Peter Schlemihl, the Chamisso Prize, and the Much Longer History of German Migration Narratives

The article uses the tension between Chamisso’s Schlemihl, an early nineteenth-century work that revolves around migration, and the Chamisso Prize, which honors writers with “migrant backgrounds,” to argue that migrants have been “co-constitutive” of German culture for centuries. It further claims that the focus on post-1955 migrants and the texts they produced, “migrant literature” rather than “migration narratives,” has left the field in an ahistorical morass that implicitly views the homogenous population of postwar Germany as the norm not an exception in German cultural history. The alternative proposed here is a chronologically expanded, more inclusive archive of migration narratives.