Subjectivity Regained? German-Language Writing from Eastern Europe and the Balkans through an East-West Gaze

This project uncovers the role of recent German-Balkan works in articulating transnational identity in and through literature. Drawing on social and political models of European identity representations as well as on studies on stigma, trauma, and diasporic cultures as distinct historical formations, I contend that migrant fictions from Eastern Europe and the Balkans not only illuminate the concepts and demarcations operative in European collective imaginations but also introduce an Eastern European/Balkan dimension regarding the formation of modern identities beyond a national focus. To investigate this process, I focus on three Eastern European expatriates: the Bulgarian-born German and Austrian writers Rumjana Zacharieva and Dimitre Dinev and the Russian-German Wladimir Kaminer. The dissertation begins with an overview of postcolonial and Western theories of subjectivity and hybridity within the context of German literary-critical discourse on alterity, migration, and Turkish-German writings to argue that the historical and cultural context from which Eastern Europe/the Balkans have developed as Europe's "Other within" requires a reconfiguration of present theoretical models. In historiographic fashion, this thesis emphasizes the role of Ottoman and Soviet legacies and Western domination on the formation of Balkan subaltern identities. Attending to a tradition of Balkanist discourse that engages the internal bipolar demarcation of Balkan identities as part Western, part Oriental, I reconsider in chapters 3 and 4 how Dinev and Zacharieva's writings negotiate the experience of migration from East to West and articulate particular kinds of Balkan identities as a response to competing representations of the Balkans and the West. In the fifth chapter, my application of the Russian discourse on itself and Europe in examining Kaminer's works transcends the discussion of migration and Balkan identities to offer a related, yet differentiated, account of the manifold processes that surround other Eastern European writings in German. By analyzing these narratives through an East-West lens, the study shows how thinking about identity and migration in literary and historical perspectives proves useful for understanding the shifting identities and borders in Germanic Europe and beyond