“Mrs. Ruete, the Berlin-based sister of the Sultan of Zanzibar, will soon publish a two-volume work entitled ‘Memoirs of an Arabian Princess,’ which is said to contain both personal experiences and particularly impressive descriptions of Mohammedan [sic] culture in East Africa” states a notice in a German illustrated magazine of April 1886, an example of the publicity preceding the publication of Emily Ruete's autobiography Memoiren einer arabischen Prinzessin (Memoirs of an Arabian Princess) that same year. The memoirs, written in German, primarily describe the childhood and young adulthood of their author, who was born Sayyida Salme, daughter of the sultan of Oman and Zanzibar, near Zanzibar Town in 1844, and who lived in Zanzibar until the age of 22, when she left the island after her relationship with her German neighbor was discovered. It is widely acknowledged as the oldest published autobiography of an Arab woman in existence. The memoirs, extending from a personal life to “a meditation about the self” in history and culture, also describe episodes from Ruete's later life, such as her journey to Zanzibar in 1885, where she and the inheritance she hoped to claim were used as a bargaining instrument, playing a central role in German colonial ambitions in East Africa. As the notice in the illustrated magazine heralds, they additionally discuss important aspects of Muslim and East African culture for her German readership, such as “The Status of Women in the Orient,” “The Fasting Period,” and “Slavery.” “I don't want to write a scholarly book,” writes Ruete, “I just want to try to make it possible for the European reader to have a correct understanding of the more important views and customs of the Orient.”

Before the publication of Ruete's memoirs, the Ruete's relationship and subsequent perceived flight from Zanzibar had proven enticing fodder for asides in the narratives of explorers and for articles in the illustrated magazines of the day. These imaginative retellings of this episode in Ruete's life read like a “fairytale from the Thousand and One Nights made real” and have arguably provoked the distinctive sober language and style of the memoirs themselves, termed “ethnographic” by Annegret Nippa, editor of the contemporary modernized and somewhat abridged German version of the memoirs.

Places

LIKE AGE-OLD Celtic fairy trails and charged with shimmering tension, streets flow through the city, the country, and the world. Were I to step out the door now, put my foot on one of those currents rushing past my house, and let myself drift like a raft, maybe I would pop up again unexpectedly in the place that, many years ago, discarded me easily, quietly, and efficiently, as if it had digested me. That time, it retched out my dried-out, scrappy residue into the streets of the air, wholly unmoved by the question of where they might take me. That was long before it would have granted me leave to stroll in its alleys, to explore its sky, or to touch its people.

There were some things I collected there all the same: by the side of the road, for the few steps that the old place let me linger in it. A mulberry tree, for example, and snow-decked midsummer peaks, close by, far away, at the window of a kitchen. Heat shimmers over the steaming ground and lush, cotton-wool-cloudlike cherry blossom. A cicada song too, and the scent of jasmine. The soundscape of words that no one understands anymore at this end of the street. The hurried, amusedcheerful jump from one language to the next, to the next, to the next, and back again. As if words were roses, heavy with pollen, and speakers nothing more than bees.

Now eager to learn, I won the new place street by street. The collecting was easier this time, because I was already practiced. The objects were harder: Cobble Stone Street, for example, and rain-heavy midsummer clouds, close by, close by, at the window of every kitchen. Heat shimmers over the tiled stove and bell-clear, chiming Sunday music. A blackbird song (that was quite easy) and a scent of wood stain on picket fences. Only words were hard to come by. They didn't grow on stems here, nor on trees, bushes, or shrubs. I hummed and hummed in the old way, but the answer was always silence. So I built myself a boat, featherlight. Made shoes out of bell-chiming and out of mountain snow. In my bag I carried cherry blossom and blackbird song, and the mulberry tree was my staff.

THERE IS “NO CRITICAL CONSENSUS” on where the shortest form of the short story comes from, no real agreement on its many possible names, and an endless debate on its length. “How short can a story be before it degenerates into something else?” asks Michael Basseler, while William Nelles plumps for 700 words as an upper limit; microfiction as a whole seems generally considered to be any piece of writing shorter than 1000 words. Nothing about the form is set in stone. Whatever the definition, however, Sudabeh Mohafez's self-imposed rules, above, as they appear on her prize-winning literary blog “zehn zeilen” (ten lines), where she writes as eukapirates under the heading “was die piratin hiertut” (what the pirate's doing here), situate her clearly within this loose category of microfiction.

The short-short is not a new form. While it may be particularly popular in and well suited to the twenty-first century, its “generic slipperiness” is evident from the number of speculated antecedents. Hailing from “Japan, China, Latin America … Europe” and beyond, these possible generators of short-shorts include parables or fables, Denkbilder (“thought images”), sonnets or ghazals,and haibun, a short form of Japanese writing related to haiku—a form at which Sudabeh Mohafez has also tried her hand; they could even be miniatures, both in the sense of the painting traditions capturing grand narratives within a single small image, and the modernist prose miniatures of which Andreas Huyssen writes, which encapsulate lightning images and movement in photographic style. Both in the German-language context and internationally, Kafka is almost omnipresent as a touchstone, evoked by nearly every critical discussion of short-shorts. For Nelles, “two thirds” of Kafka's stories published during his lifetime qualify as microfictions.

SINCE THE 1990s, the short story has reemerged in the German-speaking world as a vibrant literary genre, serving as a medium for both literary experimentation and popular writing. In the twenty-first century this boom has continued, with authors like Judith Hermann and Peter Stamm making a significant impact on German-language literary culture and, in translation, on literary culture in the UK and USA. Despite the wealth of short-story publications across different media and from a wide range of authors, there is a relative dearth of critical work focusing on the shortstory form as such. Together, the contributions to this volume offer an analysis of the variety of German-language short-story writing in the twenty-first century, and they aim to establish a framework for further research into individual authors and into important themes and formal concerns. The introduction makes the case for a flexible and responsive approach to the concerns raised by individual authors, stories, and collections, and provides an overview of the volume. In a series of themed and author-focused chapters, the volume offers an exploration of important developments and trends in the German-language short story today.

This volume took its initial cue from an earlier volume on contemporary literature edited by Lyn Marven and Stuart Taberner, Emerging German-Language Novelists of the Twenty-First Century. As Marven suggests in the Introduction to the earlier volume, ultracontemporary literature poses difficulties for researchers not only in the practicalities of seeking out and discovering new publications—arguably intensified rather than made easier by the publishing proliferation of the digital age—but also in the task of assessing the literary qualities of the texts in what may be a critical vacuum. Such “unknown and untested” texts force us to confront our own critical expectations and judgment: what makes a text worthy of study and analysis is not in the end a matter of “quality” as such, whatever that may mean to each one of us or to the reading public at large, but rather its own intrinsic interest. The sheer variety and versatility of short fiction forms mean each text must necessarily define its own genre on its own terms.

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.”

Since the 2010 publication of Thilo Sarrazin's controversial bestseller Deutschland schafft sich ab, there has been renewed debate in Germany over the country's cultural identity and the success of policies that promote multiculturalism. Central to these debates has been the question of the integration and assimilation of Germany's large and growing Muslim population. The role and place of Islam in contemporary German society has increasingly been both a source of controversy and an impetus for dialogue about religious freedom and tolerance. The issue of whether or not Islam is compatible with european values is explored in greater depth in recent works by two of Germany's leading Muslim writers and intellectuals, Zafer Šenocak's Deutschland: Eine Aufklärungsschrift (2011) and Navid Kermani's Wer ist wir? Deutschland und seine Muslime (2010). While Şenocak was born in 1961 in Turkey and moved to Germany as a child, Kermani was born in 1967 in Germany to Iranian parents. Both are self-identified Muslims who write about their experiences as German Muslims and position themselves as writer-intellectuals who embrace multiple identities and thus straddle both the eastern and Western worlds. An analysis of their works and their relationship to European culture, including the enlightenment, is fruitful in helping bridge the growing gap between eastern and Western cultural traditions and values and in addressing the question of the possibility of multicultural societies in Western Europe.

The Ethical Turn

As Thomas Elsaesser has argued recently, European cinema since the end of the Cold War foregrounds ethical, rather than directly political, concerns. For Elsaesser, who refers to a body of work that ranges from Fatih Akin to Michael Winterbottom, from Dogville to the Dardennes Brothers, this is a cinema that largely foregoes offering political solutions to the tensions its central characters experience. Even on the occasions when its focus expands beyond the personal narratives of the protagonists, when its stories address “spaces to be redistributed, and power-relations to be re-negotiated,” it remains, for Elsaesser, primarily an ethical rather than a political cinema. Elsaesser argues that many recent films address a radical encounter with the other, an event that brings with it the risks of violence and of a process of destabilization, yet also opens up the possibility of a genuinely new social awareness.

Elsaesser's account of contemporary cinema rests on categories proposed by the French philosopher Jacques Rancière. Rancière's work has been taken up recently across a number of disciplines, from political philosophy to literary and film studies. Rancière's work is of particular significance for an analysis of the contested areas of contemporary thought where questions of politics, ethics, and aesthetics merge.

The chapter “Grosse Wandelungen” in nineteenth-century Arab German writer Emily Ruete's Memoiren einer arabischen Prinzessin (1886) devotes three skeletal paragraphs to a narration of the author's relationship with a Hamburg trader and her departure for Germany, staged as a direct antidote to the “unrichtige[n] Darstellungen” at that time circulating in the German public realm that depicted these events as a grand narrative with a plot seemingly inspired by Mozart's Entführung aus dem Serail. Centering on the notion of contested representation raised by Ruete in the chapter in question, my essay will go on to explore, under the same terms, three contemporary engagements with this episode that use Ruete's narrative as source material— Tink Diaz's documentary film Die Prinzessin von Sansibar (2007), Hans Christoph Buch's novel Sansibar Blues (2008), and Nicole C. Vosseler's historical romance Sterne über Sansibar (2010). Employing a Deleuzian reading of ethics and representation, which broadly understands an ethical encounter as experiencing rather than interpreting the other's narrative, I will show how all three, precisely in their filling in the skeletal frame, work to thwart the opportunities for the ethical reading that Ruete's narrative itself presents, instead reframing her account in terms of existing narratives by and about young Muslim women.

Emily Ruete (1844–1924), born Sayyida Salme, daughter of the Sultan of Oman and Zanzibar, published her memoirs—considered the earliest surviving autobiography by an Arab woman—in Berlin in 1886. Ruete spent her childhood and young adulthood in several residences around the island of Zanzibar, and included a detailed account of this period of her life in her memoirs. In her early twenties she bought a house in Zanzibar Town, and it was there that she later became acquainted with her neighbor, a German trader named Heinrich Ruete, and the couple fell in love. In 1866 she left Zanzibar for Aden after becoming pregnant with Heinrich Ruete’s child, and he rejoined her the following year, having remained on the island to wind up his business affairs.

Ethics, Postmodernism, and the “Ethical Turn”

Ethics, or moral philosophy, involves the study of morality, and morality concerns beliefs about right and wrong behaviors and good and bad persons or character. As a branch of thought, ethics may seek to prescribe, describe, apply, or theorize moral actions and approaches. Ethical reflections appear not only in explicitly philosophical texts, but also in literary narrative and in films, among other kinds of discourse, and there are longstanding discussions about the nature and value of such nonphilosophical investigations and representations. This volume, the seventh Edinburgh German Yearbook, offers a contribution to such discussions. It brings together explorations of the ethical approaches apparent in a wide range of literary and filmic texts that have emerged in the contemporary German-language context. The essays that feature here vary in their methods and theoretical underpinnings, but there are a number of concerns that run through the collection: the relationship between self and other; the connection between particular and general; the personal and political consequences of individuals' actions; and the potential, and danger, of representation itself. The volume thus reflects on and contributes to debates about a highly topical, widely experienced contemporary crisis of values. Christopher Bennett argues, “There is […] reason to think that we have a particular need for ethics because of the kind of society we live in. […] [Our] society seems […] to be characterised by moral disagreement, and by our being able to choose between a variety of ways of life, and a variety of belief systems”; thus, “we exist in a state of moral uncertainty.” Dissent and relativism are indeed arguably hallmarks of our age.

Postmodernism has often been associated with the demise of the ethical. Conversely, the so-called “ethical turn” in contemporary literature means that literary texts are more inclined than ever to engage in ethical dialogue concerning questions of how we act toward one another. Given that encounters between human beings are contingent upon particular social and historical contexts, literature, which typically involves fictional characters interacting with each other in concrete settings, and so depicts specific actions and situations, is arguably well placed to chart a new, emerging form of postmodern ethics, one that rejects universalism and posits specificity as key to ethical behavior.

in this essay, I explore how two contemporary German-language novels negotiate particular encounters between characters: Robert Schneider's Die Luftgängerin (1998) and Sybille Berg's Vielen Dank für das Leben (2012). In spite of the fact that the novels were published fourteen years apart, the narratives' protagonists, maudi and toto respectively, have much in common. Both are intersexed; that is, their bodies exhibit what are socially read as female and male sexual characteristics. Medically speaking Toto is born with ambiguous genitalia (DL 15), whereas maudi's outwardly female appearance hides her non-descended testicles and XY chromosomes (LG 157). Yet in stark contrast to other contemporary literary texts that tell the life stories of intersexed characters and mainly focus on the protagonists'; desperate search for a gendered identity, these diagnoses are of no importance for Maudi and Toto.

WINNER OF THE GERMAN BOOK PRIZE 2004 for most successful debut novel for Selam Berlin (2003), which also earned her the 2004 Adelbert-von-Chamisso Förderpreis (promotional prize), Yadé Kara is a commercially successful Turkish-German writer. Kara, a “staunch West Berliner,” who had a diverse career as a journalist, actress, teacher and manager in four metropolises before becoming a writer, was born in Çayırlı, eastern Anatolia, in 1965 and moved to Germany with her parents as a child. In her thoughtful and at times critical Chamisso Prize acceptance speech, she compares her coming to Germany and her identity as a Berliner to Adelbert von Chamisso’s circumstances, writing:

Kara belongs to the “second generation” of Turkish-German women writers, and her work has enjoyed popular success while developing a distinctive style that sets her apart from many of her contemporaries, not least in the work’s narration through a male protagonist. I will argue that despite these differences, however, her work, and in particular her second novel, Cafe Cyprus (2008), forms part of a new trend of (female) Turkish-German writers whose texts are reterritorialized on ideological concepts such as religion, family, and nation. While the majority of these authors focus on peppy, entertaining, yet ultimately orientalizing narratives of “harmless” Turkish-German family lives, for Yadé Kara reterritorialization takes the form of a very concrete notion of identity politics, mouthed by characters in her work, and jarring in the mouth of the supposedly apolitical narrator Hasan, who in Selam Berlin seemed more inclined toward description than programmatic statement. This reterritorialization is even more developed in Cafe Cyprus, set in London in the early 1990s, than in Selam Berlin, set in Berlin between the fall of the Wall and reunification; Cafe Cyprus thus presents an interesting response to citizenship debates in early twenty-first-century Germany.

IN THIS CHAPTER I WILL CONSIDER the encounter with Islam through the medium of language in literary texts by the contemporary Turkish-German writer Emine Sevgi Özdamar and the late nineteenth-century Arab-German writer Emily Ruete. The contexts in which the two women write are of course vastly different. Özdamar's short story “Großvater Zunge” and her novel Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei hat zwei Türen aus einer kam ich rein aus der anderen ging ich raus—her texts that engage most directly with Islam—were published in 1990 and 1992 respectively, at which time Turks and other ethnic minorities were already a substantial presence in Germany. In contrast Emily Ruete's Memoiren einer arabischen Prinzessin (now titled Leben im Sultanspalast) was published in 1886, while her text Briefe nach der Heimat, probably written in the 1880s, came to light after her death in 1924 but was first published in German only in 1999: she belongs far more to the European era of colonization, Orientalism, and the scramble for Africa. And yet Özdamar and Ruete share much in the critical “Islamic” encounters with German and Germany that they produce. This is demonstrated not least by the fact that there was support for publication of Ruete's Briefe in 1999 and that her Sultanspalast has recently been republished. As Fedwa Malti-Douglas observes, “her textual journey is more than simply a set of memoiristic … flourishes that keep the reader's feet firmly planted in the nineteenth century.”