Debating German Cultural Identity Since 1989

Interdisciplinary views of the debates over and transformation of German cultural identity since unification.

The events of 1989 and German unification were seismic historical moments. Although 1989 appeared to signify a healing of the war-torn history of the twentieth century, unification posed the question of German cultural identity afresh. Politicians, historians, writers, filmmakers, architects, and the wider public engaged in "memory contests" over such questions as the legitimacy of alternative biographies, West German hegemony, and the normalization of German history. This dynamic, contested, and still ongoing transformation of German cultural identity is the topic of this volume of new essays by scholars from the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States, and Ireland. It exploresGerman cultural identity by way of a range of disciplines including history, film studies, architectural history, literary criticism, memory studies, and anthropology, avoiding a homogenized interpretation. Charting the complex and often contradictory processes of cultural identity formation, the volume reveals the varied responses that continue to accompany the project of unification.

Contributors: Pertti Ahonen, Aleida Assmann, Elizabeth Boa,Peter Fritzsche, Anne Fuchs, Deniz Göktürk, Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Anja K. Johannsen, Jennifer A. Jordan, Jürgen Paul, Linda Shortt, Andrew J. Webber. Anne Fuchs is Professor of German Literature at the University of St.Andrews, Scotland. Kathleen James-Chakraborty is Professor of Art History at University College Dublin, Ireland. Linda Shortt is Lecturer in German at Bangor University, Wales.

Kinda Shortt is Associate Professor at the University of Warwick. Her research focuses on concepts of place, belonging, and attachment in
twentieth- and twenty-first-century German-language literature and film. Significant publications in this area include: "Borders, Bordering,
and Irregular Migration in Novels by Dorothee Elmiger and Olga Grjasnowa," MLR 116, no. 1 (2021): 134-52; and German Narratives
of Belonging: Writing Generation and Place in the Twenty-first Century (Oxford: Legenda, 2015).