Cosmopolitan Parables. Trauma and Responsibility in Contemporary Germany by David D. Kim (review)

David D. Kim’s Cosmopolitan Parables offers an ambitious intervention into contemporary discourses about cosmopolitanism, world citizenship, and world literature. Kim starts from the observation that current theoretical takes on cosmopolitanism split into two, seemingly irreconcilable, factions: a Neo-Kantian, universalistic top-down model, centered on a globalized Holocaust memory, the Human Rights revolution, and international governance, and, ever since the 1980s, a “postcolonially-inflected” (4) bottom-up approach, which is critical of both the Eurocentrism of earlier conceptions of cosmopolitanism and the global dominance of Holocaust memory. These newer theories focus instead on the violent (after-)histories of colonialism, while also emphasizing the affective, embodied, and localized aspects of cosmopolitan practices.

Acutely aware of the potentials and limitations of both positions, Kim stresses the necessity of moving beyond this impasse in current theory, by developing a “relational” (56) perspective that illustrates the entanglements between histories and memories of the Holocaust, (post)colonialism and present-day neoliberalism. His study thus echoes more recent scholarship in cultural memory studies, championed by, for example, Stef Craps, Michael Rothberg, Max Silverman, and Debarati Sanyal, which increasingly views memories of the Holocaust through the prisms of transnationalism and/or transculturalism, and in relation to memories of (post)colonialism. What sets Kim’s study apart from these is the focus on German culture and literature, as the contributions mentioned earlier tend to concentrate on Anglo- or Francophone settings.

Kim chooses Germany as a case study because he regards the “unique constellation of histories, memories, and responsibilities at this national level [as] exemplary of the currently unresolved conflict between cosmopolitanism from above and cosmopolitanism from below” (58). While it remains somewhat unclear why Germany is better suited to address this tension than, for example, Belgium, France, Italy, or Spain, which are also marked by experiences of colonialism, dictatorship, and post–cold war transformation, the focus on Germany is certainly intriguing, for, as Kim rightly remarks, research on cosmopolitanism, world citizenship, and world literature is still rare in the German-language context.

Cosmopolitan Parables engages with three German-language writers in particular—Hans-Christoph Buch, Michael Krüger, and W. G. Sebald—who, according to Kim, all share an interest in the intersections between Holocaust, (post)colonial and postwar memories. They moreover all resort to what Kim terms melancholy modes of representation, which are particularly suited to express “cosmopolitan imagination” (8).

The study is divided into two parts: Entanglements engages more deeply with the book’s key terms and concepts, such as cosmopolitanism, post–cold war Germany, and the concept of melancholia/melancholy. Parables is dedicated to the three writers mentioned previously. While the first two sections of Entanglements in many ways extend points already raised in the introduction, it is probably worth investigating the third section a little more closely, which engages with the concept of melancholy. Contributing an innovative angle to recent debates on cosmopolitanism, Kim suggests that the cosmopolitanism sense of entanglement depends not only on literariness, but also on what he terms the “melancholy” mode. Inspired by Walter Benjamin, Kim argues against what he sees as the Freudian denigration of melancholia, illustrating that melancholy approaches to history, which stress multilayeredness and the inseparability of past and present, subject and object, here and there, promote a truly cosmopolitan world view, which is revolutionary to the extent that it “disrupts the flow of monumental history” (80).

Kim is right when he states that recent scholarship does not sufficiently consider the role of aesthetic devices in the creation of cosmopolitan memories. However, his notion of “melancholy modes of representation” (95) remains a little vague. Throughout the entire study, Kim’s understanding of melancholy oscillates between a specific aesthetic approach (which is never concretised) and a particular view of history and temporality, or a worldview even. The “melancholy mode” furthermore seems to coalesce with literariness as such in many places. The techniques highlighted by Kim, such as intertextuality, intermediality, multiperspectivity, or...