This book explores how literary texts by five German-speaking women writers conceptualize contemporary German and Austrian identities — especially but not only gender identities — in ethically instructive ways. The writers — Birgit Vanderbeke, Dorothea Grünzweig, Antje Rávic Strubel, Anna Mitgutsch, and Barbara Honigmann — reveal how factors such as sexuality, ethnicity, religion, and disability affect the status and comfort of the subject. They problematize the categories of gender and nation, revealing them to be artificial and restrictive — though still pertinent and influential — and they suggest more inclusive and nuanced ways of framing identities in a postmodern, globalized...

Postmodernism is widely understood to privilege disunity over coherence, leaving morality an uncertain business. If the subject is joyously free and nomadic, how can attachments to others emerge and persist? The “strange subjects” this study explores all in fact assert ethical behaviors alongside, or within, mobility. As the work of Sara Ahmed and Rosi Braidotti implies, a refusal to be fixed and bounded is indeed a prerequisite for an openness to engage with others. The subject’s performances are in any case always relational. This insight comes to the fore in the work of Birgit Vanderbeke, a writer who also challenges...

Strange subjects trouble postmodernist notions of disembodied, free-floating individuals and masculinist models of knowledge production. They also challenge anthropocentric accounts of the world, opening up space for human/nonhuman connections and for “creature comforts,” a term to which I will return. In this chapter, I explore the intersection of nomadism with green thought, specifically with ecofeminism, and argue that the poetry of Dorothea Grünzweig enacts an “economadic” challenge to rapacious global capitalism. Such a challenge is urgent in light of the widely acknowledged, ongoing destruction of the natural environment by humans, or “the impending extinction of our biosphere.”¹

Dorothea Grünzweig was...

We have seen how nomadism involves a challenge to masculinist ways of knowing and to arrogant humanism. In this chapter, I introduce the idea of queer nomadism, which opposes both nationalism and heterosexism. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s ideas concerning orientation to read the work of Antje Rávic Strubel, I argue that Strubel’s works practice an aesthetics of disorientation. This disorientation is bound up with and expressive of a specifically post-Wende, East German form of trouble, as we will see.¹

Antje Strubel² was born in Potsdam in 1974, and grew up in Ludwigsfelde in the GDR. After leaving school in 1992,...

The question of memory has already surfaced explicitly at points during my discussions of Vanderbeke, Grünzweig, and Strubel. Memory has of necessity pervaded and fueled this study. As Andreas Huyssen notes, “All representation … is based on memory,” and all remembering involves representation. The past is not simply there in memory, it needs to be articulated actually to become memory. History thus involves a dynamic reworking of the past in the present, where these terms are not fixed or static; Huyssen refers to the “tenuous fissure” between the two.¹ In the context of post-Holocaust Germany and Austria, the past and...

Upon receipt of the 2006 Jeanette Schocken Prize, Barbara Honigmann discussed the fearful encounter with the other, or:

die Angst vor dem Blick des anderen, der einen entlarven könnte, weil man ja meistens eine Maske trägt, die verbergen soll, was wir auch im Gesicht des anderen nicht wahrnehmen wollen: Verletzlichkeit und Vergänglichkeit.

[the fear of the other’s gaze, with its potential to unmask you, because you normally wear a mask, after all, one meant to hide what you don’t want to see in the face of the other, either: vulnerability and mortality.]¹

This reflection on self and other merges the...

Nomadic ethics involves effortful, ongoing encounters with unknowable others. It entails a rejection of normative thinking and a commitment to open-ended ways of being and becoming. It rests on a view of the subject as a genealogical, ecological, embodied entity. A nomadic stance counters domination, exclusion, violence, and the denial of difference. The writers I have examined demonstrate both the impediments to and the urgency of ethical nomadism.

Vanderbeke shows how subjects are interpellated by superficial dominant discourses and become self-serving and unthinking, and how the media and advertising conspire to produce fragmented, dissatisfied societies. In Das Muschelessen, she exposes...