BIG CITIES AS TOPOI OF MIGRATION CRISES IN GERMAN LITERATURE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 21ST CENTURY

Abstract

The following paper offers a transgeneric analysis of three contemporary German literary texts which shows how the plot setting - which is in all these cases an urban environment, i.e. a city – can be described as a topos to address ongoing migration crises. These urban places of action and the depicted migration crises create a state of paradox and irony: big cities attract the population and represent a place that is desirable to live in, yet they seem to marginalize and ostracize the very groups that migrate towards them. The research presented in this paper stems from an ongoing research project that deals with the phenomenon of crisis in contemporary English, German and Croatian literature, with an emphasis on systems in crisis, where the systems are defined from a sociological perspective as the family, the local community, the state, the region, and so on. The research was conducted within the installation research project “UIP-2020-02-3695 Analysis of Systems in Crisis and of New Consciousness in 21st Century Literature” (2021.-2026) funded by the Croatian Science Fund. The aim of the project is to prove the hypothesis that what we have at hand is a predominantly subversive attitude on the part of literature towards the phenomenon of crisis and towards systems in crisis. The research done in the first year of the project (2021) shows that of the 126 German-language prose and drama texts included in the corpus, focusing on texts published from 2000 to 2021, 29 deal explicitly with crises in the local community or in the city and 23 with migration crises (cf. Novak et al. 2021, p. 3). The literary works selected for analysis, which offer urban areas as the setting of the narrative, show how, at the expense of the protagonists’/characters’ isolated experience, a shared, global view is illustrated that might indicate literary trends in dealing with contemporary problems in society, such as the attitude towards the ‘other’, the marginalized, or the ‘different’. Paradoxically, at the same time, through the way they subtly address these problematic attitudes, the literary texts become topoi that allow space for criticism. The novel and two plays that are the focus of this research have all been published in German since the year 2000 and are part of the project’s corpus. They have been selected as representative examples of how the urban, civilized, dominant community acts and reacts when it comes into contact with the ‘other’. They encompass both the individual and the collective, tragedy and comedy, but also social satire which addresses many problems of the world we consider to be structured and ordered, revealing that it is in reality a place of complex dynamics of centricity versus provinciality and inclusion versus exclusion. The paper takes a close look at Robert Menasse’s novel Die Hauptstadt (2017), Philipp Löhle’s play Wir sind keine Barbaren! (2015) and Lutz Hübner and Sarah Nemitz’s play Phantom (Ein Spiel) (2015). The transgeneric analysis of the selected literary texts shows how the migration crises in the big cities are not explicitly addressed, but rather pushed to the sides and margins – both literally and figuratively - and overlooked, and thus made even deeper within the system of the narrative (that is, in the narrative of both the prose as well as the drama text). In all three examples, the “we” is often emphasized as dominant, while “the others” are marginalized, both geographically and symbolically, due to this dominance. The migrants/refugees appear and remain on the geographical periphery, while also not even being recognized, and listened to, or else they become condemned to a life in symbolic parallel worlds. The community in all three examples acts globally in the economic and communication-strategic sense, but limits its self-image and the conception of “we” locally, and in doing so emphasizes the meaningfulness of their own tradition, while diminishing the existence of the others.