Reviewed by: Cosmopolitan Parables: Trauma and Responsibility in Contemporary Germany by David D. Kim Helen Finch Cosmopolitan Parables: Trauma and Responsibility in Contemporary Germany. By David D. Kim. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017. Pp. 248. Paper $34.95. ISBN 978-0810135253. Kim's monograph aims to bring contemporary discussions of cosmopolitanism to bear on current debates about postcolonial memory, Holocaust memory, and trauma in German literature. It synthesizes a vast range of contemporary thought on memory, cosmopolitanism, postcolonialism, and capitalism through analyzing three postwall German novels. These "cosmopolitan parables" are Hans Christoph Buch's Speech of the Dead Columbus on Judgment Day (1992), Michael Krüger's Himmelfarb (1993), and W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn (1995). Kim claims that these works deploy melancholy aesthetics to break down national containers of memory and trace links between postcolonial memory and Holocaust memory in disruptive ways. As Kim admits, his aim is extremely ambitious: "an investigation of one of the most elusive philosophical concepts and highest political ideals today, seeking to show its many interpretations in the humanities and social sciences as well as the urgent problems associated with them" (183). For Kim, "trauma lies at the heart of transcultural memory as a common good" (13), and his chosen authors respond to this trauma with a form of melancholy aesthetics informed by a leftist consciousness that moves them to call for "world citizenship," a term that Kim uses interchangeably with "cosmopolitanism." Kim chooses to focus on German literature because it held a unique position in the 1990s as a space where memories of the Nazi past, the colonial past, and the East German past intersected. He concludes by suggesting that the three "cosmopolitan parables" "produce dissonant social relations through which readers are able to reflect on their own implicated relationships with strangers in pain" (185). Melancholy cosmopolitan literature, for Kim, is fundamentally didactic, aiming to have an ethical effect on a reader. The first half of the book, "Entanglements," consists of three chapters that establish the theoretical framework for Kim's study. Chapter 1, "Divided Cosmopolitanisms," discusses the conceptual history of cosmopolitanism from the 1990s to the present, starting from Nussbaum's concept of cosmopolitan education and its critiques by postcolonial theorists such as Gilroy, Cheah, and Noyes. Kim also evaluates the debate surrounding the universality of Holocaust memory as a carrier of cosmopolitan duty, expressing concern at the quarrel between postmodern and postcolonial scholars. [End Page 201] Chapter 2, "The Traumas of Unification," discusses the debates on Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) in Germany. This chapter relies somewhat on outmoded narratives (e.g., that until the 1960s in Germany "with the exception of Paul Celan's iconoclastic poem 'Death Fugue' … writers and thinkers remained mostly silent about Nazi crimes against humanity" [64], a view that has been challenged by scholars including Ruth Vogel-Klein and Stephan Braese). Nonetheless, it does important work in bringing together the German postcolonial moment with Vergangenheitsbewältigung and also with the German turn to neoliberalism in the 1990s. Chapter 3, "In the Whirlwind of Melancholy," discusses "the problem of too much memory" (79) and argues that melancholy makes literature the ideal platform for cosmopolitan entanglement with memory. Kim engages with the long strand of German thought, particularly Benjamin's work, that links melancholy to resistance. Part 2, "Parables," contains Kim's case studies of authors who, in his words, "have inherited the historical burden of National Socialism … as descendants of Germans who lived through Nazi Germany" (15). He considers that, due to their position as globally oriented, leftist public intellectuals, they are ideally placed to probe a long arc of institutionalized oppression. Chapter 4 on Buch's Speech of the Dead Columbus discusses the title character as an ironic wanderer through five centuries; somehow both Jewish and non-Jewish, the dead Columbus exposes the crossings between German, Jewish, and Caribbean histories. Next, Kim argues that Michael Krüger's Himmelfarb shows the impossibility of a neat German-Jewish partition after World War II, as well as exposing the racist German history of anthropology. Finally, Kim focuses on Sebald's poetics of photography in The Rings of Saturn, showing his "archaeological...