New essays exploring the resurgence of the theme of romantic relationships and love in German literature since around the turn of the millennium. While sociologists have long agreed that the problems of modern and contemporary subjectivity crystallize in the issue of romantic relationships and love (e.g., Luhmann, Illouz, Beck, etc.), the theme of love, so crucial to the foundational text of modern German literature, Goethe's Werther, all but disappeared from German prose literature in the second half of the twentieth century. Yet over the past fifteen years German-language literature has witnessed an explosion of novels with "Liebe" in their titles as well as novels that centrally focus on intersubjective erotic and emotional relationships. A number of major contemporary writers (Treichel, Walser, Kermani, Ortheil, Maron, Zaimoglu, Genazino) have written Liebesromane or novels in which significant sociohistorical questions are refracted through the love relationships of their protagonists. German film likewise has increasingly thematized love relationships under postromantic conditions, e.g. in the films of the Berlin school. Simultaneously, the development of both feminist and LGBTQ politics over the past decades has exploded the heteronormative discourses ofdesire in a way that has both expanded and enriched the lovers' discourse, while recent developments of urban (hetero)sexuality have expanded the previously available models of expressing erotic relationships in ways that are reminiscent of the utopian ending of Goethe's first version of Stella. The present collection offers a wide-ranging set of essays on these developments. Contributors: Esther K. Bauer, Sven Glawion, Silke Horstkotte,Sarra Kassem, Maria Roca Lizarazu, Helmut Schmitz, Angelika Vybiral. Helmut Schmitz is Reader in German at the University of Warwick. Peter Davies is Professor and Head of German at the University of Edinburgh.

With the disappearance of the eyewitness generation and the globalization of Holocaust memory, this book interrogates key concepts in Holocaust and trauma studies through an assessment of contemporary German-language Jewish authors. In the shifting media landscape of the twenty-first century, the second and third generations of German-language Jewish authors are grappling with the disappearance of the eyewitness generation and the hyper-mediation and globalization of Holocaust memory. Benjamin Stein, Maxim Biller, Vladmir Vertlib, and Eva Menasse each experiment with new approaches towards Holocaust representation and the Nazi past. This book investigates major shifts in Holocaust memory since the turn of the millennium, and argues that the works of these authors call for a much-needed reassessment of key concepts and terms in Holocaust discourse such as authenticity, empathy, normalization, representation, traumatic unspeakability, and postmemory. Drawing on current research in media, memory, cultural, and literary studies, Maria Roca Lizarazu develops a fresh approach which challenges the dominant focus on traumatic unspeakability by engaging with the culturally mediated travels of transgenerational and transnational contemporary Holocaust memory. Roca Lizarazu pays special attention to ethical and aesthetic challenges of contemporary Holocaust memory and how these are addressed in the medium of contemporary German-language literature. This book offers a critical new perspective on the central paradigms informing recent Holocaust and trauma studies scholarship and, in doing so, provides novel insights into a new generational approach towards Holocaust remembrance and representation. MARIA ROCA LIZARAZU is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham, UK.

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.