GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS最新文献

{"title":"THE IMPLICATED READER: ABBAS KHIDER'S OHRFEIGE RECKONING WITH THE REFUGEE CRISIS IN GERMANY","authors":"Jennifer Noji","doi":"10.1111/glal.70043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.70043","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Dieser Artikel untersucht, wie Abbas Khiders Roman <i>Ohrfeige</i> (2016) globale Gewalt gegen Flüchtlinge verhandelt, indem er formale und rhetorische Techniken einsetzt, um die Lesenden in diese Gewalt zu verstricken. Michael Rothbergs Konzept des „implicated subjects“ wird mit Narratologie und formalistischer Erzähltheorie in Verbindung gebracht. Der Aufsatz konzeptualisiert den „implizierten Leser“ (implicated reader) als ein Subjekt, das in die gewalttätigen Ereignisse und Strukturen, die im jeweiligen Text dargestellt werden, verwickelt ist. Dieses analytische Konzept macht Khiders Erzählprinzip sichtbar, mittels dessen er den implizierten deutschen Leser adressiert und herausfordert. Neben weiteren literarischen Techniken setzt Khider die formale Anrede „Sie“ ein, um die Identifikation des Lesers mit einer deutschen Asylbeamtin, die die Subjektivität des Flüchtlings missachtet, zu fördern. Werke wie <i>Ohrfeige</i> erzeugen nicht in erster Linie Empathie mit den Opfern, sondern machen Ungerechtigkeiten sichtbar und fordern politische Verantwortung ein, indem sie die Lesenden dazu anregen, sich in die Position von Akteuren politischer Gewalt zu versetzen, statt lediglich deren Leid zu bezeugen.</p>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":"79 4","pages":"495-516"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149014682","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE OF IMPLICATION","authors":"Michael Rothberg","doi":"10.1111/glal.70046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.70046","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":"79 4","pages":"580-587"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149014617","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"IMPLICATION IN YOUNG ADULT NOVELS ABOUT THE GDR: HISTORICAL FICTION FOR A DEMOCRATIC FUTURE","authors":"Kristin Rebien","doi":"10.1111/glal.70042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.70042","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines the pedagogical potential of young adult literature about East Germany to help readers reflect on the legacies of authoritarian rule and questions of responsibility, accountability and agency. Drawing on Michael Rothberg's concept of the implicated subject, I argue that young adult literature exploring implication offers crucial frameworks for strengthening democratic consciousness. While much young adult literature about the GDR perpetuates problematic victim/perpetrator binaries that obscure the complex realities of life under authoritarianism, Dorit Linke's <i>Jenseits der blauen Grenze</i> demonstrates an alternative approach. Through analysis of Linke's sophisticated narrative techniques, including her use of fragmented storytelling and montage, I show how the novel positions readers as active interpreters who must recognise patterns of complicity and implication in everyday social relations. Rather than presenting clear-cut heroes and villains, Linke reveals how ordinary people become entangled in systems of power through accommodation, silence and their positioning within social structures that sustain authoritarian rule. This nuanced exploration of implication proves especially relevant for contemporary Germany, where young people face rising authoritarianism and need tools for understanding how individual choices shape political systems and democratic institutions.</p>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":"79 4","pages":"472-494"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.70042","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149014681","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"AFFECT, AUTOFICTION, PARODY: NEGOTIATING IMPLICATION IN CHRISTIAN KRACHT'S EUROTRASH AND MAXIM BILLER'S DER FALSCHE GRUẞ","authors":"Karin Bauer","doi":"10.1111/glal.70045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.70045","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;Christian Kracht's assertion that everything that takes itself too seriously is ripe for parody frames this analysis of &lt;i&gt;Eurotrash&lt;/i&gt; (2021) and Maxim Biller's &lt;i&gt;Der falsche Gruß&lt;/i&gt; (2021), novels in which the postmemory generation navigates inherited legacies of violence, injustice and abuse, as well as of wealth and privilege. Drawing on Michael Rothberg's &lt;i&gt;The Implicated Subject&lt;/i&gt;, it shows how the narrators respond to the psychic burden of injustices and crimes they did not commit. Through humour, hyperbole, absurdity, fabulation and unreliable narration, the autofictional novels explore the emotional and ethical complexity of ‘feeling implicated’. Kracht's picaresque storytelling and Biller's ambiguous, antisemitic gesture of the ‘falscher Gruß’ foreground the performative dimension of implication, exposing the vulnerability and narcissistic wounds that accompany the reckoning with the past. The novels present parodistic interventions in contemporary German memory culture, which, as A. Dirk Moses argues, has become ritualistic and dogmatic. Parody here offers a means of reflecting on implicated subjectivity, providing ethical insight and levity without, however, resolving the historic entanglements and moral conflicts at stake. The inherent ambiguities of autofiction contribute to a self-reflexive dimension: the authors do not distance themselves entirely from their narrators, thus self-reflexively implicating themselves in the legacies their stories narrate.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Christian Krachts Behauptung, dass alles, was sich zu ernst nimmt, zur Parodie tendiert, bildet den Ausgangspunkt dieser Analyse von &lt;i&gt;Eurotrash&lt;/i&gt; (2021) und Maxim Billers &lt;i&gt;Der falsche Gruß&lt;/i&gt; (2021). Beide Romane zeigen, wie sich die Postmemory-Generation mit ererbten Hinterlassenschaften von Gewalt, Ungerechtigkeit und Missbrauch ebenso auseinandersetzt wie mit Reichtum und Privilegien. In Anlehnung an Michael Rothbergs Konzept des „implicated subject“ untersucht der Beitrag, wie die Erzähler auf historische Verfehlungen reagieren, die sie nicht selbst begangen haben, in deren Folgen sie jedoch verstrickt bleiben. Durch Humor, Hyperbel, Absurdität, Fabulieren und unzuverlässiges Erzählen erkunden die autofiktionalen Texte die affektive und ethische Dimension des Sich-Verwickelt-Fühlens. Krachts pikareske Erzählweise und Billers ambivalente, antisemitische Geste des „falschen Grußes“ rücken die performative Struktur von Verwicklung ins Zentrum und legen Verletzlichkeit, Abwehr und narzisstische Kränkung als Begleiterscheinungen der Auseinandersetzung mit der Vergangenheit offen. Zugleich erscheinen die Romane als Parodien einer, wie A. Dirk Moses argumentiert, ritualisierten deutschen Erinnerungskultur. Parodie fungiert dabei als reflexives Verfahren, das ethische Einsichten ermöglicht, ohne historische Verstrickungen aufzulösen. Die Mehrdeutigkeit der Autofiktion verstärkt diese Selbstreflexivität, indem sich die Autoren nicht vollständig von ihren Erzählern di","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":"79 4","pages":"557-579"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.70045","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149014733","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"GENDER, POWER AND IMPLICATION IN ANTJE RÁVIK STRUBEL'S NOVEL BLAUE FRAU","authors":"Friederike Eigler","doi":"10.1111/glal.70048","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.70048","url":null,"abstract":"<p>By bringing Michael Rothberg's notion of the ‘implicated subject’ into conversation with feminist scholarship, this article examines Antje Rávik Strubel's <i>Blaue Frau</i>, a novel that addresses both structural violence and specific instances of sexualised violence in a European context. While the victim and main character, a young woman from the Czech Republic, ultimately regains a degree of agency, the novel also points at systemic inequities that derail the legal prosecution of the perpetrator. Drawing on the concept of implication, the analysis shows how the novel complicates power relations beyond neat binaries of East/West and masculine/feminine. It does so by examining characters who cannot be captured in the perpetrator/victim binary but who are nevertheless implicated in the injustices portrayed in <i>Blaue Frau</i>. The article concludes by exploring the metafictional and autofictional dimensions of the titular figure of the blue woman, and by maintaining that both dimensions reflect on the author's implication in the novel she writes. As will be argued throughout, Strubel's <i>Blaue Frau</i> can be read both literally — with a primary focus on individual characters — and figuratively, as an allegory for complex power relations in contemporary Europe.</p>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":"79 4","pages":"537-556"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.70048","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149014638","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"‘DIE SOGENANNTEN KLEINEN LEUTE’: MULTIDIRECTIONAL MEMORY AND THE IMPLICATED SUBJECT IN EVA MENASSE'S DUNKELBLUM","authors":"Kylie Giblett","doi":"10.1111/glal.70044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.70044","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Set in the fictional Austrian border town of Dunkelblum in the historically momentous summer of 1989, Eva Menasse's novel <i>Dunkelblum</i> (2021) is a polyphonic narrative recounting stories of the town's ‘sogenannten kleinen Leute’ and revolving around the dark core of a Nazi-era atrocity. In this article, I analyse <i>Dunkelblum</i> as both a mirror of and contributor to recent approaches to the memory of the Holocaust and other traumatic events and explore the novel through the lens of Michael Rothberg's concepts of multidirectional memory and the implicated subject. After examining the way in which the novel's spotlight on cultural memory creation and subversion of literary genre tropes prepare a fertile ground for a consideration of Rothberg's ideas, I identify <i>Dunkelblum</i>’s border setting as a site of multidirectional memory that highlights the productive potential but also the difficulties of this approach. I demonstrate how the stories of Dunkelblum's inhabitants present a wide array of characters occupying positions of complex implication and argue that this focus on the implicated subject shows that it takes a village to commit and cover up a crime and to perpetuate the structures that enabled that crime into the present day.</p>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":"79 4","pages":"517-536"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.70044","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149014678","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"INTRODUCTION: THE IMPLICATED SUBJECT IN POST-1945 GERMAN-LANGUAGE LITERATURE","authors":"Karin Bauer,&nbsp;Anke Biendarra","doi":"10.1111/glal.70041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.70041","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;Drawing on Michael Rothberg's concept of ‘the implicated subject’, this special issue brings together articles that explore how German-language literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries negotiates the contested terrains of victimhood, perpetration, complicity, solidarity and their afterlives. The contributions investigate how literary texts articulate both individual and collective entanglements in systems of political, societal, colonial and sexual violence. They examine implication not only as a structural position but also as an affect: what does it mean to &lt;i&gt;feel&lt;/i&gt; implicated?1 What aesthetic strategies and narrative forms render implication visible? How do texts implicate their readers, drawing them into ethical and mnemonic constellations that blur the boundaries between guilt, responsibility and solidarity?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the German context, the analysis of implication is inseparable from the country's responsibility for the Shoah and the division of Germany in the wake of World War II. Literature's engagement with these histories remains central to debates about ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’, but recent political shifts have contributed to reframing these discourses. Chancellor Olaf Scholz's 2022 declaration of a ‘Zeitenwende’ — a watershed moment in response to Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine — marked not only a political and ideological shift towards increased military spending and military power but was also a turning point in German memory politics.2 Scholz's rhetoric reoriented national self-understanding by moving away from pacifist traditions rooted in Holocaust memory. In response, intellectuals such as Jürgen Habermas, as well as public forum debates, have re-examined earlier paradigms of remorse and reconciliation (Willi Brandt's ‘Ostpolitik’) and economic rapprochement for Eastern Europe and Russia (Angela Merkel's ‘Wandel durch Handel’), signalling that Germany's narratives of guilt, responsibility and solidarity are again being reshaped.3 More recently, cracks have begun to show in Germany's so-called ‘Staatsräson’, its unconditional commitment to supporting Israel. In the wake of 7 October 2023, Germany's relationship with Israel has become a focal point of public controversy, as critics increasingly question whether an unconditional interpretation of ‘Staatsräson’ can coexist with ethical accountability for civilian suffering and international law. In August 2025, after facing significant public pressure, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz announced the suspension of German weapons exports to Israel that could be used in Gaza. Following Israel's invasion of Gaza, popular opinion and heated discussion in the German public sphere have increasingly questioned what moral and political responsibility incurred for Germany's Nazi past precisely entails. This reconfiguration sets the stage for renewed inquiry into implication: how can historical responsibility be acknowledged while confronting present-day compli","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":"79 4","pages":"445-452"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.70041","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149014619","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"FEELING IMPLICATED: AFFECTIVE ENTANGLEMENTS IN INGEBORG BACHMANN'S ‘DAS DREIẞIGSTE JAHR’","authors":"Imke Meyer","doi":"10.1111/glal.70049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.70049","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Ingeborg Bachmann's narrative ‘Das dreißigste Jahr’, published in the eponymous 1961 short story collection, famously marks Bachmann's turn from poetry to prose. What is perhaps best described as the radical hybridity of the text's affective stylistic registers has continued to puzzle readers. If, however, the narrative is read through the prism both of Michael Rothberg's concept of the implicated subject and the concept of feeling implicated, then this radical affective hybridity becomes legible as the necessary outcome of a narrative technique that highlights the protagonist's emotional investments in and struggles against historical and present structures of injustice in which he is complexly implicated. Simultaneously, the text's generic and formal hybridity reveals the narrative's implication in the exclusionary structures of European literature and intellectual history. At the same time — and especially to the extent that the readership of Bachmann's texts recruits itself from the ‘Bildungsbürgertum’ — we as readers are likewise implicated in the systemic injustices embedded in and carried forward by the Western canon. Through its promiscuous intercourse with Western intellectual history and its radical intertextuality, Bachmann's ‘Das dreißigste Jahr’ prompts us to recognise our implication in historical and systemic injustices, to grapple with the feelings that attend this implication, and to critique it.</p><p>Ingeborg Bachmanns 1961 veröffentlichter Erzählband <i>Das dreißigste Jahr</i> und dessen gleichnamiger zentraler Text leiten bekanntlich Bachmanns Wendung von der Lyrik zur Prosa ein. Der Sinn der radikalen Hybridität der affektiven stilistischen Register des Textes erschließt sich nur schwer. Wenn wir ihn jedoch im Lichte von Michael Rothbergs Thesen zum „implicated subject“ und zum Phänomen des „feeling implicated“ betrachten, wird die radikale affektive Hybridität des Textes als Konsequenz einer Erzähltechnik lesbar, die die emotionale Verwicklung des Protagonisten in und seinen Kampf gegen geschichtlich gewachsene und gegenwärtige Unrechtsstrukturen in den Vordergrund rückt. Zugleich unterstreicht die generische und formale Hybridität der Erzählung deren Teilhabe an den ausgrenzenden Strukturen der europäischen Literatur und Geistesgeschichte. Zudem — und das ist im Besonderen der Fall, soweit sich das Lesepublikum von Bachmanns Texten aus dem Bildungsbürgertum rekrutiert — sind wir als Lesende gleichermaßen in die systemischen Unrechtsformen verwickelt, die der Kulturkanon der westlichen Welt perpetuiert. Durch seinen promisken Dialog mit der westlichen Geistesgeschichte und seine radikale Intertextualität zwingt uns Bachmanns „Dreißigstes Jahr“, unsere eigene Teilhabe an historischen und systemischen Unrechtsstrukturen zu konfrontieren und uns mit den politischen Konsequenzen und komplexen Emotionen, die mit dieser Teilhabe einhergehen, kritisch auseinanderzusetzen.</p>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":"79 4","pages":"453-471"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149014650","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"ANATOMY LESSONS: TRANS LIFE BETWEEN PORTRAITURE AND PERFORMANCE IN PAUL B. PRECIADO'S ORLANDO, MY POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY (2023)","authors":"Lawrence Alexander","doi":"10.1111/glal.70037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.70037","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article considers how trans lives are mediated across literary, painterly and filmic registers in Paul B. Preciado's <i>Orlando, My Political Biography</i> (2023). My analysis draws on Andrew Webber's development of reading practices applied to intertextual works that also exhibit interpictorial and interfilmic dynamics in his reading of a scene in Christian Petzold's <i>Barbara</i> (2012) that features the studied contemplation of Rembrandt's <i>The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp</i> (1632). I adopt Webber's reading of the surgical and theatrical space of Rembrandt's painting as a point of departure for thinking about compositional scenarios that move between modes of portraiture and performance. More specifically, I approach the process of restaging — and reimagining — the literary text as one that can also render the construction and performance of trans and nonbinary identities in Preciado's personal and political documentary. In turn, I argue that the disposition of scientific investigation as an analogue for critical cultural work frames Preciado's invitation to read closely and queerly for the material and mediated presence of trans subjects across history and a range of media: from the printed page to contemporary art cinema.</p>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":"79 3","pages":"419-436"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2026-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.70037","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148147032","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"TALKING CROWS AND A FIG-TREE NARRATOR: THE UNCANNY AND THE GROTESQUE IN ÖZDAMAR'S EIN VON SCHATTEN BEGRENZTER RAUM AND SHAFAK'S THE ISLAND OF MISSING TREES","authors":"Elizabeth Boa","doi":"10.1111/glal.70034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.70034","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Emine Sevgi Özdamars <i>Ein von Schatten begrenzter Raum</i> und Elif Shafaks <i>The Island of Missing Trees</i> erschienen beide im Jahr 2021. Die Handlungen beider finden sowohl auf Mittelmeerinseln sowie in europäischen Hauptstädten statt, in Berlin und in London. Beide handeln von politisch motivierter extremer Gewalttätigkeit. Özdamars Erzählerin zitiert den armenischen Genozid von 1915, der der Gründung des türkischen Nationalstaates in 1923 vorausging, sowie einen Völkeraustausch, der die gemischte griechisch/türkische Bevölkerung auf Lesbos und auf einer unbenannten Insel in der Nähe der türkischen Küste in einsprachige Bevölkerungsgruppen verwandelte. Eine Episode erinnert an die Flächenbombardierung von Berlin im Zweiten Weltkrieg; ein Schuhkarton voller Zeitungsausschnitte über Jahrzehnte hinweg seit dem zweiten Weltkrieg dokumentiert politisch motivierte Gewalttätikeit in der Türkei. Shafaks Roman blickt aus der Gegenwart in London auf ethnisch begründete Feindseligkeiten auf Zypern in den siebziger Jahren zurück, die die Insel in getrennte griechische und türkische Zonen aufteilte, sowie auf einen homophobisch motivierten Mord, bei dem die Leichen in einen alten Brunnen geworfen wurden: Zypern ist eine Insel vermisster Körper. Groteske Figuren, Mischungen von Mensch und Tier oder Mensch und Pflanze spielen eine Rolle in beiden Romanen: Özdamars Krähenchor und ein berlinernder Moskito und Shafaks Feigenbaumerzähler. Auch magisch-realistische Episoden schaffen Distanz zum Grauenhaften und vermitteln das Traumatische im Modus des Lachens.</p>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":"79 3","pages":"384-395"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2026-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148147182","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}