TRANSNATIONALISM IS “not new and has been around since ancient times,” Michael Howard reminds us. Yet in the contemporary era the “ties, interactions, exchange and mobility” that connect across and between nations, Steven Vertovec argues, “function intensively and in real time while being spread throughout the world.” Economic globalization, instantaneous electronic media, and the movement of millions around the globe today appear to be rendering national borders—and the cultures, polities, and frameworks of understanding that they are imagined to contain—more porous than ever before.

Transnationalism—understood in this volume as a plurality of intersecting, and crosscutting flows of products, ideas, and people back and forth over borders—presents a number of challenges to scholars working in the humanities and social sciences. How are they to conceptualize transnationalism beyond the conventional focus on the experience of those “minority” individuals or groups who span two or more cultures as migrants, refugees, or exiles? That is, how can they move beyond a focus on diasporic formations, hybridity, or notions of center and periphery in order to theorize how contemporary transnationalism's characteristic multidirectionality and saturation of all aspects of everyday life, from consumption to culture, impacts everyone, whether “settled” residents of a given national space or transient “guests”? How can they best conceptualize the nation's continued salience—the persistence of the nation in transnationalism—for its citizens, and for those it refuses to accept as such? And how are they to rethink the nation's continued centrality to persistent global imbalances in economic, geopolitical, and military power, even as transnationalism appears to weaken that nation's claim to be sovereign?

For literary scholars, specifically, the reality of contemporary transnationalism prompts us to think more closely about the ways fiction written in a particular time and in a particular place—in the context of this volume, in the German-speaking countries—connects to, circulates through, and is rechanneled by global patternings and global debates on identity, mobility, hospitality, universalism, self-forming, and cosmopolitanism.

WHEN EXPLORING THE EFFECTS that transnationalism has on contemporary societies, cultures, and economies, on different lifestyles and individual biographies, and more specifically—as is the objective of this volume—when exploring the ramifications of transnationalism within contemporary literature, it is necessary to not only look at each of those areas separately but also inspect their interdependency and reciprocal impact. Accordingly, this chapter is devoted to a definition of contemporary German literature in the twenty-first century that links an investigation of transnationalism to the question of how daily life experience and literature actively shape each other. Transnationalism in this context is understood as the local, national, cultural, and economic, but also biographical manifestations of globalization in everyday life. It will be investigated particularly with regard to the fact that writing in Germany has increasingly become transnational over the last two decades.

As a first step, this chapter will refine the often used but not precisely defined term “contemporary literature” in order to identify specific features and the changing conditions of literature in times of globalization. The chapter further establishes a theoretical basis that identifies transnationalism not solely as a theme but as a literary concept that can fruitfully be connected with a reconceptualization of world literature as a phenomenon of literary mobility. Fictional works by German authors of different national and transnational backgrounds will be used as examples to demonstrate that transnationalism builds a significant pillar in contemporary German literature and redefines it in various ways. The textual examples examined in this context are Ilija Trojanow's Der Weltensammler (The Collector of Worlds, 2006), Daniel Kehlmann's Die Vermessung der Welt (Measuring the World, 2005), Christian Kracht's Imperium (Empire, 2012), Felicitas Hoppe's Hoppe (2012), and Dan Vyleta's crime fiction Pavel & I (2008), The Quiet Twin (2011), and The Crooked Maid (2013). Within the examination of these texts special attention will be paid to the correlation between language and national identity or affiliation, physical and intellectual mobility, and the conditions under which literature travels the world. This will eventually lead us to ask how national, transnational, and world literature are connected with each other and how literature mirrors those changes that are currently happening in our society.

IN OCTOBER 2013, the editors of this volume invited writer Ilija Trojanow to participate in a seminar on “Transnationalism” for the Thirty-Seventh Annual Conference of the German Studies Association in Denver, Colorado. Denied permission to enter the United States, however, Trojanow was prevented from boarding his plane in Brazil. He participated in the seminar via Skype, and the planned performance based on his novel EisTau (Melting Ice, 2012) for the GSA luncheon was transformed into a discussion on the subject of surveillance in a digital age. The following interview does not explicitly engage with this event, though it remains as backdrop to the conversation.

EDITORS: You are considered a transnational author and someone who is an expert and practitioner of transnationalism. From your perspective and experience, how would you describe or define “transnationalism,” as a life experience, a mode of living and with regard to literature? That is, what is “transnational literature” for you?

TROJANOW: Well, it's difficult for me to answer because until the day I received your invitation, I’ve never used that word myself, and I’ve never positioned myself within this semantic framework. So this was a bit new to me. The reason I didn't do it is that “nationality” doesn't seem to figure in my kind of biographical conditioning. Right from the beginning, when we fled Bulgaria, there was always a very diverse context, starting with the refugee camps, where you have a multitude of different refugees, growing up in Kenya where you have a multilingual setting (I grew up speaking four languages) and many people from international or multinational backgrounds. So it was more of an education in cosmopolitanism, looking back on it, than in transnationalism. The only time I actually thought of myself in regards to any kind of national identity was when my father insisted that we apply for German citizenship. It was one of the weirdest conversations I’ve ever had because in those days there was no test. You just had to fill out a form and one of the questions was “What is your hobby?” and I wrote down “literature.” The bureaucrat who was screening me looked up from his form and said, “Ah, literature! So, so.