Editors’ Introduction

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of German unification. As editors we use the occasion to invite our readers to reflect on the political significance and consequences of that event on the cultural life of the German- speaking world. Gender and gender roles were an import aspect in the shifting geographies of identity in the aftermath of unification. Readers of the Yearbook may recall the cautionary voices that pleaded for more deliberation before rejoining the GDR and the FRG. Some spoke of colonization, while others objected to that rhetoric as historically inaccurate. In these debates, the GDR was often depicted as female and as victim of an FRG coded as male aggressor, invoking imagery of sexual conquest, if not rape. While such language perhaps tended to simplify complex sociopolitical processes, there were also the very real losses suffered by East German women through the closing of daycare facilities and the elimination of jobs. Yet Germany’s first female chancellor is also an East German, who hails from the former GDR. And, very young East German women like Jana Hensel and Claudia Rusch, authors of, respectively, Zonenkinder (East German Children, 2002) and Meine freie deutsche Jugend (My Free German Youth, 2003), were among the most outspoken and witty writers who gave voice to East German life stories from their own idiosyncratic perspectives. Among the most difficult challenges for American GermanistInnen was the deep disappointment connected with revelations about Christa Wolf’s Stasi involvement and the perhaps ill-timed publication in 1990 of Was bleibt (What Remains, 1995). The gender-specific criticism mobilized against the autobiographical novel together with a sweeping rejection of political engagement in literary works, while offensive, failed to defuse the accusations of betrayal leveled at an author who had for decades seemed to occupy a moral high ground. Also of interest for U.S. GermanistInnen will be Wolf’s latest book Stadt der Engel (City of Angels, 2010), an autobiographical narrative whose title pays tribute to Los Angeles and the time Wolf spent in Southern California as a result of the “quarrel” surrounding her in the early 1990s. While we have since witnessed the process of “normalization” in virtually all aspects of discourse related to unified Germany, works like Jenny Erpenbecks’s Heimsuchung (Visitation, 2008), whose focus is a plot of land in eastern Germany and its inhabitants from Wilhelmine Germany to united Germany, insist that gender continues to matter but must be viewed in context with other identity categories if we want to comprehend German history. One might speculate that “normalization” at least contributes to a broadening of narrative perspectives and angles.

Unification and its aftermath nonetheless refocus our attention on the movement of people across borders and on the power relationships mobilized— or sometimes erased—by those crossings. In particular, we continue to make connections among the experiences of gender difference, the significance of language, and the issue of citizenship, as these factors play a central role in reshaping cultural narratives. Among the reasons cited for the selection of Herta Müller as recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009 was, according to the judges, a “moral momentum,” as well as her ability to depict the “landscape of the dispossessed” (Flood). That landscape, evoked from memory of life as a member of a German-speaking minority in the Banat region of Romania under Nicolae Ceauşescu’s dictatorship, provides the context for her precise, spare, and lyrical language. With laconic realism, the narrator of Müller’s 1997 novel Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet (The Appointment), a young factory worker who commits the crime of sewing subversive messages into men’s suits, mentally and physically prepares herself for an imminent interrogation with a series of ritual acts, including cracking and eating walnuts for breakfast. She further strategizes ways to cope with her vulnerability, describing the experience at the hands of Securitate in a simile: “It’s humiliating, there’s no other word for it, when your whole body feels like it’s barefoot. But what if there aren’t any words at all, what if even the best...