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  • Introduction
  • David N. Coury (bio) and Sabine Von Dirke (bio)

The first decade of the twenty-first century saw both the pinnacle and the bursting of the global economy, leading to a recession parallelling that of the great depression in the 1930s. The rapid globalization of the economies of the former Eastern Bloc in Europe combined with the internet and “dot-com industries” in the West created what Alan Greenspan and then later Yale economist Robert Shiller have referred to as an irrational exuberance in the financial markets at the turn of the millennium. The human toll and effects from both the rise and fall of these neoliberal policies are too often glossed over in the discourses of the political and financial worlds, but have served as source material for a growing number of works of fiction, film, and documentary literature in the German-speaking world. This special issue of Seminar examines the interrelationship between German literary and cinematic production and the impact of globalization on material and immaterial production at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

The globalization of the world’s economies has had a profound impact on the movement of not only financial but also human capital around the world. It is no surprise then to find a multitude of recent artistic and social-scientific works dealing with issues of immigration, migration, and human trafficking around the globe. Similarly the impact of these changes on the work force in the West has been dramatic. As the economies of Western Europe and North America begin to rebound, economists are speaking of one of the first jobless recoveries in modern times, whereby the banking and financial sectors again amass huge profits while Eurozone unemployment continues to hover around 10% and reaches as high as 15%–20% in some countries. Moreover the neoliberal business strategies well-known in the U.S. (last hired, first fired; profit margins over corporate ethics, etc.) quickly wound their way into European societies. Works like Urs Widmer’s Top Dogs (1996) already began to deal with the changes in the European social market economy just five years after reunification, as the laws and rules protecting workers gradually became liberalized in the name of corporate profitability. Other literary and cinematic works followed as the Generation Golf soon found itself on the losing side of globalized business. The articles collected in this issue span a wide array of genres and forms, but share a similar interdisciplinary approach to analyzing cultural production in the twenty-first century, each with a focus on how globalizing market forces have impacted social, gender, and class structures in the new Europe. [End Page 395]

When approaching the concept of globalization, it is perhaps best to heed Ulrich Beck’s advice, namely that attempts to define the term are like trying to nail pudding to the wall (Was ist Globalisierung? 44). Therefore a methodologically more sound approach might be to summarize the dominant tropes of the discourse employed to explain globalization. Central to all definitions of globalization are the recycled concepts of the “global village,” referring to the increasing interconnectedness of all the regions of the world, and “glocalization,” referring to the interplay between the global and the local. The novelty that the term globalization connotes has been contested from the beginning, when it arose in the mainstream U.S. media during the second half of the 1980s and – according to Conrad Jarausch – about ten years later in the German debates (340). However, even those who trace globalization back to the early modern period of European expansion acknowledge a more recent intensification of this process and link it to late-twentieth-century technological innovations and phenomena of which the “Internet Revolution” or “Digital Revolution” appear to be most ubiquitous. Thus there is little controversy about the importance of information-communication technologies for the process called globalization, as these technologies have indeed accelerated the pace of transporting ephemeral goods – whether media images, ideas, services, or finance capital – around the globe and in doing so have also enlarged the audience for their consumption. This linkage points to the economic underpinnings of globalization and helps explain how and why globalization is today primarily thought of...

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