Legacies and identity

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This volume seeks to trace the robustly critical process of historical, political and personal self-examination to be found in German literature of the 1990s. Scholars from Australia, Britain, Germany, and the USA have contributed essays which deal with a broad range of East and West German writers (Biskupek, Grass, Hilbig, Königsdorf, Maron, Mensching, Walser, Wenzel, and Wolf) as well as with general topics such as literature and the Stasi , and the response to the aftermath of unification to be found in autobiographical writing, lyric poetry, satirical fiction and cabaret texts. For all their diversity, a common thread can be discerned in these writers and the literature they have produced: a concern for the particularity of the East German experience, past and present, and a desire to explore that discrete identity – in both its positive and negative aspects – which stubbornly persisted over a decade in which the citizens of the German Democratic Republic saw themselves, their institutions, and their culture, swept up and consigned to oblivion.