Rewriting Germany from the Margins: "Other" German Literature of the 1980s and 1990s

Marguerite Andersen is a professor of French Studies at the University
of Guelph. She is the author of Courts métrages et instantanés and La
Soupe.

Petra Fachinger, assistant professor in the Department of German
Literature and Language at Queen’s University, presents the work of
four writers of Turkish origin, men and women who grew up or were born
in Germany during the second half of the 20th century. She also
discusses the autobiographies of two German Jewish writers, as well as
the writings of a “marginal” West German writer and literature
written by younger GDR writers after unification.

Fachinger analyzes the discursive strategies used by these authors to
expose certain assumptions that unfortunately underlie German public
discourse; they also destabilize notions of Germanness, Jewishness, and
Turkishness. The writers she discusses are engaged in oppositional
aesthetics, wishing to construct their own version of the country that
is their homeland also. At the core of this book is Fachinger’s belief
that, in Germany and elsewhere, centre and margin can and will
“continue to reconstitute and redefine themselves.” Rewriting
Germany from the Margins is an important contribution to the discipline
of ethnic-minority writing.