What can contemporary German-speaking writers, with their obsessive preoccupation with the past, tell us about the cultural conflicts of today?
After looking at former literary periods and at specific literary essays, then focusing on a large number of contemporary literary case-studies, this work explores the spiritual resources and the aesthetical impulses by which literary approaches can enlarge our intercultural experiences and horizons. The studies examine how German-speaking narratives deal with migration, ethnicity and xenophobia, as well as how they sustain or disrupt national, religious and ethnical boundaries. In a time of ambivalent tendencies, when both globalization as well as ethnic-cultural conflicts are ever-increasing, this study tries to reveal the potential for tolerance contained in the German literary memory, to demonstrate how the representation of "the Other", of cultural and identity and alterity have become increasingly nuanced, and how this stimulates the dynamics of transcultural interconnection.