Politics and Culture in Germany and Austria Today ed. by Frauke Matthes et al. (review)

The eleven varied, lively, and often controversial essays in Politics and Culture in Germany and Austria Today, Volume 14 of the Edinburgh German Yearbook, emerged from presentations at the conference “The Politics of Contemporary German Culture” held at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, on April 26–27, 2019. According to the editors’ introduction, “The essays in this volume show the different ways in which cultural production in Germany and Austria engages with contemporary politics.” The editors call attention to the cultural domains “literature, film, theater, and art,” and “interrelated topoi that are both political and subject to politicization: identity, memory, language, nationalism, Europe, transculturalism, globalization, and migration” (1).

Among the novels analyzed in the volume is Die Hungrigen und die Satten by Timur Vermes, a 2018 bestseller highlighting European migrant issues of recent years. Linda Shortt’s essay on the novel points out the stereotypical and one-sided nature of most European “host country” media and political views of the so-called “refugee” or “border crisis.” The novel ends in a shocking, albeit fictional, outbreak of violence. A drone attack by unidentified forces results in a massacre of three hundred thousand people who had been “violently demonstrating the disposability of refugee lives” (31). Shortt comments that Vermes is trying to “jolt” readers “to encourage a critical reassessment of the values that determine social and political life” (33).

A chapter by Myrto Aspioti is devoted to the 2014 novel Vor dem Fest by Saša Stanišić, a “migrant writer” in Germany with a Serbo-Bosnian background. In this novel, Stanišić rejects the usual expectations of autobiographical “migrant” literature of displacement and “adjustment” by “imagining a community that is, in some ways the complete opposite of ‘migrant:’ that of a village [ . . . ] whose identity is premised on its geographical seclusion and an illusory sense of homogeneity” (100) and by writing “a deliberately anti-autobiographical novel” (103).

The essay “Precarious Narration in Anke Stelling’s Schäfchen im Trockenen” (2018) by Stephanie Gleißner discusses a novel that “has been the subject of intense media attention in Germany,” largely due to its political content (123); one reviewer saw in it “vulgar sociology” because of its “thematic proximity to pressing social-political debates around affordable urban housing, gentrification and [ . . . ] elite self-fulfillment” (123). The novel’s protagonist, Resi, is financially precarious and in danger of losing her apartment; her more privileged friends are sympathetic but want above all the ability to hide their privilege. According to Gleißner, “Resi’s writing qualifies as a form of ‘homeless’ writing, both in a literal and a metaphorical sense: no longer at home in the bourgeois narrative tradition, her writing has been forced to reflect on itself” (127). In the end, the book that alienated her from her friends wins her a literary prize, for her a dubious affirmation from the society she views as unjust.

Discussions of film and politics include an article by Evelyn Preuss on Gundermann, Andreas Dresen’s 2018 film on the East German singer-songwriter Gerhard Gundermann. Gundermann, who died in 1998 but not before becoming “a spokesman for the underrepresented East German minority in the 1990s” (188). A uniquely creative individual, he bridged high and low culture and combined Marxist theory with folksy proverbs and material on the East German secret service and other aspects of life in East Germany. The article critiques many commercial and political aspects of the filmmaking industry. Preuss asserts, “While [the film] ostensibly promotes a local, minority culture, it sidelines that very culture for the chance of an ‘Oscar.’” She also notes that “the project turned into an Orientalizing biopic over the course of the twelve years he had to fight for funding. [ . . . ] it evolved into a piece that the German state and industry eventually promoted” (183–84). Preuss points out that the film was finally funded after being revised...