Rewriting Germany from the Margins: ‘Other’ German Literature of the 1980s and 1990s by Petra Fachinger (review)

humanities 503 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 to the talent and energy lost by the United States during those years: Kevin Vrieze became a major contributor to deaf education in Toronto; Kristine King is president and owner of an international record promotion company, her husband, Bill, the publisher of the international magazine The Jazz Report; Philip Marchand is a literary critic; Steven Burkick, president of a union local. Hagan also attempts to use his biographical material to make a theoretical statement about social movement theory. He works basically within the traditions of political process and resource mobilization theory but finds them a bit confining for explaining the long-term commitments that individuals make (or don=t make) to social movements. Using coded interview data collected on the resisters who remained in Canada into the 1990s, he is able to employ Daniel Bertaux=s life-course method to construct >social genealogies= that take account of intergenerational influences on the activists. He makes interesting comparisons with a similar study of Civil Rights activists to uphold the utility of mainstream social movement theory. At times, this theoretical agenda seems an imposition on the core of his text, but it may be yet another of Northern Passage=s enduring contributions. (JERRY LEMBCKE) Petra Fachinger. Rewriting Germany from the Margins: >Other= German Literature of the 1980s and 1990s McGill-Queen=s University Press. xii, 160. $65.00 Syrian-born author Suleman Taufiq, writing specifically on so-called migrant writing in Germany, has identified oppositionality as the characteristic feature of this body of literature. As Taufiq points out, when cultural, linguistic, or geographical dislocation and the resulting experience of marginalization are at issue in the literary text, narrative strategies may not align themselves easily with established canonical traditions. Yet, as Petra Fachinger points out in the introduction to her study, relatively little attention in recent studies of minority writing has been paid to the oppositional literary strategies that Taufiq describes. On the contrary, studies of what has alternatively been designated as migrant, multicultural, intercultural, or transnational literature have on the whole favoured analyses of theme rather than form. Consequently, many critics have focused on how authors from minority communities are bearing witness or finding a voice, often neglecting to pay equal attention to how writers may in the process also dismantle traditional notions of genre, narrative, linguistic standards, or aesthetic values. The goal of Petra Fachinger=s study is to fill this major gap. She does not, however, limit her analysis to migrant writing: her definition of >Other= xxxxxx 504 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 German Literature includes writers from Spanish, Italian, and Turkish diasporic communities (Franco Biondi, Renan Demirkan, Zehra Çirak, José Oliver, Akif Pirinçci, Feridun Zaimoglu) as well as German-Jewish writers (Lea Fleischmann, Barbara Honigmann, Richard Chaim Schneider), authors of the former GDR (Kerstin Jentzsch and Thomas Brussig), the Austrian writer Barbara Frischmuth, and West German writer Hanne Mede-Flock. What unifies these authors and texts from disparate cultural and sociopolitical contexts are, in Fachinger=s view, their positions on the margins of mainstream German society and/or literature, their opposition to dominant constructions of what constitutes Germanness, as well as the literary strategies they employ in reaction to the >exclusionary politics of the dominant [German] culture.= Unlike Taufiq, Fachinger is careful not to claim oppositional narrative strategies as a universal feature of minority writing. This, she rightly points out, would be to obscure the range of approaches present within such a category. Her aim, however, is to locate and define specific paradigms of oppositional strategies that exist in some minority writing in Germany. Without losing sight of the specificity of German cultural and political contexts, Fachinger applies conceptual frameworks developed by a number of postcolonial theorists outside the borders of German studies: Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Sneja Gunew, Emily Hicks, and Helen Tiffin, to name a few. She thus identifies the following modes of >oppositional aesthetics=: rewriting (of a specific canonical text or traditional genre), postcolonial picaresque, grotesque realism, and linguistic strategies such as allusion, code-switching, interlanguage, neologism, and syntactic fusion. While Fachinger considers...