Migration destabilized family life, gender, and sexuality. Whereas most Turkish guest workers traveled alone during the formal recruitment period (1961–1973), West Germany’s subsequent policy of family reunification sparked the increased migration of spouses and children. This chapter shows that, although migrants developed strategies to maintain connections to home, separation anxieties and fears of abandonment loomed. The departure of able-bodied young workers strained local economies, upended gender roles, and separated loved ones, sparking tensions at home: were guest workers sending enough money home, communicating enough, and remaining faithful to spouses? In Germany, reports about sex between male guest workers and German women fueled Orientalist tropes about “foreigners,” perpetuated stereotypes about Turkish men’s propensity toward violence, and stoked fears about the transgression of national and racial borders. Women left behind worried that their husbands would commit adultery while abroad. Guest workers’ children were viewed simultaneously as victims and threats: some stayed behind in Turkey, others were brought to Germany, and thousands of “suitcase children” (Kofferkinder) repeatedly moved back and forth between the two countries with their bags perpetually packed. As physical estrangement evolved into emotional estrangement, the perceived abandonment of the family came to represent the abandonment of the nation.

This essay considers the question of Sebald and cinema both in terms of how his texts engage with the medium and how film, in its turn, has treated the author and his works. The argument takes its cue from the essay ‘Kafka im Kino’ (translated as ‘Kafka Goes to the Movies’) in order to discuss the imprint of filmgoing experience that Sebald takes from Kafka, in dialogue with his own. The experience of film viewing raises issues that are central to Sebald’s writing, turning on the potential for identification and community of experience, the reliability of visual evidence and the vicissitudes of memory. These run through the references to film – ranging from early narrative cinema to different modes of documentary film and the French and German new waves – across a set of works by Sebald. The references, extending to medial avatars and intermedial relations, form a ramified network of association, not least in relation to projection and doubling. And the same preoccupations are also seen to reverberate through the cinematic afterlives of Sebald: films in different fictional, documentary and essayistic forms that have drawn – and continue to draw – their inspiration from his writing, also in its intermeshing with his biography.

Chapter 3 moves on to our first constellation, the utopian vision of Planet Earth as an actor in its own right. Rather than conceiving of humans as endowed with a special status that sets them apart from both non-human animals and the planetary ecosphere, proponents of this idea sketch a hypothetical scenario that destabilizes entrenched ways of reflecting on our species’ place in the world. I approach this proposal, framed by a What-If plot line, via two stages: first, by unpacking the Gaia hypothesis as recently revisited by Bruno Latour. I posit that Gaia should be deciphered as a framework that seeks to estrange us for, rather than from, the world. In a second step, the chapter directs attention to N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, proposing that this fantasy text can further tease out the elusive Gaia figure. Even if the champions of the Gaia hypothesis as well as the author of the Broken Earth trilogy assess several options, their utopianism primarily consists in the speculative opening up of novel possibilities for being and living otherwise. A fault line running through the What-If plot line is therefore its characteristic reluctance to forge concrete ways forward.

This chapter turns to the curatorial role of authors on the countershelf, tracing the impact of Octavio Paz’s sojourn as Mexican ambassador to India (1962–1968) on Indian poets and artists in the little magazine scene of the 1960s and 1970s, including Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Geeta Kapur, and Jagdish Swaminathan. While Neruda often formed the image of the countershelf for South Asian authors, Paz was the nearly invisible engine through which that imaginary consolidated. Paz’s sensibility of “strangerhood” reflected his growing interest in the baroque, a form which emerged to aestheticize the rapidly and radically changing concept of the world in the era of colonial expansion. This same strategy was taken up by several creators of Indian little magazines, among whom Paz helped to establish a very particular idea of world-literary friendship: not an increasingly unified and easily digestible singular style but a series of intentionally disorienting enigmas. Both route through Latin American literature of the 1960s, but the 1970s Indian poets set a very different course for global English, one that the rise of the novelists in the 1980s dramatically interrupted and then, essentially, cut off.

Comparative cross-disciplinary study shows how East Asian thought, theater, and poetry, while situating cultural analogies, helpedshape Brecht’s work. The narrative clarity anddistancing techniques of Japanese theater undercut superficial naturalism, and comparison with sophisticated, graceful Chinese theater later relativized his own. In Chinese philosophy he encountered witty discrimination, an estranging critique of virtues, dialectical social interrelations, a stimulating flow of things, focus on practical engagement, warnings (apropos Confucius) of accommodation with power and, in his crucial Me-ti, what he intimated to Korsch as an “anti-systematic … epic science” realized through individual productivity, not by a top-down imposed social order. East Asian imagination stimulated an unconventional aesthetics. In ethics, the social paradox of self-love would avoid turning people into “the servants of priests.” Even another global politics once briefly seemed conceivable, when China appeared to confront European Stalinism, but in the end that revolution disappointed as well.

Brecht the theater theoretician is better described as the theater practitioner. His innovative concepts that have come to mark the modern theater were the product of his reflections on the experiments and lessons he learned from his collaborative work in the theater and on the stage. In short, Brecht’s staging practices ground the “Brechtian” approach to theater, even though he never articulated a formal acting method, sometimes contradicted himself, and rarely recommended that actors or theater practitioners with whom he worked read his theoretical writings. This essay traces the development of key concepts around notions of nonmimetic realism and anti-illusionary theater that fed into the epic theater as well as his views of anti-consumerist spectatorship, produced in the theater through episodic structure, distancing or Verfremdung, historicization, and the social Gestus. The centrality of contradiction and dialectical thinking became for Brecht the basis of negation and imagining innovative forms in the theater for his political agenda of changing society, most clearly accomplished in his model of the Lehrstück or learning play aimed at the collective learning process of the actors.

This essay provides an overview of Brecht’s engagement with photography. His early fascination with the medium developed, in the context of the burgeoning illustrated media landscape and the German “New Photography,” into theoretical reflections in dialogue with Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. He also began to use photography, especially press photography, in his own work: as a source for the analysis of social behavior and a way of fixing Gestus. In due course he became more and more sensitive to the politics of representation and employed photography directly and innovatively in his own works, the Journal and the “photoepigrams” of War Primer.

This article, a personal reflection by the respected Eastern German writer Kerstin Hensel, explores Bertolt Brecht’s significance for the development of East German literature and culture. The socialist regime in East Germany sought to coopt Brecht’s legacy for its own purposes, and by the 1970s and 1980s Brecht had therefore become something of a lifeless classic throughout much of the GDR. However, his approach to theater and writing still had the potential to unsettle and inspire younger writers occasionally, and Brecht had a major influence on some of the most famous East German writers and playwrights, including Heiner Müller, Peter Hacks, and Volker Braun. Hensel shows via a close-reading the way that themes and tropes from one of Brecht’s most famous poems influenced Volker Braun in one of his poems and then Henself herself, who consciously placed herself in the tradition of both of her predecessors.

The years 1918–1933 were a time of such rapid and far-reaching change in Brecht’s life and artistic development that the period defies definition as a single “context.” His writings in these years were embedded in a multidimensional matrix of factors (social, intellectual, cultural, theatrical), at times complementary, at others pulling in contrary directions, some bearing the imprint of earlier experiences (particularly World War I), while others adumbrate developments that would unfold more fully in the following decades (the economic crisis of the late 1920s and the accompanying radicalization of German politics). The youthful “spirit of contradiction” that he hoped never to lose was fully in evidence in all Brecht’s efforts to master the multiple challenges facing him and his generation as it emerged from the war, with an intense hunger for life and eagerness to put its own stamp on an evolving and expanding world. In these efforts, which produced the first forms of epic theater and the Verfremdungseffekt, Brecht drew on an exceptionally diverse range of resources, including the Bible and Nietzsche, expressionism and new sobriety, Shakespeare and Shaw, Karl Valentin and Karl Marx, Georg Kaiser and Charlie Chaplin, film and circus, boxing matches and fairground entertainments.

This article examines Bertolt Brecht’s impact on contemporary transcultural theater worldwide.Globalization and migration have increased the importance and impact of transcultural theater in recent decades, leading to new forms of theatrical creation and experience. In the context of aggressive anti-globalization reactions characterized by xenophobia and racism, transcultural theater, as influenced and initiated by Brecht, celebrates hybridity and the fragment, focusing above all on processes of estrangement (Verfremdung) that reject the fantasy of a complete, self-identical, separate cultural sphere.Transcultural theater embraces multiperspectivalism and views the supposedly well-known and obvious self as strange and foreign, while at the same time it invites the self into a process of dialog with other cultures and identities that are equally strange and foreign. It rejects the notion of holistic identities and instead embraces the fragmentary, basing itself on repetition, historicization, and the citability of gestures. Transcultural theater seeks to create theatrical experiences that are adequate to, and also respond in a meaningful way to, the complex and changing world of migration and mobility in which both theater practitioners and theater audiences actually live.

This chapter uses an estrangement frame to explore the problem of rural injustice. We analyze four drivers of rural estrangement: stereotypes in favor of elites, mechanization in favor of resource extraction, corporate markets in favor of finance, and governance in favor of urbanity. While the concept of the rural “other” has value, we prefer the concept of estrangement because it treats the rural as diverse rather than monolithic. Doing so avoids the cultural and racial stereotypes that exacerbate the asymmetries of power between the rural and the urban, discrepancies frequently used to legitimize exploitation of rural peoples and the environment.Extractive and mechanization-intensive processes in resource-rich rural places globally often promote a transfer of wealth to urban absentee owners at the expense of the rural environment and public health. Likewise, corporatization makes rural areas vulnerable by collapsing local markets and dispossessing rural peoples. We also explore how the utilitarian orientation of the democratic state often results in what Ashwood (2018) calls a “for-profit democracy” that favors urbanity and diminishes the power of local governance. Finally, we propose some solutions to help mitigate the problems of rural estrangement.