Transnational Terrorism, War, and Violence: Globalization and Transborder Exchanges in Juli Zeh’s Spieltrieb

If a popularity contest for a label describing the present epoch were announced, globalization would most likely be pronounced the winner, despite the lack of a single horizon of meaning (Beck 30). Globalization serves as the catchword of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century – not least because its proponents as well as its opponents can embrace the term when analyzing globalization’s effects on various areas of contemporary life: language, culture, the nation state, media, technological innovation in data processing and communication, consumption, as well as the latest economic developments. And whichever way one evaluates the process of globalization, it has without a doubt been a significant factor in the processes moulding the Berlin Republic and its identity since 1990, even though the process of globalization had started before the fall of the Wall (Osterhammel and Petersson 26–27).

For post-Wall literature, scholars such as Gerhard Fischer, David Roberts, Stuart Taberner, and Katharina Gerstenberger have emphasized the great diversity and the extent to which the “experience of German protagonists in global contexts figures prominently in some of the most successful texts of younger writers, reframing questions of German national identity as well as literature’s contribution to it” (Gerstenberger 3). The essays in Taberner’s German Literature in the Age of Globalisation all attest to the impact globalization has had on contemporary German literature. Referencing Thomas Banchoff, Sebastian Harnisch, and Ben Rosamond, Taberner simultaneously emphasizes how “the phenomenon of ‘globalisation’ is narratively constructed at a local level. [...] In essence, the debate about economics is transformed into a debate about values” (German Literature in the Age of Globalisation 6).

Juli Zeh’s Spieltrieb (2004) is a perfect example of a growing body of texts that engage the contested concepts of “the local” and “the global” against the backdrop of the discourse on globalization, internationalization, and the resulting debate about the validity of “values.” Although the novel’s plot is located in Bonn, the provincial capital of the former West Germany, its dominant themes and brutal events are all linked to global politics. In fact, the fictional episodes are systematically linked both to specific international events that occurred between the summers of 2002 and 2004, and to the war-on-terror context (Herminghouse 272). Specifically, the massacre at the Gutenberg-Gymnasium in Erfurt modelled on the Columbine shooting, the beginning of a war in Iraq “justified” by the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the bombings in Madrid, and the eastward enlargement of the European Union play a significant role in the novel.

This article begins with a brief overview of the main characters and plot elements as they pertain to this analysis, as well as a concise account of the concept of the game that gives the novel its title and its relationship to ethical values in Spieltrieb. It then offers a detailed analysis of the novel, reading it in connection to Ulrich Beck’s ideal of a “world society.” Primarily Arjun Appadurai’s notion of ideoscapes, Roland Robertson’s concept of glocalization, and Ulrich Schneckener’s ideas on transnational terrorism and Schattenglobalisierung form the framework of the underlying theoretical concept. The analysis argues that the political incidents of international significance, in addition to coinciding with the events depicted in the novel, also function as “transnational stage directions” for the protagonists, several of whom actually exemplify the transnational character of a supposedly “local literature” through their representation of diverse national origins. Spieltrieb illustrates how national and international politics, global economy, migration, and international terrorism affect individuals in a personal way – often despite geographic distance.

Ada and Alev are students at the exclusive Ernst-Bloch-Gymnasium in Bonn, a private school renamed post-1945 to cover up its disreputable Nazi history – a past that is pried open in the twenty-first century when the new principal, Teuter, significantly nicknamed “Töter,” “Täter,” and “Teutone,” implements an intransigent style of leadership based on strict rules and love for the fatherland. Ada is a fourteen-year-old German-born juvenile delinquent who was expelled from her previous school for attacking a...