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This chapter examines the works of Hans-Ulrich Treichel, Norbert Gstrein, Bernhard Schlink, W. G. Sebald, and Katharina Hacker. These writers have a broader notion of Germany's “recent past”, which includes aspects of the period between 1933 and 1945 that were relatively neglected in previous decades: the plight of the German civil population during the massive air raids on German cities, the Vertreibung (the immense expulsion and flight of Germans from Eastern Europe toward the end of the Second World War), and Germany's partition and the forty years of socialist dictatorship. Addressing Nazism in the decades following 1989 has also meant engaging with the more immediate past, with events following the Cold War such as the 1991 Gulf War and the aftermath of 9/11.

This chapter examines the works of Günter Grass to address the following questions: How did new vocabularies to describe and address the German past emerge in the postwar era? To what extent did writers introduce novel ways to see what had occurred during and subsequent to the Nazi era that allowed their readers to glimpse the shadow that futurity casts on the German present? How did fiction indicate the possibility of prospection, self-creation, and the formation of a new community? It argues that more effectively than any other writer of the postwar era, Grass introduced a new vocabulary that helped shape a German democratic and humanistic public discourse.

This chapter explores Franz Kafka's complex relation to Czech literature in terms of his ambivalent nostalgia for his father's maternal language and culture, and his skeptical alienation from all constructions of identity. This paradoxical movement between belonging and disavowal is manifested in Kafka's transformation of key works of Czech literature from the redemptive articulation of the writer's role as the conscience of the national collective to an antiredemptive reinvention of the writer as a universal figure liberated from all forms of ethnic and religious affiliation. A corollary of Kafka's need for anonymity is the gradual effacement of Prague as a recognizable setting of his stories and novels. Only by erasing all topographical references to the city of his birth could Kafka achieve his desired goal as the universal chronicler of modern urban life. The chapter also examines the equally complex and ambivalent reception of Kafka's works in postwar Czech literature.

This chapter introduces a core group of German writers addressing superstition in the fifteenth century and explores the particular contexts in which they wrote. It briefly recounts the commonalities they shared with earlier authorities and how they perpetuated many well-established critiques, before examining new points of emphasis found in their works. These men were not deliberate innovators, yet their increased engagement, at a practical level, with common superstitions required them to focus to a considerable degree on elements of lay religiosity and the murky, troublesome “twilight zone” in which the practical use of prayers, blessings, and appropriated sacramental items might signal either admirable faith or damnable superstition.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, continental writing was more available to British readers than ever, in large part because of the translations and reviews made available in the periodical press. Moreover, as Alessa Johns argues, Revolutionary furore meant an increased openness to German literary work as opposed to French. With particular attention to the work of Anna Karsch, Sophie von La Roche, Benedikte Naubert, Johanna Schopenhauer and Margarete Klopstock this chapter tracks the presence of a dozen German women authors through popular and influential periodicals such as the Annual Register (1758–present), the Gentleman’s Magazine (1731–1922), the Scots Magazine (1739–1826), and the Court Miscellany; or, Gentleman’s and Lady’s New Magazine (1766–71). Far from what one might expect, German women writers were less associated with sensibility or the Gothic; rather they are held up as exemplary, and used to stress transnational identification, especially along gendered lines.

This chapter jumps to the turn of the century, when the rise of racial antisemitism fostered a new Jewish self-awareness and rendered “interracial” love and marriage central to the public debates about German Jewish identity. It analyzes three German Jewish writers of different and paradigmatic political orientations, who used love stories to diagnose the reasons for the faltering of emancipation: the assimilationist Ludwig Jacobowski, the Zionist Max Nordau, and the mainstream liberal Georg Hermann. Their works, including Jacobowski's Werther the Jew (1892), Nordau's Doctor Kohn (1899), and Hermann's Jettchen Gebert (1906), show how love stories potentially escape the ideological constraints of increasingly racialized models of identity. On the one hand, the love plot affords an opportunity to expose the obstacles encountered by Jews seeking integration in times of rising antisemitism. On the other hand, the open endings of most love stories and the ambiguous use of racial language allow the authors to eschew a final verdict on the success or failure of integration. The chapter argues that the love plot generates a host of equivocations between the social and the biological, and the particular and the universal, creating a metaphorical surplus that opens up venues to rethink the project of Jewish emancipation and assimilation.

Like the myth of Libuše, the legend of the golem does not constitute one univocal text but resembles a palimpsest of layers. The story of the chief rabbi of Prague who invents a man of clay has inspired endless versions by many writers and filmmakers, yet it was only in the modern period that the legend assumed its present familiar form. Some early versions were not even set in Prague at all. This chapter explores the correlation between the mutating legend of the golem and the partial demolition of the ancient Jewish district in the late 1890s. Whereas Jewish writers such as Yudl Rosenberg strove to efface the historical association of the ghetto with prostitution by reinventing the golem as an unsullied hero who defends the Jews against the blood libel, the end-of-the-century generation of Prague-German writers, such as Gustav Meyrink and Paul Leppin, remained nostalgic for the vanished Judenstadt and its reputation for decay, degeneration, and prostitution.

This chapter examines the works of Alexander Kluge. Kluge's themes and figurative choices help broaden our view of German history. His literature and his cinematic and television work goes beyond the confines of his nation's past, embracing modernity in all its iterations. His interest lies in what he views as human “orientation” in light of past and possible future man-made catastrophes: his work asks how a literary and theoretical investigation of modernity may yield different modes of social and economic organization.

This chapter describes the ginkgo, a tree whose leaf German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe gave to Marianne Willemer in September 1815 as a symbol of his loving affection. Some research shows that the ginkgo may be the oldest tree on our planet. It has fan-shaped leaves, is pest resistant, and is undemanding with respect to climate. Botanically, is cannot be classified because it is neither coniferous nor deciduous, although it represents a single family with many varieties of fossil. The chapter suggests that the ginkgo has become a new symbol of universal significance, a symbol of the invincibility of hope in our time.