambitious attempt to present an overall history of the dynamics of the outsider, in his/her contribution to German and Austrian culture. The book consists of 28 essays by cultural and literary historians as well as by journalists, all of whom are involved in GermanJewish studies. In addressing the issue of the outsider within literary discourse, the editors take a historical approach focusing on the Jewish community. Divided into six sections with an introduction and conclusion, the book begins with a broad sweep of the history of the Jewish influence during specified time periods and ends with the post-Holocaust period. For this approach, Dagmar Lorenz, who contributed several essays throughout the text, provides an appropriate introduction by tracing major trends not only in German language and literature since the Enlightenment, but also in the fields of political and social science. Through such a factual approach, Lorenz makes the case for distinguishing between German and Austrian literature, a demarcation that is especially crucial in understanding post-Holocaust writing as it affects the Jewish community. The book accurately conveys a central fact in postwar German and Austrian literature: the Holocaust is the focal point that has not only given rise to the literary discourse in Germany and Austria following the Holocaust but has altered literary interpretation prior to it. Book Reviews 199 Lorenz has therefore correctly drawn attention to the distinction ofliterary development in each of the two countries especially since the Holocaust. The presentation of the essays, for the most part, is tightly structured. Each of the major sections represents a specific issue within the framework of historical chronology; each section can also stand alone because of its division by an inherent historical progression. Section One, "HistoricalPerspectives: Emancipation and Assimilation," serves as a general introduction to the issues concerning the Jewish influence throughout literary history. Sander Gilman's lead essay presents issues that have not changed over time or place either in the old world or new, an approach consistent with the universality underlying the Jewish presence in cultural life. Employing psychological techniques, Dr. Gilman provides the reader with an understanding of the major issues involving the Jew as outsider. His essay is followed by several others that concentrate on the various issues from a historical perspective that Gilman raises from a psychological one. The section ends with Ruth Beckermann's essay on Jean Amery as a paradigm for the issues that have faced Austrian Jewry since the close of the War. While serving as an introductory section, Section One can stand on its own chronology. Section Two, "Jewish Languages and DiscOlJrses," follows a similar pattern as that presented in Section One. While the focus of Section One was primarily on literature, Section Two encompasses the German language, including Yiddish. The introductory essay is strictly linguistic. The following four essays are chronologically aminged. Two provocative arguments of the cultural aspects of the German language are presented here. They are Michael Berkowitz's "The Debate About Hebrew in German: The Kulturfrage in the Zionist Congresses, 1897-1914" and Margaret Pazi's "Authors ofGerman Language in Israel." The first example uses the Zionist movement as its historical context, and in the second example it...

Informed by trauma theory, recent discussions of post-9/11 literature have vehemently lamented the failure of works by Don DeLillo, Jay McInerney, or Ken Kalfus to incorporate the aesthetic paradigm shift precipitated by the traumatic effects of the terrorist attacks. Through a close reading of Patrick McGrath's novella ‘Ground Zero’ (Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now, 2005) from a psychoanalytic and a narratological perspective (converging in the discourse of psychotherapy), this essay proposes the concept of transference as key to the narrativisation of post-9/11 trauma. The argument draws on previously unpublished archival material in 9/11 oral history as well as on psychoanalytic theories of transference and counter-transference (supplemented by René Girard's sociological work on the scapegoat) to recast the crisis of imagination that followed upon the terrorist attacks as primarily a narrative impasse. ‘Ground Zero’ engages both characters and readers in scapegoating games that mobilise discourses as diverse as racial persecution and narrative unreliability. In examining these forms of scapegoating, the essay derives from the transferability of evil (as evinced through scapegoating) a broader statement on the ethical function of narrative in the mediation of world-historical trauma.

Reviewed by: The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary by Jason Groves Bernhard Malkmus The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary. By Jason Groves. New York: Fordham University Press. 2020. x+208 pp. $105. ISBN 978-0-8232-8810-6. Human civilization's geological agency in transforming the biosphere has been reframing the epistemologies of all academic disciplines, in particular in the humanities. Reflection on what it means to be human no longer takes place on a stage for which the natural world is a mere backdrop; it is complicated by the myriad feedback loops between human cultures and anthropogenically transformed natures that mark our human condition today. The geological imaginary in the Anthropocene is closely tied to the history of Earth systems sciences that emerged during the hottest phase of the Cold War and to the epistemic construction of a global environment by the United Nations and international diplomacy. It is thus a form of planetary thinking, for which the Austrian writer and polymath Raoul Schrott has forged the new literary genre of a 'scientific epic' in his Erste Erde Epos (Munich: Hanser, 2016). However, as Jan Volker Röhnert reminds us in his Über das Gehen im Karst (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2021), the geological imaginary has a much longer history, in particular in German-language letters. Geology is, of course, the discipline that revolutionized the human sense of time; it opened up the vista of unimaginable natural histories that allowed humans to conceive of life as an evolutionary development. Geology has also provided a plethora of metaphors for rethinking the human on the threshold to modernity; it has offered ambivalent imagery between the biotic and the abiotic, the latent and the manifest, the exploitable and the uncanny. Grounded in this ambivalence, geology in modern German literature functions also as a mode of thinking about alternative modernities. This is evident in Jason Groves's new study, which traces the signs of a planetary ecological reflexivity in the archive of German literature in modernity, aiming to unearth 'those imaginaries in which other earths emerged' (p. 1). His close readings of a 'mineral imaginary' add up to a genealogy of the discovery of a climatologically volatile and unreliable Earth. In the process, the study becomes a cryptogram of a planetary imagination that enables us to consider alternative genealogies of modernity and trace the roots of Anthropocene thinking. His point of departure is the observation that the climax of modern Subjektphilosophie coalesces with an unprecedented fecundity of scientific and imaginative thinking about minerality and geology. He thus complicates the conventional narrative of an intrinsically teleological post-Enlightenment concept of the subject by revealing the degree to which the reflection on human subjectivity around 1800 was modulated by creatureliness—and the degree to which that creatureliness encompassed both [End Page 308] animality and minerality. Intense efforts to imagine deep earth and deep time reframe the standardized genealogy of the modern subject. The Germanic obsession with foundlings, in particular, and the multiple attempts to reassemble historical narratives around these erratic witnesses to Earth's history offer a particularly compelling way of rethinking modern human self-reflection through the lens of 'the lithic' (p. 6). Groves is engaging in an exercise of ichnology; he is reading what was never written, he is tracking traces such as foundlings to piece together the hidden geology of intellectual history. In claiming a 'geophilological turn', however, he is probably overstating the case. In his Introduction one gets the impression that Groves wanted to synthesize his considerable theoretical acumen as early as possible. However, a more gradual argumentative approach that links theoretical inferences to concrete close readings and thus creates a narrative momentum would have been more reader-friendly. In spite of the apparent theoretical ambition, some of the references remain underexplored, for example trauma theory and colonialism. Some readers might find Groves's choice of authors somewhat eclectic and wonder why, for example, there are no in-depth discussions of Jean Paul and E. T. A Hoffmann or Theodor Fontane and Alfred Döblin. Others might bemoan the fact that the book does not strictly adhere to the format of a traditional academic...

<i>High-Tech Trash</i> analyzes creative strategies in glitch, noise, and error to chart the development of an aesthetic paradigm rooted in failure. Carolyn L. Kane explores how technologically influenced creative practices, primarily from the second half of the twentieth and first quarter of the twenty-first centuries, critically offset a broader culture of pervasive risk and discontent. In so doing, she questions how we continue onward, striving to do better and acquire more, despite inevitable disappointment. <i>High-Tech Trash</i> speaks to a paradox in contemporary society in which failure is disavowed yet necessary for technological innovation. “Leonard Cohen sang ‘There’s a crack in everything…that’s how the light gets in.’ Here, Carolyn Kane teaches us how to see that light, one crack at a time.” FRED TURNER, author of <i>The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties</i> “Kane profiles art practices and media discourses that exploit and celebrate, rather than filter or suppress, all kinds of errors and noises. A welcome intervention in a number of discursive fields.” PETER KRAPP, author of <i>Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture</i> “An original work of scholarship that addresses some of the most pervasive phenomena and foundational questions in the contemporary media environment.” ROBERT HARIMAN, coauthor of <i>The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship</i> CAROLYN L. KANE is Associate Professor of Communication at Ryerson University and author of <i>Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code.</i>

On the basis of James Phelan’s unreliable narrative, Northrop Frye’s U-shaped narrative structure and Cathy Caruth’s Trauma theory, this paper studies Ian McEwan’s Booker Prize nominated novel Atonement and analyses the protagonist Briony’s behaviour responding to a traumatic experience and her efforts to heal the trauma. It provides readers with ways to help them get out of similar predicaments, and a new research perspective combining trauma theory with narratology for the interpretation of novels.

Reviewed by: Words from Abroad: Trauma and Displacement in Postwar German Jewish Writers Rochelle Tobias Words from Abroad: Trauma and Displacement in Postwar German Jewish Writers. By Katja Garloff. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. xii + 252 pages. $49.95. Katja Garloff takes the title for her study from an essay with the same title by Adorno in which the philosopher defends the use of foreign words (Fremdwörter) in German. Adorno argues that foreign words introduce a dissonance into language that exposes, [End Page 591] in turn, the heterogeneity at the heart of any language, such that no language can ever be native to a people (26). The title could not be more fitting for this remarkable monograph in which Garloff demonstrates the displacement that postwar German Jewish writers inscribe into the German language. At once an historical and a literary project, the book investigates the ways in which Peter Weiss, Nelly Sachs, and Paul Celan responded to their reception in West Germany. That all three authors lived abroad throughout their writing careers contributes to, but is not essential for Garloff's argument. Even if Sachs, Weiss, and Celan had returned to their "native" lands, their relation to the German language would have been irrevocably altered by the Holocaust which made the German language an uneasy, if not impossible, home for a Jewish poet. Drawing equally on Postcolonial Studies and trauma theory, Garloff contends that all three writers "perform for an imagined German audience the violent rupture between the subject and its place of origin" (11). One of the many feats of this learned and highly readable study is the dialogue it creates between postcolonial theory and Holocaust Studies, which for too long have remained separate fields. In her theoretical introduction, Garloff indicates that postcolonial theory brought to the foreground the idea that the voices of postcolonial subjects call into question any national identity conceived as the outgrowth of a common origin. Diaspora experiences undermine all fixed narratives of the past and projections for the future. In this manner they subvert existing models, while at the same time creating new possibilities. While sympathetic to this position in general, Garloff cautions that German-Jewish literature after the Holocaust cannot be interpreted in such a positive light as the articulation of difference for two reasons that are related but not identical. First, German-Jewish writers cannot stand apart from the models or narratives they critique or, more precisely, disarticulate since these models entail their annihilation as Jews or the complete erasure of their difference. Secondly, they cannot generate "new" possibilities, such as fashioning alternative communities, since the Holocaust destroyed any future for German Jewry. (As Garloff notes, the Jews in West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s came mostly from Eastern Europe via displaced persons camps and hence do not represent a continuation of prewar German-Jewish culture [112–13].) In the absence of either a past they can recuperate or a future they can imagine, German-Jewish writers are left in a double bind. On the one hand, they "attempt to transform their own displacement into a critical stance" (11); on the other, their efforts attest to "their inability, or unwillingness, to arrive at a position of strength and detachment" (11). To elucidate precisely this resistance to exile from a position of vulnerability and entanglement, Garloff examines the works of Weiss, Sachs, and Celan with attention to the contexts in which they wrote and published their texts. The first chapter explores essays by three diverse thinkers (Adorno, Günther Anders, and Jean Améry) that directly address the issue of exile for German Jews after the Holocaust. Although the chapter is divided into three equal sections, the section on Adorno occupies the thematic center, if for no other reason than because Adorno uses the word trauma and outlines what could be called traumatic temporality in his essay "Die Wunde Heine." As Garloff points out, the word trauma is a foreign word, the Greek for wound referred to in the title of the essay (33). The title additionally permits two interpretations: it could indicate either the wound that Heine has, as in "Die Wunde Heine," or the one that he is...

Cold War Crossings: Border Poetics in Postwar German and Polish Literature

When looking at how trauma is represented in literature and the arts, we tend to focus on the weight of the past. In this book, Amir Eshel suggests that this retrospective gaze has trapped us in a search for reason in the madness of the twentieth century's catastrophes at the expense of literature's prospective vision. Considering several key literary works, Eshel argues in Futurity that by grappling with watershed events of modernity, these works display a future-centric engagement with the past that opens up the present to new political, cultural, and ethical possibilities - what he calls futurity. Bringing together postwar German, Israeli, and Anglo-American literature, Eshel traces a shared trajectory of futurity in world literature. He begins by examining German works of fiction and the debates they spurred over the future character of Germany's public sphere. Turning to literary works by Jewish-Israeli writers as they revisit Israel's political birth, he shows how these stories inspired a powerful reconsideration of Israel's identity. Eshel then discusses post-1989 literature - from Ian McEwan's Black Dogs to J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year - revealing how these books turn to events like World War II and the Iraq War not simply to make sense of the past but to contemplate the political and intellectual horizon that emerged after 1989. Bringing to light how reflections on the past create tools for the future, Futurity reminds us of the numerous possibilities literature holds for grappling with the challenges of both today and tomorrow.

Confounded Dwelling: Architectures of Association in W. G. Sebald’s<i>Austerlitz</i>

This study examines three narratives by contemporary minority writers who write in the German language: Die Orangen des Prasidenten (2011) by Abbas Khider, Im Grenzland (2001) by Sherko Fatah, and Die Sehnsucht der Schwalbe (2002) by Rafik Schami. By analyzing these texts through a framework of narrative ethics that relies on the work of narratologists such as Wayne Booth, James Phelan, Seymour Chatman, and Monika Fludernik, this study seeks to understand readers’ possible ethical responses. The framework of narrative ethics sheds light on how these texts function to prompt a reader’s open-ended exploration of ethical issues. This study is a first of its kind, not for its methodology, which has long existed in the realm of canonical literatures, but for the intersection of methodology and subject matter. It seeks to show that narrative ethics has a role — perhaps a particularly fertile one — when used to explore German language texts written by writers from migrant backgrounds. In the field of minority and migrant German literature, it aims to refocus attention on the reader’s experience with texts by exploring whether such texts achieve the often-stated goal (which was advanced by early promoters of migrant literature in the 1980s and is still prevalent in the marketing of this literature today) of allowing readers to explore Otherness.

Since unification in 1990, and particularly since the late 90s, Germany has seen a boom in the confrontation with memory, evident in the sharp increase in novels, films, autobiographies, and other forms of public discourse that engage with the long-term effects of National Socialism across generations. Taking issue with the concept of Vergangenheitsbewaltigung, or coming to terms with the National Socialist past, which after 1945 guided nearly all debate on the topic, the contributors to this volume view contemporary German culture through the more dynamic concept of contests, which provides a circumspect view of German debates on the past, departing, as have recent German debates, from the tone of censorship that has so often accompanied these discussions. Instead, the idea of memory contests posits that all forms of memory, public or private, can be understood as ongoing processes of negotiating identity in the present. The idea also captures the intergenerational dynamic of the ongoing confrontation with memory in Germany today.Touching on gender, generations, memory and postmemory, trauma theory, ethnicity, historiography, and family narrative alongside many other topics, the contributions provide a comprehensive picture of current German memory debates, in so doing shedding light on the struggle to construct a German identity mindful of but not wholly defined by the horrors of National Socialism and the Holocaust. The volume will appeal to readers with a wide variety of academic interests, including cultural history, gender studies, film, and contemporary German literature. Anne Fuchs is professor of Modern German Literature and Georg Grote is lecturer in German History, both at University College Dublin. Mary Cosgrove is lecturer in German at the University of Edinburgh.