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The aim of the essay is to formulate approaches towards a global history of German-language literature from Romania and to discuss them using examples. To this end, the concept of minor literature according to Franz Kafka is utilized and linked with the concept of a global history of German literature. Emphasis is placed on the continuity in this literature despite the changes resulting from engagement with the communist system in Romania before 1989 and through the 1989 revolution in Romania. Many of the authors have emigrated and live today in Germany. Nevertheless, their works remains part of the minor literature in Germany as well.

German-language literature of the Banat develops under specific historical circumstances amidst a multi-ethnic Region, in which the multiple social-political, religious and linguistic relations to Romanians, Hungarians, Serbs and Jews find their immediate expression.The beginning of the German-language writings of the Banat Swabians are under the aegis of the Austrian model, especially of the Viennese model. Here one mainly includes the extremely stimulating press and theater tradition of the Banat, which can still be remarked in the interwar period, and which created the conditions for the unfolding of a lively spiritual life.Johann Friedel born in Timișoara, an outstanding representative of Josephine epistolary satire, was considered on account of his novels and letters to be the founder of the local German-language writings by several scholars.

The absence of female writing forms a particularly striking gap in the historiography of German-language literature in the Czech Lands during the decades around 1900. Women participated significantly in the literary scene of the period but were largely forgotten. Our article will discuss the conditions and discourses that enabled women to be active in the public space but later led to their absence in literary history. Approaches are sought that make future inclusion possible again. The first step for (re-)establishing a female presence in this area is to reconstruct biographies with a focus on female-specific social realities at the time and on the interaction of cultural, social and historical factors. In the next step, attention is brought to the “minor” or “simple”, rather non-canonical literary genres that were often used by women authors at the fin de siècle.

The paper looks into the German-language manuscript notebook and excerpt book of Samuel Ferjenčík (1793 – 1855) from the 1840s. The authors comprehensively reconstructed the sources of notes and excerpts, although the manuscript, with only a few exceptions, contained no references. The German-language originals and their adaptations in Ferjenčík’s manuscript were analysed, especially substitutions, contextual transpositions, insertions, etc. The paper used the concepts of intertextuality, hypertextuality, transformation, and imitation to interpret the text. Research results provide an insight into the Ferjenčík’s thoughts during the preparation and organization of the political text Slovenský prestolný prosbopis [Slovak petition to the throne] from 1842, written not long before the revolutionary events of 1848 – 1849. It also examines the reading of this Slovak intellectual of his time, the German-language sources he used and the problems he tried to grasp through parallels and analogies.

This article details how Marina Achenbach’s Ein Krokodil für Zagreb (2017) and Marica Bodrožić’s Mein weißer Frieden (2014) reintroduce the legacy of socialism into European memory and thereby put the spotlight on a common European past that has often been sidelined both after WII and after the end of the Cold War. Engaging in a form of postsocialist nostalgia that is firmly oriented towards the future, both prose works invoke memories of the potentials, the exclusions, the dreams and possibilities of the Yugoslav socialist project in order to critique the capitalist present and to make suggestions for a better European future. Rather than providing some kind of political blueprint for a better Europe, however, the crux of their future-oriented nostalgic representations of the past lies in a more abstract commitment to hope and the ability to think beyond the capitalist status quo. That is, both authors turn to the socialist past in order to affirm the utopian spirit more generally and to insist on the possibility of radical social, economic, and political change.

From the second half of the 17th century onwards, Sardinia has fascinated many German-speaking travelers and writers, whose works have given rise to a particular literary tradition, based on a prismatic image of this island. Through a large and often unexplored corpus, consisting of travelogues, diaries, novels, short stories, and poetry, a specific literary discourse of the island has been constructed over the centuries, and Sardinia has acquired the distorted image of either a waste land, an exile, and prison, or an uncorrupted paradise, where human beings can still retrieve a deep relationship with the Earth. This paper aims to give an account of this discourse to highlight, from a diachronic perspective, the construction of the image of an island more or less influenced by a Eurocentric perspective. Using a geopoetic approach, several texts are analysed in a hermeneutic process which outlines not only the island's colonial past, but also the construction of a recent neocolonial project made up of uncontrolled urbanization, industrialization, mass tourism, and (nuclear) pollution.

Considering the recent criticism of the competence-oriented concern of the PISA study, the present paper proposes a practical teaching concept that opposes the isolated practice of reading skills. In the era of Post-truth, this contribution presents a lesson plan for Robert Musils’s novel “The Man without Qualities”, which aims at promoting aesthetic sensibility in the universityGerman courses for advanced levels.

The present paper focuses on the American-born German-language writerAnn Cotten, an author who creates an experimental poetry influenced by the Viennesegroup, whose texts are enriched with vivid imagery. The study compares Cotten’sworks written in German (for example, Der schaudernde Fächer, one of the reasonsfor which she received the Adelbert-von-Chamisso Prize, awarded mostly to authorswith a migrant background) with I, Coleoptile, her first book written in English, incollaboration with the artist Kerstin Cmelka