This book offers the first full-length study of W. G. Sebald and Christoph Ransmayr and their complicated relation to the traumatic traces of National Socialism. It examines the different ways in which the traces of a traumatic past mark their narratives.

Examines the heightened role of politics in contemporary German and Austrian cultural productions and institutions and what it means for German Studies. As debates about Europe, migration, resurgent nationalism, and neoliberalism intensify in Germany and Austria, politics has gained particular prominence in cultural production and cultural institutions. How does this development affect German Studies as a discipline and a practice? Volume 14 of Edinburgh German Yearbook examines political or politicized aspects of contemporary life that have become increasingly significant for culture today. The contributions gathered here offer engaging readings of contemporary literary texts (including work by Sasa Stanisic, Anke Stelling, and Timur Vermes), films (by Fatih Akin, Ruth Beckermann, and Andreas Dresen), and other forms of cultural intervention (the polemics of Max Czollek and Oliver Polak, and the activism of the left-feminist group Burschenschaft Hysteria). These encourage us to consider how communities are being (re)shaped by current political and social crises, antagonisms around memory cultures, questions of European identity, as well as challenges to the status of an assumed Leitkultur and the discourse of integration.

A study of the archival turn in contemporary German memory culture, drawing on recent memorials, documentaries, and prose narratives that engage with the material legacy of National Socialism and the Holocaust. With the passing of those who witnessed National Socialism and the Holocaust, the archive matters as never before. However, the material that remains for the work of remembering and commemorating this period of history is determined by both the bureaucratic excesses of the Nazi regime and the attempt to eradicate its victims without trace. This book argues that memory culture in the Berlin Republic is marked by an archival turn that reflects this shift from embodied to externalized, material memory and responds to the particular status of the archive "after Auschwitz." What remains in this late phase of memory culture is the post-Holocaust archive, which at once ensures and hauntsthe future of Holocaust memory. Drawing on the thinking of Freud, Derrida, and Georges Didi-Huberman, this book traces the political, ethical, and aesthetic implications of the archival turn in contemporary German memory culture across different media and genres. In its discussion of recent memorials, documentary film and theater, as well as prose narratives, all of which engage with the material legacy of the Nazi past, it argues that the performanceof "archive work" is not only crucial to contemporary memory work but also fundamentally challenges it. Dora Osborne is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of St Andrews.

Explores the changing relationship between memory and the archive in German-language literature and culture since 1945. In recent years, the discourse of memory - and of German memory culture in particular - has become increasingly concerned with questions of the archive. An archive can refer to a physical place, the material found there, or the system that orders this material; in its broadest sense, it might refer to something public (records housed in a municipal building), or something private (photographs in a family album). The material and documentary qualities of the archive confer on it an authenticating function attributed only cautiously to memory, but theories of the archive have questioned the status of material, documentary vestiges of the past. Memory and the archive are inextricablylinked, but how does this affect the mediation of the past? This volume explores the changing relationship between memory and the archive in German-language literature and culture since 1945. Contributions approach this topic froma range of perspectives (film, visual culture, urban culture, digital technology, as well as literature) and offer illuminating studies of Harun Farocki, Anselm Kiefer, Thomas Demand, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Jurgen Fuchs, StefanWolter, and Sasa Stanisic. Contributors: Priyanka Basu, Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, Regine Criser, Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann, Diana Hitzke and Charlton Payne, Caitriona Leahy, Dora Osborne, Annie Ring, Lizzie Stewart, Simon Ward. Dora Osborne is Lecturer in German at Durham University.

Both W. G. Sebald (1944-2001) and the Austrian author Christoph Ransmayr (1954-) were born too late to know directly the violence of the Second World War and the Holocaust, but these traumatic events are a persistent presence in their work. In a series of close readings of key prose texts, Dora Osborne examines the different ways in which the traces of a traumatic past mark their narratives. By focusing on the authors use of visual and topographical tropes, she shows how blind spots and inhospitable places configure signs of past violence, but, ultimately, resist our understanding. Whilst links between the two authors are well-documented, this book offers the first full-length study of Sebald and Ransmayr and their complicated relation to the traumatic traces of National Socialism. Dora Osborne is Lecturer in German at the University of Nottingham.