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14 - From “Normalization” to Globalization. German Fiction into the New Millennium: Christian Kracht, Ingo Schulze, and Feridun Zaimoğlu

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2013

Stuart Taberner
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
Stuart Taberner
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
Paul Cooke
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
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Summary

Literary reflections on what a postunification German “normality” might look like are informed by the different “subject positions” of contemporary authors to the extent that they personify the life experiences of various segments of a population shaped by factors such as membership in a certain generation, formative years spent in either East or West Germany, and ethnicity and gender, among others. Onetime 68ers such as Uwe Timm, F. C. Delius, and Peter Schneider, as well as writers of an older generation such as Günter Grass, for instance, continue to debate normality in relation to the Nazi past. Thus texts such as Timm's Am Beispiel meines Bruders (2003), Delius's Mein Jahr als Mörder (2004), Schneider's “Berlin novels,” Paarungen (1992) and Eduards Heimkehr (1999), and Grass's Im Krebsgang (2002) engage works such as Schlink's Der Vorleser (1995) or Walser's Ein springender Brunnen (1998) in a debate on political correctness and, particularly in the case of Ein springender Brunnen, on whether a historicizing perspective on the past that stresses the normality of everyday life for a majority of non-Nazi Germans is to be preferred to a perspective that insists in embedding “ordinary” people's actions in the wider context of popular fascism. Contrasting with a definition of normality as an internalization of political engagement, however, younger west German writers, for example, offer up the normality of their youth in the late 1970s and 1980s.

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Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2006

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