Monatshefte

Studies of colonialism and postcolonialism in German literature got off to a slow start. In comparison with the vast British Empire, the history of German colonialism seemed brief and limited in geographical range, its impact on German literature relatively insignificant. In the late 1990s the situation began to change: Susanne Zantop's landmark Colonial Fantasies (1997) made it clear that long before Germans actually possessed colonies, they were both participants in colonial ventures by other nations and harbored pre-colonial fantasies of their own. Significant studies began to appear around this time, including The Imperialist Imagination (1998), an anthology that Zantop co-edited with Sara Friedrichsmeyer and Sara Lennox; two volumes edited by Paul Michael Lützeler, Der postkoloniale Blick (1997) and Schriftsteller und 'Dritte Welt' (1998); and monographs such as Nina Berman's Orientalismus, Kolonialismus und Moderne (1997), Russell A. Berman's Enlightenment or Empire (1998), and Azade Seyhan's Writing Outside the Nation (2001). As we approach the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, it would be difficult to imagine German Studies in America without its pervasive interest in questions of national identity and cross-cultural exchange. Investigations of colonialism and postcolonialism in German literature have broadened to include topics as old as the impact of the Crusades on the Western imagination and as recent as the hybrid cultures of today's Germany, linked by migration and communication with global culture, and haunted by the memory of the National Socialist past.

As Axel Dunker observes in his introduction to this excellent new anthology, Literaturwissenschaftler in Germany have been even slower to discuss the impact of colonialism and postcolonialism on German literature than their North American colleagues. Dunker seeks to change this situation by importing "Impulse der angloamerikanischen Literatur- und Kulturtheorie" into Germany. The essays collected in this volume were first presented as papers at a conference in February, 2004 hosted by the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. Herbert Uerlings begins with a programmatic essay on "Kolonialer Diskurs und Deutsche Literatur" that introduces arguments echoed elsewhere in the volume: that colonial discourse in literature is not limited to the few decades in which Germany actually possessed colonies; that questions of colonialism and postcolonialism are linked to the interrelated categories of race, class, gender, and sexuality; that there are structural similarities between the position of Jews and other minorities in Germany and foreigners abroad; and that Weltliteratur should be understood not as a series of individual masterworks, but as a communication network created by literature that extends beyond national borders to create a form of cultural globalization.

Jochen Dubiel writes about eighteenth-century definitions of race in relation to the concept of hybridity; Hansjörg Bay provides a critical survey of the literature on Kleist's Verlobung in St. Domingo; John K. Noyes insists that colonialism was widely discussed in Germany around 1800 before focusing more closely on themes of [End Page 432] mobility and Bildung in Goethe; Uwe Schwagmeier explores Fontane's reception of James Fenimore Cooper; Axel Dunker applies Edward Said's technique of "contrapuntal" reading to Raabe's Stopfkuchen, reminding readers that colonialism was not just something that happened "over there," but had repercussions back home as well; Dirk Göttsche examines the mixture of cross-cultural understanding and prejudice in Peter Altenberg's Ashantee sketches; Wolfgang Struck notes the impact of colonial fantasies on German Expressionist literature; Alexander Honold writes about Kafka's Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer in the context of the polymorphous Austro-Hungarian Empire; Paul Michael Lützeler provides an important discussion of the "spatial turn" in recent literary studies before demonstrating how memories of war and the immediate postwar period in Germany inform representations of the "Third World" in works by Uwe Timm, Nicolas Born, and Günter Grass; Monika Albrecht looks at contemporary novels by Michael Krüger and Jeannette Lander from a postcolonial perspective; and Judith Ryan concludes the volume with a sensitive reading of Sebald's Austerlitz.

Taken together, the various contributions demonstrate two broader points: that questions of colonialism and postcolonialism are more central to German literature than previously imagined, and that cross-cultural dialog can occur among scholars as well as in literary texts. At a time when the bipolar worlds of German Germanistik and North American German Studies have again been accused of going their separate ways, it is encouraging to see evidence of productive exchange.