THE OPENING CHAPTER OF THE present volume began by proclaiming the heterogeneity of post-unification German writing. In this first chapter and in the chapters that follow, I hope to have given something of the flavor of this contemporary diversity in a series of close readings of individual novels and allusions to further works by authors from east and west and of the older, middle, and younger generations.

The diversity of recent German fiction has to do, in part, with changed market conditions and changed audience expectations. Indeed, the publishing environment in which German authors operate, the kinds of books that are in demand and the way they are promoted, is itself a major theme of much recent writing. Some authors reject what they see as the increasing conformity of German literature with international trends and attempt to return to “German” forms; some attempt to inflect global trends with a “local” sensibility, whereas others, at first glance, at least, seem to accept a dominant international “pop” culture. In many cases, evidently, an engagement with what at first appear to be “merely” aesthetic questions implies an engagement with the broader question of the kind of “normality” that is being established in the new Berlin Republic as a whole. Whether to seek inspiration in “German” traditions cleansed of their association with the horrors of Nazism, or in international trends adapted to German circumstances, or in what superficially appears to be the liberating ahistoricity of the globalized consumer culture — these are the possibilities that define contemporary German society as much as contemporary German literature.