13 - German-language writing from eastern and central Europe

Summary

Germany's Turkish-German writers have attracted much critical attention, particularly in the UK and the USA, and its German-Jewish writers are beginning to do the same, yet the treatment of writers from, or whose parents were from, former eastern bloc countries other than the GDR has been patchy. While several prize-winning authors fall into this category, their works remain underresearched. This chapter argues that in recent years these writers have made not only a distinguished but also a distinctive contribution to German literature and that, despite the varied nature of their writing, there is a strong case, at present at least, for considering their works collectively.

The reasons why this body of writing exists at all have to do firstly with the presence of large numbers of Germans in the countries of eastern and central Europe from the middle ages until the mid to late twentieth century. This was a result of successive waves of colonisation from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries. Germans tended to dominate the region economically and the German minorities were privileged under Habsburg rule up to the collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918. Secondly, the fall of communism and the economic success of the Federal Republic of Germany have led to a wave of migration to Germany of ethnic Germans but also of many others from eastern and central Europe since 1990.