In the late 1990s, in the wake of German
unification, multiculturalism, and globalization, a
surge of historical novels about German colonialism in
Africa and its previously neglected legacies hit the
German literary scene. This development, accelerated by
the centenary in 2004 of Germany's colonial war in
South-West Africa, has continued to the present, making
colonialism an established theme of literary
memorialization alongside Germany's dominant memory
themes - National Socialism and the Holocaust, the
former GDR and its demise in the Wende, and, more
recently, "1968." This is the first comprehensive study
of contemporary German literature's intense engagement
with German colonialism and with Germany's wider
involvement in European colonialism. Building on the
author's decade of research and publication in the
field, the book discusses some fifty novels by German,
Swiss, and Austrian writers, among them Hans Christoph
Buch, Alex Capus, Christof Hamann, Lukas Hartmann, Ilona
Maria Hilliges, Giselher W. Hoffmann, Dieter Kühn,
Hermann Schulz, Gerhard Seyfried, Thomas von
Steinaecker, Uwe Timm, Ilija Trojanow, and Stephan
Wackwitz. Drawing on international postcolonial theory,
the German tradition of cross-cultural literary studies,
and on memory studies, the book brings the hitherto
neglected German case to the international debate in
postcolonial literary studies. Dirk Göttsche is
Professor of German at the University of
Nottingham.
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