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.
