THIS CHAPTER EXPLORES the intersection of politics and culture by examining how German-language literature has tried to process and engage with the so-called European refugee crisis. It offers a brief overview of, and identifies key trends in, these literary responses, before focusing on the political satire and Der Spiegel bestseller Die Hungrigen und die Satten (2018; The Hungry and the Fat, 2020) by Timur Vermes. Pulling Heinrich Heine's wandering rats from the nineteenth into the twenty-first century, Vermes's novel stages a violent border confrontation between the fat (Germans) who are eager to protect their privileges, and the hungry (refugees) who are attracted north by the dream of luxury and the prospect of personal and professional security. While Heine advocates a redistribution of resources and privilege to eradicate the circumstances that produce these rats, Vermes updates the message for a neoliberal twenty-first century audience and violently eliminates the hungry on live TV, so that the fat can continue to prosper. This savage solution to the refugee crisis, which draws on anti-migrant rhetoric, sets Vermes's novel apart from other writerly attempts to respond to the refugee crisis. As will be shown, these other texts often try to make different facets of the crisis more comprehensible. In contrast, Vermes focuses on Germany's response, blending an attack on the media, politicians, and public discourse with entertainment to highlight inconsistencies and absurdities in socio-political attitudes to refugees. Concentrating on how Vermes helps readers to grasp the moral implications of mediating and consuming images of human vulnerability, while forcing them to witness the violence of the border, this chapter shows how Die Hungrigen und die Satten disrupts social and political norms and values to spark reflections that could generate change.

The European refugee crisis began in 2015 when conflicts in Syria and other fragile states like Afghanistan, Iraq, and different sub-Saharan African countries led large numbers of people to seek asylum in the European Union (EU). Since 2015, academics, politicians, journalists, and the wider public have been discussing and debating the nature and consequences of this crisis which has dominated the media and the political landscape.