Contemporary German Literature Research Articles

New Odysseys or from Mare Nostrum towards Mare Monstrum? (The) Mediterranean Route(s) in Selected Examples of Contemporary German Literature

New Odysseys or from Mare Nostrum towards Mare Monstrum? (The) Mediterranean Route(s) in Selected Examples of Contemporary German Literature

Politické kázání. Impuls k diskusi

A Political Sermon. An Impulse for Discussion. The author points to the fact that in the Czech Protestant environment, there has not yet been a professional discussion on how to reflect contemporary political issues at the pulpit. He points to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s thesis that the church must be able to pronounce the word of God here and now, from knowledge of the political matter, getting to the core. Building particularly on contemporary German literature, he not only summarizes the arguments for “political sermons” and suggests what form they might take, but he also discusses the risks involved. Finally, he stresses that preaching is part of a worship service in which people pray for politicians and good governance and also celebrate the Eucharist – experiencing the new world and carrying parts of it into the present one.

Perpetual Exile: Legacies of a Disrupted Century

The transnational configuration of contemporary German literature cannot be detached from its historical continuum, since such a separation would render the archive of histories of exile in and out of Germany inconsistent and incomplete. Bringing literary histories of exile in a dialogue, in this instance, Exilliteratur, represented by prominent German authors, who, during the Second World War, immigrated to Southern California (Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Franz Werfel, among others), as well as Anna Seghers and Stefan Zweig, who went into exile in Mexico and Brazil, respectively, and the emerging literature of contemporary transnational or so-called hyphenated German (“Bindestrich-Deutsche”) writers would enable an inclusive paradigm that communicates across communities of research. To that end, I briefly review one novel each by Anna Seghers and Lion Feuchtwanger and essays by the Iranian-German poet SAID, which exemplify the two distinctive genres of exile literature: the long-established Exilliteratur and what I elsewhere described as transnational literature of writers mostly from the non-Western world, who in the latter part of the twentieth century began immigrating to the West. While I acknowledge the different circumstances and historical imperatives that have dictated the features of the two genres, I foreground the ethical implications and the cautionary tales the respective works of Exilliteratur authors and transnational writers share.

Nicole Coleman. The Right to Difference: Interculturality and Human Rights in Contemporary German Literature

Nicole Coleman. <i>The Right to Difference: Interculturality and Human Rights in Contemporary German Literature</i>

REMINISCING AND RECOLLECTION OF LIFE IN ILIJA TROJANOW’S NOVEL THE WORLD IS BIG, AND SALVATION LURKS EVERYWHERE

IIija Trojanow, one of the Bulgarian writers of Contemporary German Literature, penned the story of the Luxow family's migration from Bulgaria to Germany in his first novel, "The World is Big, and Salvation Lurks Everywhere" (Die Welt ist groß und Rettung lauert überall, 1996). Employing self-reminiscences ingrained in his autobiographic memoir, the author reveals how the oppressive communist regime of the 70s affected society in the novel's story of the Luxow family. The novel is composed employing modern and post-modern narration techniques. The past is rendered in the story of Alex Luxow, the main character, who loses his family in a traffic accident in Germany and cannot recall past events before this accident. In addition, the main character's journeys in tandem with his godfather Bai Dan, who helps him in the healing process both physically and spiritually, indicate the search for an individual and cultural identity. This study discusses how the main character's memories of the overshadowed past are revived and what they point to while surpassing individual/cultural boundaries in the context of memory objects in autobiographical and collective reminiscences.

Questioning the Canon: Counter-Discourse and the Minority Perspective in Contemporary German Literature by Christine Meyer

Reviewed by: Questioning the Canon: Counter-Discourse and the Minority Perspective in Contemporary German Literature by Christine Meyer Bethany A. Morgan Questioning the Canon: Counter-Discourse and the Minority Perspective in Contemporary German Literature. By Christine Meyer. Translated by Dustin Lovett and Tegan Raleigh. Boston: De Gruyter, 2021. Pp. 343. Cloth $99.00. ISBN 978-3110674361. Christine Meyer’s Questioning the Canon masterfully treats the representative works of Rafik Schami, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and Feridun Zaimoglu through a postcolonial methodology to reveal their overlooked counter-discursive aspects. In response to a field of scholarship that lags behind its Francophone and Anglophone counterparts, Meyer calls for the necessity of utilizing a postcolonial approach to Germanophone literature and its authors originating from stigmatized countries. This work questions the power relations between the center, the canon, and the margins. Utilizing Genette’s theories of “hypertext” and “hypotext,” Meyer shows which authors have written into the canon and essentially asserted themselves as “successors” to canonical authors. Meyer exposes the problems with a literary canon as a collection of texts approved for universality by cultural and academic institutions. From a position inferior to the main subject of discourse in canonical texts, the un-, under-, or misrepresented, such as women and ethnic and sexual minorities, question the ability of canonical authors to universally represent the human experience. For her methodology, Meyer convincingly demonstrates both the validity and importance of approaching German-language “migration literature” from a postcolonial perspective, which originated with “orientalism” and has developed through “mimicry” and “third space,” “subalternity,” and “writing back.” The main difference between the German-speaking canon and the Anglophone or Francophone canon lies in the aims and discourse itself. Rather than uncovering a colonialist or racist ideology in the canon, German-language authors of “migration literature” endeavor to “de-ethnicize” and “denaturalize” the canon by uncovering cosmopolitan and hybrid elements already within. The German canon does not contain the same cultural imperialism or notions of expansionism, but rather focuses on its own “cultural nation.” Moreover, Meyer points out that Germany’s immigration population does not come from colonized subjects but rather from Turkey or from nations conquered by other colonizers. Despite these differences in colonial and immigration histories, Meyer does not excuse the German canon from its share of literary protests but rather [End Page 342] shows how a postcolonial approach unveils a power struggle between the margins and center analogous to that between writers in post-colonial regions and the colonizer. In considering the conditions under which Germany’s contemporary literary canon has developed, the fraught twentieth century required the redefinition of a common patrimony and cultural foundation upon which to build its Kulturnation. Schami, Özdamar, Zaimoglu, and others have entered intertextual dialogue not only with canonical German authors but also with Shakespeare and authors of the larger Western canon. By rereading authors such as Adelbert von Chamisso, Heinrich Heine, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in a “minor” mode, contemporary authors of “migration literature” recontextualize these authors into a decentered space. Beginning with chapter two, Meyer introduces the counter-discursive strategies of her representative authors, including metatextuality and rewriting. Continuing through chapter six, Meyer involves us in her fruitful close readings of numerous texts to show how they write back from the East, test national traditions by diversity, write oppositionally, and utilize a bottom-up approach. Rafik Schami even writes directly to some of these authors. He adopts the position of a grandchild to Chamisso in the epistolary preface to Chamisso’s 1990 biography. To address “Harry Heine,” Schami chooses an interview in which he and Heine realize they have political persecution, exile, and marked status as a historical minority in common. Meyer reads Schami’s epistolary and interview writings as postcolonial in that he assumes a position of successor and kin rather than outsider. In Schami’s corrective (re)reading of European classics such as the fairy tales and Dracula, he rewrites the Wolf as the misunderstood outsider and the Count as misrepresented. Meyer argues that these texts and yet another text in which a fictional sultan evaluates Goethe’s corpus all point to Schami’s postcolonial tendencies to scrutinize the canon and to...

GERMAN COLONIALISM IN EAST AFRICA AND ITS AFTERMATH IN ABDULRAZAK GURNAH'S NOVELS PARADISE AND AFTERLIVES AND IN CONTEMPORARY GERMAN LITERATURE

ABSTRACTBritish author and literary scholar Abdulrazak Gurnah, born in Zanzibar in 1948 and awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021, makes significant contributions to the memory and critique of German colonialism in East Africa and its aftermath both in Tanzania and in Germany. This study examines Gurnah's novels Paradise (1994) and Afterlives (2020) for their representation of German imperial rule and its impact on Swahili society and culture and its place in the Indian Ocean universe, World War I in East Africa, the fate of askari soldiers in Weimar and Nazi Germany, and the memory and postmemory of German colonialism through to the 1960s. Gurnah's literary modelling of African experiences and memories of German colonialism is discussed in Anglo‐German comparative perspective with reference to postcolonial memory discourses in contemporary German literature, including Afro‐German life‐writing.

The Right to Difference: Interculturality and Human Rights in Contemporary German Literature by Nicole Coleman

The Right to Difference: Interculturality and Human Rights in Contemporary German Literature by Nicole Coleman

The Right to Difference: Interculturality and Human Rights in Contemporary German Literature by Nicole Coleman

Reviewed by: The Right to Difference: Interculturality and Human Rights in Contemporary German Literature by Nicole Coleman Miriam Schwarz Nicole Coleman. The Right to Difference: Interculturality and Human Rights in Contemporary German Literature. U of Michigan P, 2021. 258 pp. Cloth, $80.00. Drawing on antiracist scholarship, especially that of Fatima El-Tayeb, Nicole Coleman emphasizes in her introduction to The Right to Difference that the German national identity continues to be imagined as mono-ethnic and white.1 She sees this reflected in literary categories of German literature and criticizes that what started as a homogenizing endeavor in the nineteenth century is still apparent when scholars work with a binary that differentiates between white German literature and migrant or intercultural literature. Coleman argues that literature studies must aim to represent the reality of German diversity and suggests a reconceptualization of the term "intercultural literature" that forgoes "categorization based on background" (19). Here, precisely, is a disconnect between Coleman's premise and the theoretical solution she proposes: despite criticizing that Germanness is strongly associated with whiteness, she aims to detach intercultural literature from biographical rather than racist categories. This is reflected in Coleman's theory of interculturality. Her definition [End Page 112] of culture is separated from hierarchizing identity markers such as racialization or nationality and "assumes that there is a network of culture which overlaps [ … ] and that all humans affiliate with multiple cultures at the same time" (21); culture is "any kind of social group that provides us with meaning" (27). Her theory of difference works accordingly. Based on Derrida and Levinas, Coleman conceptualizes difference as networked and inherently interlinked with sameness. Since difference can therefore be understood as a commonality that all humans share, Coleman argues for a "right to difference" (33). While Coleman incorporates Leslie Adelson's criticism of the term interculturality concerning its implications of essentialized and discrete cultural entities, she does not address the term's implications that epistemic systems exist on an eye-to-eye level regardless of political and discursive hierarchies. Coleman admits that before an intercultural attitude that understands difference as a shared commonality is achieved, there is work to be done. Thus, she develops a new model of intercultural competence that she proposes as an "intercultural lens" (59). She proposes it as a tool for analyzing what she terms "human rights literature" (50), aiming to create an understanding of the right to difference. Based on models of intercultural competence and communication that argue for cultural relativism, namely, those by Milton J. Bennett and Darla K. Deardorff, Coleman's model consists of five categories that describe "attitudes towards cultural difference" (40). "Cultural ignorance" and "cultural exclusionism" describe a denial of cultural differences and a negative view of cultural differences, respectively. "Universalism" tries to understand and eventually reduce cultural differences from one's own cultural perspective, often by focusing on sameness rather than difference. "Autocultural reflexivity," the awareness of one's own cultural socialization, is the threshold to "interculturality" which is where "autocultural reflexivity and engagement with others come together" (41–42). Coleman argues that reading human rights literature does not automatically lead to empathy for those who are perceived as different. Rather, her analysis of eight contemporary German novels suggests ways of "reading interculturally" in order for "classrooms [to] become places for social knowledge about exclusionary practices and [ … ] racism, and also spaces for strategy testing and potential scenarios for intercultural societies" (57). Each of her four chapters of literary analysis contrasts two novels by different German authors who write about a similar topic, loosely describable as trials of genocide perpetrators, political incarceration, [End Page 113] German-Polish postwar identities, and refugees in contemporary Germany. Coleman examines the texts and protagonists by asking which of the attitudes toward cultural difference they represent. The context she provides for each chapter and the detailed teaching suggestions are highly resourceful, especially for teaching white students. The results of her analysis suggest that there is indeed a link between the authors' epistemic position, the topic they write about, and which overall attitude toward difference Coleman identifies in the texts. Given that scholars like José Medina have shown that marginalization leads to epistemic advantages, one might argue...

Männer in der Krise

Abstract In contemporary German literature, diagnoses of the times can be observed that interpret social modernization processes as alienation and loss of meaning. The article examines whether the selected novels tie in with the culture-critical crisis consciousness of the turn of the century around 1900. This article develops the thesis that in Der Eisvogel by Uwe Tellkamp and Sieben Nächte by Simon Strauß, men appear as figures of crisis through which socio-pathological side effects of modern progress are articulated.

Between fiction and truth - W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz as an anti-novel

The aim of this article is to discuss the most important characteristics of the so-called anti-novel on the example of a literary work (literary "photo-text") by W.G. Sebald Austerlitz, which in the history of contemporary German literature is considered to be extremely original in terms of form and an unusual (unconventional) prose work drawing on numerous, non-literary means of artistic expression such as photography or film. At the same time, such an unusual (i.e. going far beyond the traditionally understood novelistic genre framework) and unambiguously unclassifiable prose form is an original literary exemplification of the fight against oblivion in the context of the experience of war trauma and the hardships of searching for one's own identity in the postmodern era at the threshold of the twenty-first century, it is strongly oriented towards the reader and the horizon of his reading expectations (Wolfgang Iser), and the line between literary fiction and truth seems to be almost abolished. When discussing the most important anti-novel features, reference was made to the definition of the term "anti-novel" and selected theories in the field of aesthetics of the reception of a literary medialized text (Dieter Wellershof).

„Linie ucieczki ciągnie się za sobą przez całe życie”

“Lines of flight are dragged behind you all your life.” Post-Memory, Old Age, and Forgetting in Ulrike Draesner’s Novel Sieben Sprünge vom Rand der Welt (2014)&#x0D; In contemporary German literature, particularly in the family novels that are key to the post-memory discourse of the past, there is a marked interest in the dysfunctions and deformations of memory associated with ageing processes. Demographic changes lead researchers to consider the determinants and the existing dominant themes and categories of interdisciplinary memory studies. Ulrike Draesner’s 2014 novel, Sieben Sprünge vom Rand der Welt, the subject of this paper, probes the meanders of memory and forgetting, examining their configurations in intergenerational relations. I am interested here in the threads that have been marginalized in the popular discourse on the flight and resettlement of millions of Germans from the eastern provinces of the Reich, which emerge along with the progressive dementia of one of the novel’s main characters.

Reprezentacja dialektu bawarskiego i dialektu Kansai w literaturze współczesnej w kontekście ideologii językowych w Niemczech i Japonii

This paper examines the representations of the Bavarian and Kansai dialects in contemporary German and Japanese literature in the light of the concept of language ideologies. First, I will present general objectives of sociolinguistic analysis of dialect representation in fictional texts. Next, I will discuss the connection between language standardisation process and social attitudes towards dialect on the example of two countries from different cultural circles: Germany and Japan. Finally, using methods derived both from linguistics and literature studies, I will examine dialect representations in selected contemporary novels in order to establish the influence of language ideologies.

When Sincerity Fails: Literatures of Migration and the Emblematic Labor of Personhood1

Saskia Sassen’s landmark study <i>Globalization and Its Discontents</i> characterizes migrant laborers as “emblematic subjects” of a global economy. Reprinted from <i>The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature</i>, here with a focus on one of Aras Ören’s earliest contributions to Turkish-German literature, “When Sincerity Fails” analyzes the emblematic labor of literary configurations of migration instead, by focusing on the aesthetic form and surprising cultural stakes of Ören’s impactful novella of 1981, known in German translation as <i>Bitte nix Polizei</i>. While much scholarship on literatures of migration continues to pre-suppose an authentic migrant self who suffers indignities sincerely, this article offers important alternatives for evaluating the rhetorical conceit and social deixis of literary “personhood” in transnational literatures of migration. The elusive cipher of the illegal migrant laborer in Ören’s novella allows us to contemplate the changing hieroglyphic of ethnicity—and the labor of reading—in increasingly networked times. (LA)

«ПАМЯТЬ» И «ЗАБВЕНИЕ» В СОВРЕМЕННОЙ ЛИТЕРАТУРЕ ГЕРМАНИИ

This article explores the concepts of memory and oblivion as dominant themes in the revision and reconstruction of the past in contemporary German literature. Michel Foucault’s method of discursive analysis and Jan and Aleida Assman’s memory theory are used to analyse narrative strategies employed by contemporary German authors. Historical, sociocultural, media, and psychological discourses are viewed as contributing to the formation of protagonists’ individual memories. The trajectory along which ‘functional memory’ transmutes from ‘comforting oblivion’ to the ‘loss of identity’, as depicted in the novels Abschied von den Feinden by Reinhard Jirgl and Animal triste by Monika Maron, is analysed in the context of the cultural trauma experience. A consequence of the traumatic experience is the splitting of the self and intrusion, which is expressed through random tormenting remembrances eluding narrative description. To the fore comes silence, which fulfils a narrative-theoretical function. Contemporary German novels written after 1989 are marked by asymmetry between cultural and individual memory. This asymmetry is manifested at the level of the protagonists’ speech and communicative disorders as well as in the inviability of memories beyond local spaces. Auto-communication, mediated reflection, de(re)construction of memories, and conscious oblivion become the principal models for the formation of individual, social, and national identity.

Zwischen Heimatverlust und unsicherer Gegenwart: Sozialer Wandel in Zonenkinder (2002) von Jana Hensel und Scotch (2010) von Ioana Bradea

Abstract My paper will explore the interrelation between past, present and identity, as well as the dynamics of social change in contemporary German and Romanian literature, as exemplified by Jana Hensel’s Zonenkinder (2002) and Ioana Bradea’s Scotch (2010). Both authors belong to a new generation of writers who, having experienced the collapse of the communist regime as adolescents, investigate the traumatic experience of change and adjustment to the social, economic and cultural realities of post-communist societies. While Hensel aims at recreating the lost Heimat (motherland) as an Erinnerungsraum (space of remembrance) and portraying the social tensions of the post-unification decade from an Eastern German perspective, Bradea focuses on depicting the desolate post-communist industrial landscape, as well as the everyday lives of anonymous Romanians caught in the vagaries of transition.

Where Is My Place? Authors from the Former Yugoslavia in Contemporary German Literature

Until the first half of the twentieth century there were only a few representative authors with a migrant background who wrote in German. Since the 1950s and 60s this number has significantly increased. The terminological determinant of this literature has been debated for decades, as the crucial questions to be answered first are, in fact, what kind of literature it is and what place it should take in the German literary scene. This is evidenced by many names that are used or were used in the discourse on this literature, the most common of which are “gastarbeiter”, “migrant” and “migration” literature. The winner of the most prestigious German literary prize “Deutscher Buchpreis” for 2019 is Sasa Stanisic, an author originally from the former Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, who writes in German and is one of the best contemporary German-speaking writers. For this reason, this paper deals with the position of an under-researched group of authors originally from the former Yugoslavia in contemporary German literature from the period when that literature was still called “gastarbeiter”, until today, when it is considered equal to contemporary German literature and when there is no more need for special marginalizing terminological definitions, such as those mentioned above, nor literary awards intended for this literature alone, such as the “Adelbert-von-Chamisso-Preis” prize. The paper clarifies the terminological determinants of gastarbeiter, migrant, migration, hybrid and new world literature, by which some authors characterize this literature, and points out the reasons why the use of these terms is (un)justified. In addition, attention is drawn to representative authors who write in German, originating from the former Yugoslavia, in chronological order, as well as the awards for which some of them were nominated or have won, which testifies to the importance of these writers in the German speaking area and the equality with other German writers which they have achieved in recent years.

Family without futurity, kinship without biology: childlessness in contemporary German literature by women

ABSTRACTAs Germany’s birthrate declines, childlessness is a reality for more women yet remains underrepresented in literature and pop-culture. In this article, I analyze two texts that have struck a nerve with the German public: the novel Wetlands by Charlotte Roche (2008) and the connected short stories in Alice by Judith Hermann (2009). Both protagonists resist what Lee Edelman called the “fascism of the baby’s face” and remain childless despite cultural pressure to reproduce. Drawing on works by queer theorists such as Edelman and Halberstam, I show how the texts question neoliberalism’s insistence on reproductive futurity and posit counter models for life beyond biological family.

КУЛІНАРНА ТЕМАТИКА У ДЕТЕКТИВАХ (НА ПРИКЛАДІ НІМЕЦЬКОМОВНОЇ ЛІТЕРАТУРИ)

The article is devoted to the consideration of genre of crime novels in contemporary German literature general and to those with a culinary theme especially. The using of the term “culinary thriller“ by authors and journalists is critically considered. There is a short overview of the development of the genre of crime novel, there important stages, the structure and characteristics in German literature. Discussed is the popularity of this genre in recent years. The thriller in the modern German literature are thematically qualified. Culinary and gourmet theme is a popular environment in the criminals of the modern German crime thriller authors. Culinary has a great place in the works of the crime genre and has various functions such as means of portraying the person’s manager, crime scene or means for a crime or murder, as a tool of subject’s development. Crime novels often have an educational function, informing the reader about the quality and production of gourmet products. Authors analyze the concept of the culinary crime novel are of the opinion that a culinary crime novel is only a novel when the culinary theme is the motive for the crime. The empirical research is based on the thrillers by writers from Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Luxemburg. This allows an analyses of breadth and depth of the culinary content in the crime novels.

The Wounded Self: Writing Illness in Twenty-First-Century German Literature by Nina Schmidt

Reviewed by: The Wounded Self: Writing Illness in Twenty-First-Century German Literature by Nina Schmidt Franziska Gygax (bio) The Wounded Self: Writing Illness in Twenty-First-Century German Literature Nina Schmidt Camden House, 2018, xii + 235 pages. ISBN 9781640140165, $75.00 hardback. At the beginning of her comprehensive and excellently argued study of autobiographical representations of illness in contemporary German literature, Nina Schmidt refers to Virginia Woolf's On Being Ill and her canonical statement that illness has not acquired the crucial status of a serious literary topic that it deserves. To serve as a striking example of this inadequate judgment and of the necessary theorization of and explanation for the contrary, Schmidt takes as one of her primary texts Christoph Schlingensief's cancer diary So schön wie hier kanns im Himmel gar nicht sein! Tagebuch einer Krebserkrankung (It can't possibly be as beautiful in heaven as it is here! A diary of cancer, 2009), and the ensuing attack in the feuilleton that illness narratives are not real literature. Furthermore, the fact that numerous illness narratives have been published in the past twenty years (not only in the German-speaking world) and that they have received both public and scholarly attention demonstrates the need for further recognition and serious literary criticism, which has actually already been the case in the Anglophone world for quite some time. Besides Schlingensief's cancer diary, Schmidt focuses on Charlotte Roche's 2011 Schossgebete (published in English as Wrecked, 2013), Kathrin Schmidt's Du stirbst nicht (You aren't dying, 2009), Verena Stefan's Fremdschläfer (Alien sleeper, 2007), and Wolfgang Herrndorf's Arbeit und Struktur (Work and structure, 2010–2013), and she convincingly explains her selection by the different range of genres and narrative forms of these texts. These specific narrative forms and aesthetic strategies are the main objectives of her study, and they bring to light the crucial themes of illness, disability, and dying as they appear as lived experiences. In her introduction, Schmidt points out the difficulty of differentiating between illness and disability. She relies on insights from the field of disability [End Page 508] studies, and elucidates how readers often adopt a discriminatory attitude toward narrative on disability (and illness), considering it as deviating from the norm, which seems to be "ablebodiedness." Thus, Schmidt's approach is very much grounded in challenging normative values inadequately based on binary thinking, such as healthy vs. ill and disabled, external vs. internal, or heterosexual vs. homosexual/lesbian in Stefan's Fremdschläfer, and "Selbstbild" (self-image) vs. "Fremdbild" (externally determined image) in Kathrin Schmidt's Du stirbst nicht (71). Additionally, she emphasizes her goal of highlighting the intricate relationship between the autobiographical and the (auto)fictional, a highly contested, but necessary contemporary debate, to which she contributes with a meticulous discussion of her exemplary texts. Her decision not to proceed chronologically in her analysis of the four texts is clear because of her focus on exploring and theorizing "the relation of the portrayal of illness to the author's own life experience" (33). Thus, her first chapter addresses the boundaries between fact and fiction in Roche's trauma narrative Schossgebete, and she speaks convincingly of an "aesthetics of disgust" (vividly represented in bodily descriptions) that Roche employs to deal with the protagonist's traumatic experiences (34). Schmidt's careful close reading and insightful references to Roche's own life experiences make evident the thin line between the protagonist's and the author's personal experiences. According to Schmidt, this autofictional form lends itself best to the retelling of traumatic experience by the vulnerable subject (author/protagonist). Here one could critically add that clearly identifiable autobiographies enable and empower their authors to narrate their traumata. Analyzing the "autobiographical novel" Du stirbst nicht (66), Nina Schmidt returns to the concept of the stare from disability studies to develop her argument of the successful restoration of the protagonist's self-image (after a brain hemorrhage): because of her illness experience she has become a "staree" (72), but at the same time she begins to stare (back) and recognizes the illusory notion of normality and ablebodiedness. Nina Schmidt establishes an intriguing connection between the protagonist...