During the first decade of this millennium Germany's largest ethnic minority-Turkish Germans-began to enjoy a new cultural prominence in German literature, film, television and theater. While controversies around forced marriage and "honor" killings have driven popular interest in the situation of Turkish-German women, popular culture has played a key role in diversifying portrayals of women and men of Turkish heritage. This book documents the significance of marriage in 21st-century Turkish-German culture, unpacking its implications not only for the cultural portrayals of those of Turkish background, but also for understandings of German identity. It sheds light on the interactions of gender, sexuality and ethnicity in contemporary Germany. This book explores four notions of marriage in popular culture: forced marriage; romantic marriage; intercultural marriage; and gay marriage. Over five chapters, the book shows that in popular culture marriage is conventionally portrayed as little more than a form of oppression for Turkish-German women and gay men. The state of Turkish matrimony is seen as characterized by coercion, lack of choice, familial duty and "honor," even violence. In German culture, by contrast, marriage stands for individual choice, love and equality. However, within comedy genres such as "chick lit", "ethno-sitcom" and wedding film, there have been attempts to challenge the monolithic power of these gender stereotypes. This study finds that, in grappling with the legacy of these stereotypes, these genres reveal a yearning within German popular culture for the very kinds of "traditional" gender roles Turkish Germans are imagined to inhabit. The book provides a comprehensive account of the multiple ways in which the diverse portrayals of marriage shape views of Turkish Germans in popular culture, and are also revealing of the role of gender in contemporary Germany. It investigates some key genres-autoethnography, chick lit, ethno-sitcom, wedding film, "gay" Bildungsroman, documentary theater-within which questions of gender and cultural difference are "framed". In new and innovative close readings of literary, filmic, television and dramatic texts, the work reveals the broad significance of cultural portrayals of Turkish-German intimacy.

The first book to offer a cutting-edge discussion of contemporary travel writing in German, Anxious Journeys looks both at classical tropes of travel writing and its connection to current debates. The rich contemporary literature of travel has been the focus of numerous recent publications in English that seek to understand how travel narratives, with their distinctive representations of identities, places, and cultures, respond to today's globalized, high-speed world characterized by the dual mass movements of tourism and migration. Yet a corresponding cutting-edge discussion of twenty-first-century travel writing in German has until now been missing. The fourteen essays in Anxious Journeys redress this situation. They analyze texts by leading authors such as Felicitas Hoppe, Christoph Ransmayr, Julie Zeh, Navid Kermani, Judith Schalansky, Ilija Trojanow, and others, as well as topics such as Turkish-German travelogues and the relationship of comics to travel writing. The volume examines how writers engage with classic tropes of travel writing and how they react to the current sense of crisis and belatedness. It also links travel to ongoing debates about the role of the nation, mass migration, and the European project, as well as to Germany's place in the larger world order. Contributors: Karin Baumgartner, Heather Merle Benbow, Anke S. Biendarra, John Blair and Muriel Cormican, Nicole Coleman, Carola Daffner, Christina Gerhardt, Nicole Grewling, Gundela Hachmann, Andrew Wright Hurley, Christina Kraenzle, Magda Tarnawaska Senel, Monika Shafi, Sunka Simon. Karin Baumgartner is Professor of German at the University of Utah. Monika Shafi is Elias Ahuja Professor of German at the University of Delaware.

Even in the harsh conditions of total war, food is much more than a daily necessity, however scarce-it is social glue and an identity marker, a form of power and a weapon of war. This collection examines the significance of food and hunger in Germany's turbulent twentieth century. Food-centered perspectives and experiences "from below" reveal the social, cultural and political consequences of three conflicts that defined the twentieth century: the First and Second World Wars and the ensuing global Cold War. Emerging and established scholars examine the analytical salience of food in the context of twentieth-century Germany while pushing conventional temporal frameworks and disciplinary boundaries. Together, these chapters interrogate the ways in which deeper studies of food culture in Germany can shed new light on old wars.

Even in the harsh conditions of total war, food is much more than a daily necessity, however scarce-it is social glue and an identity marker, a form of power and a weapon of war. This collection examines the significance of food and hunger in Germany's turbulent twentieth century. Food-centered perspectives and experiences "from below" reveal the social, cultural and political consequences of three conflicts that defined the twentieth century: the First and Second World Wars and the ensuing global Cold War. Emerging and established scholars examine the analytical salience of food in the context of twentieth-century Germany while pushing conventional temporal frameworks and disciplinary boundaries. Together, these chapters interrogate the ways in which deeper studies of food culture in Germany can shed new light on old wars.