Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 “Normalization”: Has Helmut Kohl's Vision Been Realized?
- 2 Coping with Disparity: Continuity and Discontinuity in Economic Policy since Unification
- 3 Understanding Germany: The Limits of “Normalization” and the Prevalence of Strategic Culture
- 4 “Normalization” through Europeanization: The Role of the Holocaust
- 5 “Representing Normality”: Architecture in Berlin
- 6 “Normalizing” the Past: East German Culture and Ostalgie
- 7 National Memory's Schlüsselkinder: Migration, Pedagogy, and German Remembrance Culture
- 8 The Return of “Undead” History: The West German Terrorist as Vampire and the Problem of “Normalizing” the Past in Margarethe von Trotta's Die bleierne Zeit (1981) and Christian Petzold's Die innere Sicherheit (2001)
- 9 “Normalizing” the “Old” Federal Republic? The FRG between 1949 and 1989 in Recent German Fiction
- 10 Reconciliation between the Generations: The Image of the Ordinary German Soldier in Dieter Wellershoff's Der Ernstfall and Ulla Hahn's Unscharfe Bilder
- 11 “(un)sägliche Vergleiche”: What Germans Remembered (and Forgot) in Former Yugoslavia in the 1990s
- 12 “Normal” as “Apolitical”: Uwe Timm's Rot and Thomas Brussig's Leben bis Männer
- 13 “Narrative Normalization” and Günter Grass's Im Krebsgang
- 14 From “Normalization” to Globalization. German Fiction into the New Millennium: Christian Kracht, Ingo Schulze, and Feridun Zaimoğlu
- 15 Abnormal Consensus? The New Internationalism of German Cinema
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
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
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 “Normalization”: Has Helmut Kohl's Vision Been Realized?
- 2 Coping with Disparity: Continuity and Discontinuity in Economic Policy since Unification
- 3 Understanding Germany: The Limits of “Normalization” and the Prevalence of Strategic Culture
- 4 “Normalization” through Europeanization: The Role of the Holocaust
- 5 “Representing Normality”: Architecture in Berlin
- 6 “Normalizing” the Past: East German Culture and Ostalgie
- 7 National Memory's Schlüsselkinder: Migration, Pedagogy, and German Remembrance Culture
- 8 The Return of “Undead” History: The West German Terrorist as Vampire and the Problem of “Normalizing” the Past in Margarethe von Trotta's Die bleierne Zeit (1981) and Christian Petzold's Die innere Sicherheit (2001)
- 9 “Normalizing” the “Old” Federal Republic? The FRG between 1949 and 1989 in Recent German Fiction
- 10 Reconciliation between the Generations: The Image of the Ordinary German Soldier in Dieter Wellershoff's Der Ernstfall and Ulla Hahn's Unscharfe Bilder
- 11 “(un)sägliche Vergleiche”: What Germans Remembered (and Forgot) in Former Yugoslavia in the 1990s
- 12 “Normal” as “Apolitical”: Uwe Timm's Rot and Thomas Brussig's Leben bis Männer
- 13 “Narrative Normalization” and Günter Grass's Im Krebsgang
- 14 From “Normalization” to Globalization. German Fiction into the New Millennium: Christian Kracht, Ingo Schulze, and Feridun Zaimoğlu
- 15 Abnormal Consensus? The New Internationalism of German Cinema
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
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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- German Culture, Politics, and Literature into the Twenty-First CenturyBeyond Normalization, pp. 209 - 222Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2006