German Student Movement and the Literary Imagination
Through a close reading of novels by Ulrike Kolb, Irmtraud Morgner, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Bernhard Schlink, Peter Schneider, and Uwe Timm, this book traces the cultural memory of the 1960s student movement in German fiction, revealing layers of remembering and forgetting that go beyond conventional boundaries of time and space. These novels engage this contestation by constructing a palimpsest of memories that reshape readers’ understanding of the 1960s with respect to the end of the Cold War, the legacy of the Third Reich, and the Holocaust. Topographically, these novels refute assertions that East Germans were isolated from the political upheaval that took place in the late 1960s and 1970s. Through their aesthetic appropriations and subversions, these multicultural contributions challenge conventional understandings of German identity and at the same time lay down claims of belonging within a German society that is more openly diverse than ever before.
Susanne Rinner is Assistant Professor of German Studies and regular program faculty in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Most recently, she edited a special issue of International Poetry Review focused on poetry written in German by bilingual and multicultural poets. She has published several articles on contemporary German literature and is working on a book-length study of intermediality and intertextuality in contemporary German culture.