THE ESSAYS IN THIS VOLUME show the different ways in which cultural production in Germany and Austria engages with contemporary politics. In their discussions of literature, film, theater, and art, they consider a number of interrelated topoi that are both political and subject to politicization: identity, memory, language, nationalism, Europe, transculturalism, globalization, and migration. They highlight how the relationship between culture and politics is marked by the movements and tensions between the national and the European, the local and the global, that define Germany and Austria today. While the eurozone crisis and Brexit have polarized opinion on the European Union and soured relations between European neighbors, both the belief in and abandonment of the European project as postwar legacy are shaped as much by events triggered beyond as within EU borders. The so-called migrant crisis that began in 2015 (the focus of two of the chapters in this volume) has provoked significant political change and division in Germany and Austria. This humanitarian crisis, the debates surrounding it, and the attendant polarization of political positions in both countries have all left their mark on cultural production, whose scope, influences, and reach extend consequently beyond a national paradigm.

Politics and Culture in the Berlin Republic

The significance of transnational events and developments for German identity that is so striking today marks a shift from the 1990s, when, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the focus was on the emerging, unified, “normalized” nation. The founding of the Berlin Republic also brought with it a profound challenge to the relationship between culture and politics that questioned the relevance of both East and West German legacies of political authorship across media. In 1990, a heated debate broke out in the cultural pages of leading German newspapers that came to be known as the Literaturstreit (literary feud) and criticized the political commitment that was typical of German authors on both sides of the Wall. Influenced by the Gruppe 47 and the events of 1968, literature in West Germany had been resolutely “engaged” in its antifascism. For some, however, the “political contentiousness” of writers in the Federal Republic, to quote Stephen Brockmann, had resulted in a “Gesinnungsästhetik” (aesthetics of political conviction) that rendered literature staid.

The “Migrant” Writer, German “Provincialism,” and the World

THE QUESTION OF WHERE German is in the world is a particularly intriguing one when taking a closer look at German-language writing by authors whose mother tongue is not German and who came to Germany as migrants. Their entry into the German literary canon in the past twenty years or so also sheds a revealing light on the transformations German literature has undergone, and the challenges these pose, due to the global migratory flows of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries and the transnationalism that, partly as a result of this migration, has simultaneously triggered redefinitions as well as redrawings of national and cultural borders as the world becomes increasingly accessible. In the context of this chapter, transnationalism is tied to “our own moment, marked by the escalation of migration and the amplification of technological, financial, and commercial interdependence between nations.” It is precisely this interdependence—the reciprocity between as well as among nations and, on a smaller scale, regions, based on the movements of people and goods, but also of ideas and cultures—that is significant for my understanding of transnationalism here.

Contrary to this idea of transnationalism based on reciprocity, German- language “migrant” writers have often been regarded as a positive, if somewhat one-way, contribution to German literature that spices up the German literary scene, enriches the German language, and opens German up to the world in a way that nonminority writers are perceived to be less likely to do. Despite the clear recognition that migrant writers contribute to German literature rather than to a category of their own, which marks a shift between the 1980s and its Gastarbeiterliteratur (guestworker literature) and the present day with prize-winning novels such as Melinda Nadj Abonji's Tauben fliegen auf (Fly Away, Pigeon), winner of the German Book Prize in 2010, they still teeter on the brink of being “ghettoize[d],” of not being read for the literary value of their works but for their “exotic” biographies that supposedly highlight the worldliness of German literature.

aša Stanišić is a particularly interesting writer in this context. Born in 1978 in Višegrad, Bosnia, Stanišić fled to Germany with his family shortly after the outbreak of the Bosnian War (1992–95).

Given the demographic development of today's Western societies, both individuals and societies are facing ethical questions of how to deal with aging people in public as well as in private spheres. The urgency of the subject manifests itself not only in the growth of relevant academic research and self-help literature, but also in an increasing number of literary explorations of what has been a literary subject since antiquity. This chapter explores ethical problems of age and aging in Annette Pehnt's novel Haus der Schildkröten (2006), a text that forms an important contribution to these ongoing investigations. pehnt's novel deals with conflicts that arise in the lives of two middle-aged characters whose parents live in a nursing home, and in the lives of the elderly inhabitants and their professional caregivers. A focus on the relationships between these characters inevitably involves a discussion of ethics. “Ethics” here designates a system of specific mutual demands concerning the behavior of people toward themselves and others.

In our essay we shall ask, first, what conflicts arise in the novel and what the characters think is morally right. In the cases at hand, deciding what is morally right is no easy matter; for instance, there are tensions between self-fulfillment and responsibilities toward relatives. There is also the basic problem of figuring out what is right for the other person's sake, given that, owing to dementia or other age-related illnesses, this person is no longer capable of expressing her wishes. Second, we shall examine other narrative strategies that shape the ethical discourse of the novel.

“Memory contests” are a defining feature of contemporary German cultural and political life. As Anne Fuchs and Mary Cosgrove explain, the term denotes “highly dynamic public engagements with the past,” which in the German context constitutes “hotly contested territory.” While the now well-established notion was developed in response to framings of the national socialist past, it can also be applied to ongoing attempts to articulate and account for the east German experience. This chapter engages in such an application, with the complementary aim of bringing to light the ethical implications of these memory contests. “ethics,” here, connotes a relationship of obligation to “the other.” The chapter asks: what is at stake, ethically, in writings of the GDR past? How do such writings fit into, or indeed challenge, the “continuing struggle to imagine Germany as a unified, democratic, and capitalist country”? And what do they tell us more broadly about the relationship between ethics and memory?

This project involves an examination of four recent German novels in which the memory of life in the GDR plays an important role: Julia Schoch's Mit der Geschwindigkeit des Sommers (2009), Stefan Moster's Die Unmöglichkeit des vierhändigen Spiels (2009), Antje Rávic Strubel's Sturz der Tage in die Nacht (2011), and Judith Schalanksy's Der Hals der Giraffe (2011). In all of these works, the memory of the GDR is mediated and explored through the depiction of difficult, even taboo, familial or quasi-familial relationships. In all the texts, shame—“an intense and painful sensation that is bound up with how the self feels about itself”— features significantly.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, there is a pressing need to engage critically with the way human beings belong to the material world. Under the impact of globalization and digital technologies, ethical dilemmas posed by materiality are changing and evolving rapidly. In ecological terms, for example, the need for sustain-ability, which requires the reduction of consumption by a wealthy minority and the simultaneous decoupling of development from resource use, presents challenges of unprecedented scale and urgency. On a social level, meanwhile, the disconnect between the global impact of consumption and local, lived practice is felt particularly keenly in our daily interactions with things. While in the developing world many do not have the material resources to sustain life itself, affluent consumers in wealthy economies are frustrated by choice and by the need to navigate competing discourses of sustainability in order to make their purchases in an ethical way. At the same time, the rapid development of information technologies has profoundly unsettled our psychological and physiological relationships with materiality, prompting anxious questions about embodiment and disembodiment, such as “how can we be present yet also absent?” and “what is a self if it is not in a body?” One example of the way in which such concerns coalesce is the current media and scientific interest in the phenomenon of hoarding, which appears to “speak to and about our moment.”