Besprechungen / Reviews 359 K ATHARINA G ERSTENBERGER : Writing the New Berlin: The German Capital in Post- Wall Literature. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008. 220 pp. $ 75. Katharina Gerstenberger’s new book, Writing the New Berlin, is an important contribution to the ongoing examinations of the shift in cultural and literary production in post-unification Germany. Her focus on representations of Berlin in the 1990s highlights the German-specific reunification process but also contextualizes it within the ongoing processes of modernization and globalization. Gerstenberger begins the study by recounting the myriad calls by literary critics and cultural pundits for a Berlin reunification novel in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She is quick to point out that such a novel never materialized. Germany and the Germans were, Gerstenberger surmises, too diverse, German history too complicated, and the changes that German society was undergoing too problematic to be captured in a single novel about the newly reunited capital of one of Europe’s newest and increasingly diverse nation states. Adding to the impossibility of the reunification novel was the rapid realignment of cultural production and the relative marginalization of literature that took place as part of the process of normalization that followed the end of the Cold War in Germany. It is the non-arrival of the so-called «reunification novel» that is the starting point of Gerstenberger’s study. She focuses on the hundreds of other texts that fill the void of the never-to-be-written Berlin reunification novel and which, in a more limited fashion, negotiate the shifts in the socio-cultural landscape of Berlin and the post-wall German identities that take form there. Her task is thus twofold: to trace how German identity is constructed and negotiated within the texts she examines while remaining conscious of the changes in cultural production that come to bear on literature during the period. The book is divided into five chapters with an introduction and conclusion. Each chapter is dedicated to a thematically oriented examination of the varied ways in which identity has been renegotiated in Berlin literature in the 1990s. The first chapter focuses on the city and its erotic sites; the second on the monstrous scars of Berlin’s past, namely the Holocaust and the Wall; the third on the imagining of a Jewish Berlin; the fourth on negotiating the disappearance of East Berlin; and the fifth on the attempt to find new perspectives at the building site of Postdamer Platz, a space in which the national past comes into conflict with a global, internationally oriented future. The five chapters can each be read individually but are also connected by an underlying logic of historical trajectory. The first chapter examines literary connections to the erotic Berlin of the Weimar Republic and leads into the second chapter, which explores the monstrosity of the Holocaust and the traces left on the post-Nazi city. Chapter three then goes on to investigate the possibilities for a post-Holocaust Jewish space in Berlin and leads to an examination of the vanishing East in chapter four. Both of these chapters focus on the literary representations of voids and absences in present-day Berlin. Chapter five moves the study into the future and explores the active renegotiation of German identity as it is found in representations of the Potsdamer Platz, a space that, in one way or another, links the previously discussed themes and points toward a German future in a global context. CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 359 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 359 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 360 Besprechungen / Reviews The strength of Gerstenberger’s book lies in the wealth of her primary materials. She introduces close to three hundred primary works and gives excellent introductory readings of many of these, including works by Peter Schneider, Christa Wolf, Tanja Dückers, Ingo Schramm, Zafer Senocak, and Yadé Kara. This wealth of material is, unfortunately, also the weakness of the study. There are times when the reader wonders why a particular author’s work was included and another work or author left out. One wonders why a particular passage is quoted in full but so much of the novel left unexamined. The answer seems to be that those works and passages that fit best with the themes which Gerstenberger chose to organize her book around were included and cited extensively while much of the material that didn’t fit these themes was left out or marginalized. This is, of course, the danger inherent in any work that attempts to broadly survey the literary production of a period while exploring particular themes across works. What I found lacking was a compelling argument as to why the work was organized around the themes Gerstenberger chose. Did these themes emerge from her extensive readings of 1990s Berlin literature? Or were the themes chosen because of their relative importance as commonplaces of the discourse on modern German identity? One suspects the latter, but Gerstenberger never makes this clear. In all fairness though, the project is not intended to be encyclopedic, and Gerstenberger manages to provide a good overview of the period with some particularly interesting readings based on the themes she chose to highlight. What I found more troubling was the elevated status some works acquired simply because they resonated with and where seen to explore the identity themes around which the study was organized. One wonders, for example, why Thomas Brussig’s Helden wie wir and Judith Hermann’s Sommerhaus, später receive a passing paragraph while Tanja Dückers’s Spielzone is discussed in great detail. I still need to be convinced that Dückers’s work is somehow more significant to the renegotiation of post-unification German identity than the others. I think one could just as easily make the opposite case. Nevertheless, the study offers sound, well-researched insights into the works examined and should be included alongside works like Stuart Taberner’s German Literature of the 1990s and Beyond and Moritz Baßler’s Der deutsche Pop-Roman by scholars and students hoping to understand German literary production in the 1990s. Just as our ideas about cultural production in the Weimar period continue to evolve with historical distance, so too will our understanding of the profound changes in German culture in the 1990s. Gerstenberger should be commended for tackling such difficult material so soon. Her book helps lay the groundwork for future studies of the period. University of Kentucky Jeff Rogers S TUART P ARKES : Writers and Politics in Germany, 1945-2008. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009. x + 239 pp. $ 65. Perhaps the title of the present study may not immediately reveal to the reader that the author is dealing with a time-honored topic that particularly in a German context is frequently couched in the antithetically perceived terms of «Geist und Macht.» But in his introduction Parkes does provide a brief survey of the problematic relationship CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 360 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 360 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38