Writing the new Berlin : the German capital in post-wall literature

Author(s)

    • Gerstenberger, Katharina

Bibliographic Information

Writing the new Berlin : the German capital in post-wall literature

Katharina Gerstenberger

(Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture / edited by James Hardin)

Camden House, 2008

  • : hardcover

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Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. [177]-198) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

The wall was still coming down when critics began to call for the great Berlin novel that could explain what was happening to Germany and the Germans. Such a novel never appeared. Instead, writers have created a patchwork imaginary -- in the form of about 300 works of fiction set in Berlin -- of a city and a nation whose identity collapsed virtually overnight. Contributors to this literary collage include established writers like Peter Schneider and Christa Wolf, young authors like Tanja Duckers and Ingo Schramm, German-Turkish authors Zafer Senocak and Yade Kara, and the Austrians Kathrin Roeggla and Marlene Streeruwitz. The non-arrival of the great Berlin novel marks the reorientation in German culture and literature that is the focus of this study: the experience of unification was too diverse, too postmodern, too influenced by global developments to be captured by one novel. Berlin literature of the postunification decade is marked by ambiguity: change is linked to questions of historical continuity; postmodern simulation finds its counterpart in a quest for authenticity; and the assimilation of Germanness into European and global contexts is both liberation and loss. This book pursues a nuanced understanding of the search for new ways to tell the story of Germany's past and of its importance for the formation of a new German identity. Katharina Gerstenberger is Associate Professor of German at the University of Cincinnati.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Newness and its Discontents: Berlin Literature in the 1990s and Beyond Erotic Sites: Sexual Topographies after the Wall Bodies and Borders: The Monsters of Berlin Multicultural Germans and Jews of Many Cultures: Imagining "Jewish Berlin" Goodbye to East Berlin Looking for Perspectives: The Construction at Potsdamer Platz Conclusion Bibliography Index

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