Even before the Berlin Wall had been fully dismantled, critics began to call for the one comprehensive novel that could explain what was happening to Germany and the Germans. This novel never appeared. Instead, writers created a patchwork body of about three hundred texts about a city whose postwar identity was disintegrating virtually overnight. In many ways, the experience of German unification was too diverse, too ambiguous, and too influenced by global developments to be captured by one novel. Moreover, beginning in the late 1980s, the idea of literature as a source for national identity and the writer as the nation's conscience had come under scrutiny. Not only the call for the quintessential Berlin novel but also its non-arrival marks the reorientation process in German culture and literature that is the topic of this study.

Berlin's history, its symbolism as a site of the Cold War as well as of unification, and the unprecedented building boom of the 1990s turned the city into a laboratory for a changing German identity. The question of how German identity was changing and how to evaluate the transformations triggered considerable debate, but generally this shift has been understood as a desire to transcend the defining power of the Nazi past and to achieve political and cultural normalization.