MUCH CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN CRIME FICTION emphasizes the local and the regional. In part this is a reaction to globalization and in part it reflects the reality of European identity today, which exhibits a complex web of local, regional, national, and European allegiances. An analysis of two popular German language crime series, one set in Southern Germany and the other in Austria, teases out the characters’ multidimensional identities, in which the local is depicted in combination with, but also in resistance to, the global. The crime investigators differ necessarily from American hardboiled detective figures, and the crime investigations are vehicles for examining society. Humor and satire in the portrayal of the characters’ thoughts and behavior allow the narratives to convey regional pride, while simultaneously forestalling any reading of their pride as narrow and nationalistic, as was often the case with Heimat literature and films from earlier periods. The popularity of the novels is evidence that the interplay of the local, regional, and national in the characters’ identities resonates with a broad cross-section of German and Austrian readers, and that it demonstrates a mature, nuanced society.

Crime fiction is a genre that is “neither inherently conservative nor radical, and so can be co-opted for a variety of purposes,” and indeed, aspects of the genre are particularly suited to sociopolitical commentary. Klüpfel and Kobr’s crime novels center on Kluftinger, a Kemptenbased police chief inspector, and Heinrich Steinfest’s novels are about the Viennese private detective Markus Cheng. They include a wealth of detail about the locales in which the novels are set, and about attitudes to culture, history, gender, and lifestyle. Through the characters and their worlds, the texts engage in a discursive negotiation of identity. Kluftinger and Cheng perform their identities from very specific geographical and cultural bases. However, their identities are not suggestive of a homogeneous or monolithic national identity; but rather, one that is heterogeneous and in flux, reflecting the influence of trends and developments in regional and national society and in a globalized world, and the contestation triggered by these developments.

Identity is a central concern of modernity, and its relevance is not restricted to citizens of newly founded national states or a multinational Europe. It links the self as a “reflexive project” to modernity; that is, identity reflects not only individual personality development but also social change “in the dialectical interplay of the local and the global.