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.

Contributions exploring the representation and reality of LGBTQ+ individuals and issues in historical and contemporary German-speaking culture. The German-speaking lands have a long history of engagement, ranging from celebratory to horrific, with non-normative genders and sexualities, including through cultural output, language, and politics. Queering German Culture, volume 10 of the Edinburgh German Yearbook, foregrounds this via new analyses of a variety of LGBTQ+ cultural artifacts - archives both physical and digital, literature in the form of novels and periodicals, and film both narrative and documentary - to consider a spectrum of gender and sexual identities. Individual chapters employ a range of lenses, including psychoanalysis, feminism, and postcolonial and queer theory, to analyze work by ThomasMann, Thomas Brussig, Jenny Erpenbeck, Terezia Mora, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Fatih Akin, among others. Contributors: Nicholas Courtman, Leanne Dawson, Kyle Frackman, Sarra Kassem, Lauren Pilcher, John L. Plews, Gary Schmidt, Cyd Sturgess. Leanne Dawson is Lecturer in German and Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh.