Introduction: Imaginaries of Eastern Europe Brangwen Stone, Nora Gortcheva, and Anca Luca Holden The University of Sydney/ Mount Holyoke College / University of Massachusetts, Amherst There exists a long history of immigrants, refugees, and ethnic Germans hailing from outside the German-speaking states who have significantly enriched and productively undermined a narrow understanding of German culture, thereby complicating the very definition of German identity. Eastern Europe in particular has consistently played a role as an imaginary through which the German-speaking world has reflected upon itself. The so-called “refugee crisis,” which reached its height in the late summer of 2015, has once again revived the relevance of Eastern Europe� In the German imagination, Eastern Europe functions both as a vague geographic location and a placeholder for European civilizational anxieties and ambitions, but Eastern Europe is also a continuing force in German cultural life through writers, intellectuals, and artists of Eastern European origin. At the peak of the “refugee crisis,” relations between Germany and a number of Eastern European nations became increasingly tense, as these saw Chancellor Angela Merkel’s declaration of welcome as leading to a further influx of refugees and bristled at her suggestion that each nation accept a quota of refugees� Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban was most outspoken in his criticism, arguing that Merkel’s Willkommenskultur had “encouraged terrorism and spread fear” (Paterson n. pag.). Since Orban’s 2016 comments, the arrival of refugees in Germany has slowed down due to the closure of the “Balkan route,” and a number of German-language writers of Eastern European background have engaged with the “refugee crisis,” reflecting on parallels between their own fates and those of the refugees arriving in Germany now. Herta Müller, for example, wrote a short piece for Bild entitled “Ich war auch ein Flüchtling,” evoking both those who fled from Nazi Germany and from Eastern European dictatorships� In the instance of Ilja Trojanow’s 2017 Nach der Flucht , and Wladimir Kaminer’s 2018 Ausgerechnet Deutschland: Geschichten unserer neuen Nachbarn , two well-known authors of Eastern European descent have reflected on flight and refugees in a non-fictional context. In Julya Rabinowich’s 2016 Dazwischen: Ich , and Olga Grjasnowa’s 2017 Gott ist nicht schüchtern flight is central, but the 4 Brangwen Stone, Nora Gortcheva, and Anca Luca Holden “refugee crisis” has also made its way into a number of other texts by Eastern European authors in recent years. Thus in Saša Stanišić’s 2016 collection of short stories, Fallensteller , Syrian refugees appear in three different stories in a variety of locales ranging from Stockholm through the Norwegian-Russian border to East Germany. In Cătălin Dorian Florescu’s 2017 collection Der Nabel der Welt , a number of stories feature refugees, one for instance centering on a Romanian border guard who decides to let a Syrian refugee cross the border, even giving him his own shoes, and two stories contain hordes of refugees arriving in a wealthy holiday town (Rügen and St� Moritz) to the great consternation of the locals� Florescu, who is a Romanian-born award-winning Swiss author, also overtly makes a comparison between the current wave of refugees and the earlier arrival of migrants: “Das Phänomen ähnelt stark der großen Migration der Fünfziger und Sechziger Jahre aus dem armen europäischen Süden nach Nordeuropa” (Florescu 9). In her influential 2008 article on contemporary German, Swiss, and Austrian literature, Brigid Haines identified an “Eastern turn,” evoking Leslie Adelson’s earlier concept of a “Turkish turn” but also marking an expansion of the traditional migrant canon. In her article Haines discusses “the collective contribution of a new wave of writers from Eastern Europe and former Yugoslavia,” who have resettled in German-speaking countries shortly before or since the fall of communism (136). Despite arguing that the literary works of the “Eastern turn” resist “containment and collective treatment while overlapping and intersecting with other kinds of contemporary German-language literature,” Haines outlines five characteristics she contends they share (137—38). These are: (1) a content, focusing on the period from the end of World War II to the fall of communism in 1989 and its aftermath; (2) an autobiographical perspective that accounts experiences and memories of life in the Eastern Bloc under and after the influence of the Soviet regime; (3) a tendency to focus on enlightening and informing Western readers about their Eastern neighbors; (4) successful marketability due “to the perceived exoticism of foreign location in general and to depictions of the newly accessible east in a vastly expanded EU in particular”; and (5) an “accessible prose with a strong element of storytelling” (138—39). Nine articles (including an interview with Herta Müller and her translator Philip Boehm) published in a 2015 special issue of German Life and Letters (“The Eastern European Turn in Contemporary German-Language Literature,” eds. Brigid Haines and Anca Luca Holden) further engage with Haines’s idea of the “Eastern turn” in contemporary German-language literature by offering indepth discussions and analyses of works from post-“Wende” German-speaking countries and post-communist Europe� Authors discussed in the nine essays include Irena Brezna, Terézia Mora, Marica Bodrozic, Ilma Rakusa, Zsuza Bank, Introduction: Imaginaries of Eastern Europe 5 Melinda Abonji, Eleonora Hummel, Ludwig Laher, Kurt Drawert, Lutz Seiler, and Jan Faktor. Immigration, the relationship between language(s), cold war divisions and identity, journeys eastwards, and the impact of the rise and collapse of political regimes on the development and shifts of memories are major themes tackled in the volume, arguing that the “Eastern turn” is both a subset and a development in German-language literature as a whole (Haines, “Introduction” 145). The articles in this special issue of Colloquia Germanica result from a series of panels titled “German Imaginaries of Eastern Europe” at the 2017 conference of the German Studies Association in Atlanta. The findings presented in this special issue support Haines’s observation that the works of German-language writers of Eastern European descent “resist containment within historical, national or linguistic categories” (“Introduction” 146), yet they also show that the writing of such authors need not necessarily focus on the communist period in the Eastern Bloc, be autobiographical, or be intended to educate Western readers about their Eastern neighbors. Furthermore, the articles reflect on trends in the writing of the “Eastern turn” that have undoubtedly become stronger since the publication of the German Life and Letters special issue and were not originally discussed by Haines� One such development is the rise in writing by German-Jewish authors of Eastern European origin. Noting Haines’s concept of the “Eastern turn,” Maria Roca Lizarazu argues that “German-Jewish literature in particular has seen a surge in voices from Eastern Europe (Alina Bronsky, Lena Gorelik, Olga Grjasnowa, Vladimir Kaminer and Vladmir Vertlib, for example)” (Lizarazu 169). This increase of German-Jewish voices of Eastern European origin is indicative of a broader shift in Germany’s Jewish communities as a result of an influx of Jews from the former Soviet Union as Kontingentflüchtlinge (quota refugees). Between the early 1990s and 2005, when new restrictions were introduced, approximately 200,000 Kontingentflüchtlinge arrived in Germany (Weiss and Gorelik). While many of these refugees were not practicing Jews, they explicitly identified as Jewish; in fact, this was a prerequisite for being granted refugee status in Germany (Mueller and Garloff 3). This wave of immigration reshaped and revived the Jewish community in Germany, and as of 2017 more than 90 percent of members of Jewish communities in Germany now stem from the former Soviet Union (Belkin n. pag.). A number of scholars have noted that the work of these authors (to which one can add others not mentioned by Lizarazu such as Katja Petrowskaja and Sasha Marianna Salzmann, for example) does not focus on the Holocaust to the same extent as earlier German-Jewish writing. Lizarazu argues that Jewish authors of Eastern European origin have shifted their focus to “the issues surrounding transnational Jewish identities in modern-day Germany” (Lizarazu 169), and Stuart Taberner similarly suggests 6 Brangwen Stone, Nora Gortcheva, and Anca Luca Holden that they center on “the often harsh reality of immigration to Germany” (Taberner 919)� Yet a number of these novels also center on life in the Soviet era, thus leading Agnes Mueller and Katja Garloff to posit that more recent traumatic events such as the Stalin era, Soviet anti-Semitism, and the interethnic conflicts following the collapse of several Eastern European states “are more immediate historical reference than the Holocaust” for Jewish authors from the former Soviet Union (7—8). In her contribution to this special issue, Anita Lukic discusses the 2011 autofiction Titos Brille by the German-Jewish author Adriana Altaras (who fled Yugoslavia as a small child in the 1960s) as a model of the dialogic production of memory that could ground a postnational understanding of Europe� Lukic analyzes Altaras’s novel against the national narratives of the newly formed states after the Balkan civil wars of the 1990, which tend to refute the Yugoslav ideology of brotherhood and unity and justify the inevitability of the wars� Lukic responds to Haines’s claims about the collective contribution of contemporary writers from Eastern Europe and former Yugoslavia in detail, arguing that such works do not fit Haines’s parameters for literature of the “Eastern turn.” Noting that Haines acknowledges Yugoslavia’s special political status as a non-member of the Warsaw Pact, Lukic contends that texts by writers from the defunct state are outliers within the “Eastern turn” due to this special status. In addition, because of their content they neither fit within the general thematic concerns of the “Eastern turn” nor do they share “the common mission to enlighten and inform Western readers about their eastern neighbors,” as Westerners could and did visit Yugoslavia (Haines, “The Eastern Turn” 138). Lukic suggests that while some authors from the former Yugoslavia continue to play into readers’ appetite for cultural clichés, particularly through a focus on the Balkan wars, Altaras’s novel defies these expectations. Instead, Titos Brille establishes a dialogical relationship between writer and readers where the latter are addressed as interlocutors and not as cultural consumers� Lukic’s close reading draws on David Herman’s “contextual anchoring” in which the readers actively search for analogies between the text and the real world. Analyzing Altaras’s innovative use of the dybbuk, a figure from Jewish folklore, Lukic shows that Altaras inscribes the Jewish experience into the founding myth of socialist Yugoslavia and reintroduces anti-fascist resistance into discussions about postnational memory in the European context. Lukic further evinces that the second-person address in Titos Brille implicates the readers directly in a reconstruction of Yugoslavia’s anti-fascist legacy� Laura Bohn Case’s contribution to this special issue focuses on an earlier era of German engagement with Eastern Europe, analyzing Robert Musil’s 1924 intimate autobiographical novella “Tonka.” In “Tonka” an unnamed protagonist Introduction: Imaginaries of Eastern Europe 7 remembers his dead lover Tonka who died from a sexually transmitted disease a few days after giving birth to their stillborn son. Case suggests that the narrator’s desire for Tonka’s silence is central to the novella, situating the novella within linguistic history to develop her argument that the restriction of Tonka’s language mirrors an increasingly monolingual identity, which she contends was replacing the previous possibility of multilingual identities within the late Austrian Empire� Case reads Tonka’s silence through the lens of psycho-narration, contending that in “Tonka” it undermines the primacy of speech and enables Tonka to communicate despite the narrator’s desire for her silence. Through the novella’s criticism of speech and Musil’s complex use of psycho-narration, Case suggests that Tonka’s identity can be understood beyond the silence desired by her lover - not least because of her Czech bilingualism� Case concludes by arguing that the novella attributes Tonka’s death to the narrator’s inability to understand and accept her as an equal interlocutor, and suggests that the death of Tonka reveals Musil’s mourning for a lost multilingual German identity, which is, as she notes, uniquely Habsburgian. In her article, Anca Luca Holden discusses the two-part volume Ausreiseantrag. Begrüßungsgeld (1991) by Banat-born German-Romanian writer Richard Wagner, tackling the issue of German identity and marginalization in Ceauşescu’s Romania and in West Germany of the 1980s� Holden observes that the volume exposes parallel practices of marginalizing German-Romanians in both countries but also notes major differences. She argues that in the first part of the volume, “Ausreiseantrag,” which takes place in Romania, “German-Romanian cultural identity becomes fragmented to the point of being almost annihilated.” In the second part, “Begrüßungsgeld,” characters are similarly challenged to defend their “Germanness,” this time in West Germany. This comes as a shock since the characters’ conceptualization of “Germany” is not a territorial state but a “Kulturnation” - an imaginary cultural space that includes parts of Eastern Europe which they, as ethnic Germans from Romania, felt that they were part of. However, despite their efforts to prove their “Germanness,” Wagner’s characters continue to be perceived as foreigners and outsiders by the locals� Holden concludes that they nevertheless successfully come to terms with and combine Banat-Swabian, Romanian, and West German legacies. Significantly, formal and stylistic devices in Ausreiseantrag. Begrüßungsgeld capture the traumatizing effects of private and public alienation in the struggle for a distinct identity. Holden’s analysis effectively demonstrates how language itself becomes a thematic preoccupation in the text and a key site of negotiation. From linguistic contamination by totalitarian slogans and total paralysis in “Ausreiseantrag” to a split in narrative voices, attempts to imitate West German expressions, and eventual multi-lingual empowerment in “Begrüßungsgeld,” language most 8 Brangwen Stone, Nora Gortcheva, and Anca Luca Holden saliently captures the inner crisis and its overcoming by the German-Romanian main character� Importantly, language also serves as a shelter in the protagonist’s perpetual state of in-betweenness, offering a complex, indeed hybrid, vision of German identity� Writing about two recent novels by former Kontingentflüchtlinge from the Soviet Union, Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Außer Sich (2017) and Olga Grjasnowa’s Gott ist nicht schüchtern (2017) , Brangwen Stone draws a much-needed parallel between German-Jewish and Soviet-Jewish experiences and present-day suffering of Syrian refugees and transgender people� Importantly, Stone applies Michael Rothberg’s concept of “multidirectional memory” (which suggests that instead of understanding cultural memory as competitive and fearing that memory of one historical event may eclipse memory of another, representations of different traumatic histories can coexist, even across substantially different time periods, negotiating, cross-referencing and borrowing from each other) and details how both novels relate discrimination in the past to present violence against different marginalized groups. In her analysis of Salzmann’s Außer Sich, Stone reveals notable similarities between Soviet anti-Semitism and aggression against transgender people today� In contrast, Grjasnowa’s Gott ist nicht schüchtern, Stone argues, relates the experience of Syrian refugees to victims of Nazi persecution� Critically, such analogies establish what Rothberg has called “complex acts of solidarity” aiming to evoke empathy for the marginalized. Considering Judith Butler’s concepts of “grievable” and “ungrievable” lives, Stone compellingly shows that such affective work not only gives voice to but, most importantly, renders “human” the experience of refugees and transgender people� In the final article in this special issue, Nora Gortcheva expands the consideration of German imaginaries of Eastern Europe to the medium of film by exploring Berlin school director Valeska Grisebach’s 2017 film Western � She suggests that Grisebach departs from German clichés about Eastern Europe to propose a different take on the region through what Gortcheva describes as reflexive unmapping � Inspired by the genre of the Western, as the title indicates, Grisebach’s Western is set in a Bulgarian village near the Greek border and focuses on the interaction between German construction workers and the locals as the Germans prepare to build a hydroelectric power plant. After canvassing the historical conception of the “Wild East,” with special attention given to the period following the fall of the Iron Curtain that Grisebach has explicitly referred to in interviews, Gortcheva suggests that it is imaginaries of the present that are more resonant for the film and analyses contemporary iterations of such imaginaries including those of Eastern barbarity and Eastern Europe as an orientalized frontier during the so-called “refugee crisis.” Gortcheva’s ap- Introduction: Imaginaries of Eastern Europe 9 proach draws on Yuliya Komska’s notion of unmapping which challenges the “cartographic mandate” of this imaginary of Eastern Europe, an imaginary that conceptualizes Eastern Europe as in-between, periphery, or bridge and thus limits narratives about and scholarly approaches to Eastern Europe� Noting that Komska criticizes the way in which notions of betweenness and contiguity are central to mapping, Gortcheva suggests that reimagining the “Wild East” would involve unmapping and searching for discontiguities. Through a series of close readings, Gortcheva proposes that Western undertakes a process of reflexive unmapping , unmaking borders in filmic content, form, and style. Together, the five contributions to this special issue consider how relationships between the German-speaking world and Eastern Europe are depicted in cultural productions of the twentieth and twenty-first century. The works explored here range from novella, to novel, to autofiction and fiction film, but they all reflect how Eastern Europe is imagined and remembered. The way in which German-language authors and filmmakers - both with and without Eastern European ancestry - imagine, remember, map, and unmap Eastern Europe continues to shift. No doubt world events, such as the current “refugee crisis,” for instance, will continue to inflect future imaginaries of the East both due to their impact on Germany itself and on Germany’s relationships with its Eastern neighbours� Works Cited Belkin, Dmitrij� Jüdische Kontingentflüchtling und Russlanddeutsche � Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2017. Florescu, Cătălin Dorian. Der Nabel der Welt. Munich: C�H� Beck, 2017� Haines, Brigid. “The Eastern Turn in Contemporary German, Swiss and Austrian Literature.” Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe 16.2 (2008): 135—49. —. “Introduction.” The Eastern European Turn in Contemporary German-Language Literature. Ed� Brigid Haines and Anca Luca Holden� Spec� issue of German Life and Letters LXVIII.2 (2015): 145—53. Lizarazu, Maria Roca. “The Family Tree, the Web, and the Palimpsest: Figures of Postmemory in Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther (2014).” The Modern Language Review 113.1 (2018): 168—89. Mueller, Agnes, and Katja Garloff. “Interview with Olga Grjasnowa.” German Jewish Literature after 1990 . Ed. Agnes Mueller and Katja Garloff. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2018. 223—28. Paterson, Tony. “Refugee Crisis: Eastern Europe Opposes Angela Merkel’s Policy on Asylum Seekers.” The Independent 16 Feb. 2016. Web. 20 Jan. 2018. 10 Brangwen Stone, Nora Gortcheva, and Anca Luca Holden Taberner, Stuart. “The Possibilities and Pitfalls of a Jewish Cosmopolitanism: Reading Natan Sznaider through Russian-Jewish Writer Olga Grjasnowa’s German-language Novel Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt (All Russians Love Birch Trees).” European Review of History: Revue européen d’histoire 23.5-6 (2016): 912—30. Weiss, Yfaat, and Lena Gorelik. “Die russisch-jüdische Zuwanderung.” Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland von 1945 bis zur Gegenwart � Ed� Michael Brenner� Munich: C�H� Beck, 2012. 379—418.-