What has become of the literary topos “Italy”—once so central to German literature—in the 20th and early 21st centuries? Does it still have a role to play in the German self-understanding and in what way has this role changed? To address these questions, this study focusses on six texts. Each text revises, subverts, and radicalises this literary topos such that it gains new contemporary relevance and speaks to the themes of intertextuality, memoria, gender, and imagination. Culturally, the German speaking world continues to define itself in relation to its southern European neighbours: the authors continue their cultural mapping along a North-South divide, with the intellectual geography of Europe maintaining its relevance. However, the six literary travels to Italy reveal an epistemological map that differs greatly from that which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe famously created in his Italienische Reise. As the texts explore (with metafictional flare) their inability to escape the cultural episteme that they inherit, they turn their attention to altering the episteme itself by focussing on their own fictionality. In so doing, they breathe a new lease of life into a reformed literary “Italy” that no longer promises the harmonious alignment of the subject with their world, but increasingly discovers the narrative freedom to articulate a fractured sense of self.

This first monograph on WWI dramatic literature closes one of the last research desiderata of the German literature on the First World War. The author opens up a hitherto unknown corpus of texts and identifies the most important discourses represented in these WWI plays. Furthermore, he embeds the discourses in contemporary public debates and identifies them in more famous dramatic works of the Weimar Republic. This allows the analysis of the Heimkehrerdramen of Toller, Brecht, and Horváth to focus on the representation of contemporary narratives that have so far been overlooked and embeds these plays in the context in which they were created. Previously, this was only the case for Karl Kraus’s Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, which is also interpreted by the author in a newly established intertextual relationship with early WWI dramas. The approach this book takes not only provides new insights into WWI dramatic literature from 1914 to the end of the Weimar Republic, but also new points of departure for research in a number of literary and cultural studies fields.

The unification of Germany in 1990 set in train a number of dramatic changes in Germany’s political, social and cultural landscape which gave rise to a series of hotly debated memory contests centred on the newly unified nation’s approach to its common Nazi past. As an important medium of cultural memory, literature played a significant part in the controversy and novels dealing with the Nazi past enjoyed widespread popularity and influence in the 20 years following 1990. But what "version" of the Nazi past did the authors of these novels choose to tell? Using the perpetrator/victim dichotomy around which much of the debate crystallised, this book seeks to answer this question via a close textual analysis of works by Bernhard Schlink, Ulla Hahn, Tanja Dückers, and Marcel Beyer. In particular, this book analyses these novels as historiographic metafiction, a significantly under-explored angle which raises important questions concerning our ability to know the “truth” about the past and destabilises the basis on which we judge guilt or innocence. In providing a deeper understanding of the approach of fiction authors to the Nazi past in the post-1990 period, this book aims to enrich our understanding of its legacy in contemporary German society today.