Degrees of History in Contemporary German Narratives

It is not often that normality makes headlines. Yet in his work on contemporary literature, Stuart Taberner focuses on the processes that have established a new political “normality” since unification. Normality informs a discourse beyond the traumas of German history, genocide, and subsequent division into two nations with their respective oppositional ideologies. Unification provides the historical basis of a national self-awareness that insists on an ethos of the present. In other words, some aspects of German normality rely on a kind of forgetting, underwritten by the aesthetics of the moment. While it is unproductive to question the grounding of the