Germans Going Global: Contemporary Literature and Cultural Globalization by Anke S. Biendarra (review)

Germans Going Global offers a unique and insightful look at the impact of globalization on the German literary market, including its traces in text content and aesthetics, its consequences for authorship, and the use of old and new media in global reception and circulation. In this, Anke Biendarra’s study tackles some of today’s most urgent issues related to the global reach of capitalism, including precarity, economic insecurity, and neoliberal working practices, showing how such experiences define subjectivities that literature is well suited to illuminate. She thus provides an important and hitherto missing dimension to a topic that has urgency and currency well beyond the literary.

Biendarra’s study marks a clear departure from past research on such related areas as transnationalism and makes a convincing case for German Studies’ place in discussions of globalization, a topic the field has been slow to address, due in part, she claims, to its persistent interest in nation, national identity, and nationhood (9). She grounds the relationship of the global and the local in numerous analyses outside of and in German Studies (such as those by Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck or Stuart Taberner), and is particularly indebted to Roland Robertson, from whom she borrows the term glocalization. A consideration of the glocal also guides her choice of contemporary German texts that deal explicitly with “conditions of global existence and contemporary realities” (6). Such literature provides commentary on the ongoing effects of globalization locally as well as abroad. In her corpus, Biendarra, perhaps surprisingly, does not include those texts whose authors have an explicit transnational background (due in part to what she sees as a need for a comparative or more contextually expansive approach to such authors). Instead, she uses a glocal approach to analyze the material, thematic, and aesthetics dimensions of literary work and authorship of writers such as Judith Herrmann, Ingo Schulze, Elke Naters, John von Düffel, Christian Kracht, and Kathrin Röggla. Throughout, she deploys a set of interdisciplinary-based theoretical considerations based in media studies, sociology, political science, economics, and anthropology.

In charting a trajectory of global impasses related to neoliberal subjectivity, she begins already in the literary debates of the 1990s (chapters one and two), and offers an overview of the issues and debates foundational to the contemporary German literary market, including some of the primary features of the categories of literature in the 1990s (Fräuleinwunder, pop) and the debates around their reach in the public sphere of the emerging Berlin Republic (realism, authenticity, media). Her analysis of authorship with relation to globalization is one of the many aspects that make Biendarra’s study particularly strong. Her understanding that authors are both “(self-performing) subjects and (managed) objects” (19) illustrates the increasing importance globalization and the public sphere, including media, has had on the local construction of the author in the German literary marketplace. She notes, for example, how the literary and authorial development of Judith Herrmann “connects to the very globalization of both the city of Berlin and, by symbolic extension, to the Berlin Republic” (32). Biendarra anchors texts and authors in the local immediacy of space and shows, in turn, how the forces of globalization interact within that space. This connection, firmly established in the first chapters, resonates explicitly and implicitly across all of the chapters.

The remaining three chapters deepen their look at specific aspects of globalization and literature, beginning with literature of work during the first decade of the 2000s (chapter three), unemployment (chapter four), and finally turning to global travel as both mobility and immobility (chapter five). In this last chapter, she shows how travel narratives illuminate the manner in which globalization has changed the way in which we reside at home: “National borders and local places have ceased to be the clear supports of our identity; after all, globalization transforms the localities we inhabit” (150). The study ends not with a conclusion but with a coda...