Gedächtnis und Identität. Die deutsche Literatur nach der Vereinigung (review)

This volume is the product of a conference that was held in Trient in April of 2007. It contains nineteen essays mostly by literary scholars working in Italy and Germany, and as such it represents an interesting cross-section of Italian-German scholarly cooperation. The volume’s particular strengths come into play when individual authors address the significance of German literary and filmic culture in the Italian context. For instance Michele Sisto provides a fascinating overview of the Italian “literary field” (Pierre Bourdieu) and the significance of German culture therein, a significance that Cesare Cases had explored in the 1980s in his book Der Mythos der deutschen Kultur in Italien. Sisto explains the publishing programs of the major Italian publishing houses concerned with German culture and looks at the ways those programs have changed (or not) over the course of the last two decades. Overall, one is left with the impression of a remarkably strong German literary presence that tends to be divided into a present-oriented, politicized approach represented by the Einaudi publishing house and a past-oriented, seemingly apolitical approach represented by the publisher Adelphi, which declares on the cover of W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, published in Italy in 2002, “Nach Thomas Bernhard ist W.G. Sebald die einzige sehr bedeutende Erscheinung in der deutschsprachigen Literatur” (162). This division of German culture, as peculiarly Italian as it may seem, may nevertheless strike English-speaking scholars as strangely familiar.

Magda Martini provides an equally fascinating article on the significance of East German literature in Italy in the 1990s, and again the upshot of the analysis is that GDR literature is surprisingly well-represented, even if an author like Christa Wolf continues to be the occasional subject of right-wing attacks in the Italian press. Martini’s essay is among other things a spirited defense of the role of literature in understanding history itself: she believes that East German literature provides “originelle Überlegungen zur ostdeutschen Geschichte” (171).

Matteo Galli’s excellent exploration of “Deutschlandbilder im deutschen zeitgenössischen Film” is somewhat less sanguine in its evaluation of German cinema as represented in Italy. In fact, Galli makes clear that it is difficult even for film scholars in Italy to come to a representative view of contemporary German cinema for the simple reason that very few German films are actually shown in Italian movie theaters; this is a problem with which English-speaking scholars of German cinema are all too familiar. Galli’s essay is also a useful overview of current scholarship on contemporary German cinema—a subject that is still relatively under-explored—as well as an analysis of key trends in German cinema since reunification. One of Galli’s primary conclusions is that contemporary German cinema has for the first time discovered the East German provinces: “Im filmischen Gedächtnis spielt Frankfurt an der Oder erst eine Rolle, seitdem Andreas Dresen und Hans Christian Schmid dort Halbe Treppe (2002), bzw. Lichter (2003) gedreht haben” (334). Galli also offers an intriguing defense of the much-maligned German film comedies of the 1990s.

Not all the essays in the volume are this successful. Eva-Maria Thüne’s essay on Emine Sevgi Özdamar, for instance, while it provides some useful information about Özdamar’s literary models, reads as if no other scholar had ever written about Özdamar before, completely ignoring a wealth of Anglo-American scholarship not only on Özdamar but on German-Turkish literature more generally. Thüne also uses words like “Interkulturalität” (307) as if scholars like Leslie Adelson had never criticized them in essays like “Against Between: A Manifesto” (2001). This failure even to register the existence of scholarship from another part of the world is particularly disappointing in the context of a volume devoted precisely to German Studies from an explicitly international perspective. It suggests that scholars still have a long way to go before German Studies can...