Legacies and Identity : East and West German Literary Responses to Unification

This volume seeks to trace the robustly critical process of historical, political and personal self-examination to be found in German literature of the 1990s. Scholars from Australia, Britain, Germany, and the USA have contributed essays which deal with a broad range of East and West German writers (Biskupek, Grass, Hilbig, Königsdorf, Maron, Mensching, Walser, Wenzel, and Wolf) as well as with general topics such as literature and the Stasi, and the response to the aftermath of unification to be found in autobiographical writing, lyric poetry, satirical fiction and cabaret texts. For all their diversity, a common thread can be discerned in these writers and the literature they have produced: a concern for the particularity of the East German experience, past and present, and a desire to explore that discrete identity – in both its positive and negative aspects – which stubbornly persisted over a decade in which the citizens of the German Democratic Republic saw themselves, their institutions, and their culture, swept up and consigned to oblivion.