Social Transformations and Identity in the Age of Globalization in Germany: Georg Oswald’s Alles was zählt

Und deshalb wird es mir am Ende dort leichter fallen als irgendwo sonst auf der Welt, endgültig loszuwerden, was ich ohnehin nie besessen habe: eine Identität.

(Oswald 199)

Identity has long been a contested category in German consciousness, has cultivated passionate public-political debate and generated extensive academic discourse. While such discussions operate within different ideological and disciplinary frameworks, an essential aspect of any definition remains the inquiry into fundamental notions of selfhood including the question “who and what am I?” The plenitude of these articulations exceeds the confines of academic scholarship and demonstrates both the centrality of the concept of identity for human life and the difficulty in defining and translating the intangible qualities of lived experiences into discursive knowledge about subject formation. Among the critical lines of thought that have emerged is the social constructivist model reflected in the works of Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault, which posits a close link between individual identity and the larger sociocultural framework. This rationale has spawned the notion of postmodern subjectivity, suggesting that the individual is no longer fixed by categories of class, religion, or gender roles as held typical for modernity. Subsequent to the loss of meaning of such categories, individual identity is now predicated upon fluid and inherently unstable subject positions and contingent upon an increasingly transient sociocultural environment. This definition of the decentred subject will prove critical for this article’s discussion of identity in contemporary Germany through the prism of literature as one of the sites where questions of identity formation are negotiated.

Globalization and neoliberal economic practices in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Empire have shaken the sociocultural foundations of individual and collective identity for Germans and only intensified the question of how identity is constructed in this day and age. If past concerns sought to address the destabilizing effects of postwar immigration populations on German identity, recent debates have shifted the focus to analyzing the interplay between globalization, a precarious domestic employment market, and identities in flux. These relationships deserve attention, as Germans have traditionally demonstrated an exceptionally positive identification with work, particularly with the country’s model of a socially responsible economy. Importantly, the idea of “Arbeit” and a meaningful professional career – constituent factors in identity formation – compensated for the absence of other sources of positive identification following the country’s wars and the Holocaust, thus offsetting those negative identification patterns tied to a tainted national-socialist past. Given the historical significance that the role of work and life-long employment has played in providing a constructive, dependable frame of reference for individual life designs, the consequences of globalization – discernible foremost in the dismantling of the social aspect of Germany’s market economy, in the deep cuts in the social security system – have eroded the foundation for identity formation for many Germans.

The theoretical works of two social scientists, Ulrich Beck and Saskia Sassen, provide useful conceptual frameworks for analyzing how literature as a specific and highly mediated cultural practice articulates the socioeconomic and cultural transformations epitomized by the terms of globalization and the New Economy. In Risk Society, Beck examines the encroaching saturation of the sociocultural sphere with neoliberal economic doctrines to capture the thrust of social change and conflict in “Second Modernity” – his designation for what others have labelled postmodernity. Specifically, Beck’s concepts of individualization and ever more complex life designs afford analytic tools for literary texts whose narrative approach to representation aims at investigating the intersection of collective structures and individual lives. Similarly, Sassen’s argument detailing the social ramifications of globalization in urban centres is characterized by related underpinnings. Both theorists give explanations of the very phenomena that constitute major themes in Georg Oswald’s pop-literary novel Alles was zählt (2002), which is the focus of this article. This novel offers fertile ground for the study of the question of identity as Oswald’s work not only intersects temporally with major economic shifts, but also treats the quotidian struggles and mundane anxieties of the individual in...