A striking feature of today's German literature is the survival of an East German subculture characterized by its authors' self-reflexive concern with their own lives, not only in texts labeled as autobiography but also those in the more ambiguous territory of what Christa Wolf has called -subjective authenticity.- Dennis Tate provides the first detailed account of this phenomenon: its origins in the 1930s' exile debates, its evolution during the GDR's lifespan, and its manifestations in the work of five East German authors still widely read today: Brigitte Reimann, Franz Fuhmann, Stefan...

Dislocation and the need for radical reorientation are central experiences in 20th-century German history. Much of German culture has also consisted of reflections on and responses to the historical caesurae of 1933, 1945 and 1989-90, and the massive political, social and economic changes that accompanied them. In the first instance, dislocation and reorientation are to be understood in the physical sense, i.e. the loss of their homes in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia by Jewish and Communist emigres after 1933, by Germans in Eastern Europe after 1945, and by disaffected individuals...

Twenty years on from the dramatic events that led to the opening of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the GDR, the subjective dimension of German unification is still far from complete. The nature of the East German state remains a matter of cultural as well as political debate. This volume of new research focuses on competing memories of the GDR and the ways they have evolved in the mass media, literature, and film since 1989-90. Taking as its point of departure the impact of iconic visual images of the fall of the Wall on our understanding of the historical GDR, the volume first considers...