The profound political and social changes Germany has undergone since 1989 have been reflected in an extraordinarily rich range of contemporary writing. Contemporary German Fiction focuses on the debates that have shaped the politics and culture of the new Germany that has emerged from the second half of the 1990s onwards and offers the first comprehensive account of key developments in German literary fiction within their social and historical context. Each chapter begins with an overview of a central theme, such as East German writing, West German writing, writing on the Nazi past, writing...

This book is a comprehensive study of the nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine. Anthony Phelan examines the complete range of Heine's work, from the early poetry and 'Pictures of Travel' to the last poems, including personal polemic and journalism. Phelan provides original and detailed readings of Heine's major poetry and throws fresh light on his virtuoso political performances that have too often been neglected by critics. Through his critical relationship with Romanticism, Heine confronted the problem of modernity in startlingly original ways that still speak to the concerns of...

Stefan Heym was Hitler's youngest literary exile. This book, the first full-length study of Heym to appear in English, outlines his exciting career, which culminated in his becoming the major dissident of the German Democratic Republic. It focuses primarily on his journalism and his novels, some of which have been translated into over twenty languages, but also discusses his earliest, almost unknown, poetry and drama. Peter Hutchinson pays special attention to the way in which Heym's defiance of a repressive regime inspired others and paved the way for the new Eastern European literature.