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.

Interdisciplinary views of the debates over and transformation of German cultural identity since unification. The events of 1989 and German unification were seismic historical moments. Although 1989 appeared to signify a healing of the war-torn history of the twentieth century, unification posed the question of German cultural identity afresh. Politicians, historians, writers, filmmakers, architects, and the wider public engaged in "memory contests" over such questions as the legitimacy of alternative biographies, West German hegemony, and the normalization of German history. This dynamic, contested, and still ongoing transformation of German cultural identity is the topic of this volume of new essays by scholars from the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States, and Ireland. It exploresGerman cultural identity by way of a range of disciplines including history, film studies, architectural history, literary criticism, memory studies, and anthropology, avoiding a homogenized interpretation. Charting the complex and often contradictory processes of cultural identity formation, the volume reveals the varied responses that continue to accompany the project of unification. Contributors: Pertti Ahonen, Aleida Assmann, Elizabeth Boa,Peter Fritzsche, Anne Fuchs, Deniz Goekturk, Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Anja K. Johannsen, Jennifer A. Jordan, Jurgen Paul, Linda Shortt, Andrew J. Webber. Anne Fuchs is Professor of German Literature at the University of St.Andrews, Scotland. Kathleen James-Chakraborty is Professor of Art History at University College Dublin, Ireland. Linda Shortt is Lecturer in German at Bangor University, Wales.

This study of a wide selection of literary texts from the beginning of the twenty-first century aims to explore various ways in which a sense of belonging is being articulated and understood in contemporary Germany.

Since unification, German culture has experienced a boom in discourses on generation, family and place. Linda Shortt reads this as symptomatic of a wider quest for belonging that mobilises attachment to counter the effects of post-modern deterritorialisation and globalisation. Investigating twenty-first century narratives of belonging by Reinhard Jirgl, Christoph Hein, Angelika Overath, Florian Illies, Juli Zeh, Stephan Wackwitz, Uwe Timm and Peter Schneider, Shortt examines how the desire to belong is repeatedly unsettled by disturbances of lineage and tradition. In this way, she combines an analysis of supermodernity with an enquiry into German memory contests on the National Socialist era, 1968 and 1989 that continue to shape identity in the Berlin Republic. Exploring a spectrum of narratives that range from agitated disavowals of place to romances of belonging, this study illuminates the topography of belonging in contemporary Germany.