The "margins" in Petra Fachinger's work are occupied largely by second-generation migrant writers from Spain, Italy, and Turkey, German Jewish writers of diverse ethnic origins, and writers born in the GDR. She demonstrates that during the 1980s and 1990s writers from various cultural backgrounds engaged in oppositional discourse to construct their own version of Germany and write back to the German canon. While most studies of texts by minority writers in Germany favour content over form, Fachinger focuses on identifying counter-discursive strategies, and applies postcolonial theory concerned with textual resistance to the German situation. In doing so, this study effectively relates marginal writing in Germany to similar forms of writing in other national and cultural contexts. The oppositional impulse, whether manifested in counter-canonical discourse, postcolonial picaresque, hybridity, rewriting of genre, or grotesque realism, is prompted by the exclusionary politics of the dominant culture. The discursive strategies used by the authors discussed to rewrite Germany expose the assumptions that underlie German public discourse and destabilize notions of Germanness, Jewishness, and Turkishness. Fachinger's reading of texts by marginal writers in Germany, all of whom endeavour to resist marginalization while simultaneously experiencing or even celebrating the margin as a site of empowerment, was motivated by the absence of comparative studies of such writing. Rewriting Germany from the Margins demonstrates the necessity and usefulness of comparative approaches to minority discourses across national and cultural borders.

A Different Germany looks at German film, popular literature, theatre, garden culture, and popular music as examples of how people of German-Turkish descent, women and culture writ large are thriving in a Germany that is, for all of the struggles this entails, already a country of great diversity. Germany, the authors argue in their own particular contexts, is much more than the few tropes that circulate through the Cold War lens in much of the English-speaking world.

How does migration change a nation? Germany in Transit is the first sourcebook to illuminate the country's transition into a multiethnic society—from the arrival of the first guest workers in the mid-1950s to the most recent reforms in immigration and citizenship law. The book charts the highly contentious debates about migrant labor, human rights, multiculturalism, and globalization that have unfolded in Germany over the past fifty years—debates that resonate far beyond national borders. This cultural history in documents offers a rich archive for the comparative study of modern Germany against the backdrop of European integration, transnational migration, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Divided into eleven thematic chapters, Germany in Transit includes 200 original texts in English translation, as well as a historical introduction, chronology, glossary, bibliography, and filmography.

This collection of new essays explores how Germany's imagined Asia informed its national fantasies at crucial historical junctures. It will influence future scholarly explorations of Asian-German cultural transfer. The first collection of essays in the new field of Asian-German Studies, Imagining Germany Imagining Asia demonstrates that Germany and Asia have always shared cultural spaces. Indeed, since the time of the German Enlightenment, Asia served as the foil for fantasies of sexuality, escape, danger, competition, and racial and spiritual purity that were central to foundational ideas of a cohesive German national culture during crucial historical junctures such as fascism or reunification. By exploring the complex and varied phenomenon of German "Orientalism," these essays argue that the relation between an imagined Germany and an imagined Asia defies the idea of a one-way influence, instead conceiving of their cultural transfers and synergies as multidirectional and mutually perpetuating. Examining literary and non-literary texts from the eighteenth century to the present, these essays cover a wide rangeof topics and genres in disciplines including philosophy, film and visual culture, theater, literary studies, and the history of science. Ideally positioned to shape further contributions, Imagining Germany Imagining Asiawill attract a wide range of readers interested in German, Asian, colonial, postcolonial, and transnational studies. Contributors: Sai Bhatawadekar, Petra Fachinger, Veronika Fuechtner, Randall Halle, David D. Kim, Hoi-eun Kim, Kamakshi Murti, Perry Myers, Mary Rhiel, Qinna Shen, Quinn Slobodian, Chunjie Zhang Veronika Fuechtner is Associate Professor of German at Dartmouth College. Mary Rhiel is Associate Professor of German at the University of New Hampshire.

In today’s globalized world, traditions of a national Self and a national Other no longer hold. This timely volume considers the stakes in our changing definitions of national boundaries in light of the unmistakable transformation of German and Dutch societies. Examining how the literature of migration intervenes in public discourses on multiculturality and including detailed analysis of works by the Turkish-German writers Emine Sevgi Özdamer and Feridun Zaimoglu and the Moroccan-Dutch writers Abdelkader Benali and Hafid Bouazza, New Germans, New Dutch offers crucial insights into the ways in which literature negotiates both difference and the national context of its writing.

Explores nationality, gender, and postmodern subjectivity in the work of five German-speaking women writers who embody a "nomadic ethics." How can postmodern subjectivity be ethically conceived? What can literature contribute to this project? What role do "gender" and "nation" play in the construction of contemporary identities? Nomadic Ethics broaches these questions, exploring the work of five women writers who live outside of the German-speaking countries or thematize a move away from them: Birgit Vanderbeke, Dorothea Grünzweig, Antje Rávic Strubel, Anna Mitgutsch, and Barbara Honigmann. It draws on work by Rosi Braidotti, Sara Ahmed, and Judith Butler to develop a nomadic ethics, and examines how the writers under discussion conceptualize contemporary German and Austrian identities -- especially but not only gender identities -- in instructive ways. The book engages with a number of critical issues in contemporary German studies: globalization; green thought; questions of gender and sexuality; East (and West) German identities; Austrianness; the postmemory of the Holocaust; and Jewishness. In this way, Nomadic Ethics offers a valuable contribution to debates about the nature of German studies itself, as well as insightful readings of the individual authors and texts concerned. Emily Jeremiah is Lecturer in German, Royal Holloway, University of London.

With the economic and political rise of East Asia in the second half of the twentieth century, many Western countries have re-evaluated their links to their Eastern counterparts. Thus, in recent years, Asian German Studies has emerged as a promising branch within interdisciplinary German Studies. This collection of essays examines German-language cultural production pertaining to modern China and Japan, and explicitly challenges orientalist notions by proposing a conception of East and West not as opposites, but as complementary elements of global culture, thereby urging a move beyond national paradigms in cultural studies. Essays focus on the mid-century German-Japanese alliance, Chinese-German Leftist collaborations, global capitalism, travel, identity, and cultural hybridity. The authors include historians and scholars of film and literature, and employ a wide array of approaches from postcolonial, globalization, media, and gender studies. The collection sheds new light on a complex and ambivalentset of international relationships, while also testifying to the potential of Asian German Studies.