GROßSTÄDTE ALS TOPOI DER MIGRATIONSKRISE IN DEUTSCHSPRACHIGER LITERATUR AM ANFANG DES 21. JAHRHUNDERTS
BIG CITIES AS TOPOI OF MIGRATION CRISES IN GERMAN LITERATURE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 21ST CENTURY

Summary/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). The term topos is used in connection with the literary and cultural studies’ term of topos, in which places such as a (big) city, a centre, a foreground, a middle point and others are used for the geographical or spatial and cultural positioning of the plot in the literary work The theoretical framework for the analysis is based on Aristotle’s Topics and Rhetoric, Ernst Robert Curtius’ conception of topos, as well as Theodor Adorno’s and Hans Georg Gadamer’s contemporary conceptions of topos. Having used Aristoteles’ theory on the term topos, we attempt to use it as a commonplace for the expansion of an argument or a place of systematic discussion, where people begin to illustrate their ideas. We thus argue that contemporary authors choose cities and urban, centrally-positioned (central European) places to point towards the flaws in the geopolitical and social system. Moreover, considering Curtius’ understanding of topos as, again, a common place, an image and/or motif, we believe that it can be argued that even since the beginning of the industrialization period in Europe and with that the process of urbanization in the 19th century, major cities such as Berlin, Vienna, London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, and so on, have generally become literary images, representing the different social problems such as a lack of housing opportunities, poverty and misery, anonymity, decadence, a lack of employment opportunities and various others. This hypothesis leads in the hermeneutical sense to the contemporary understanding of topos found in e.g. Theodor Adorno and Hans Georg Gadamer, especially in terms of Adornos‘ theories regarding space, utopia and the topos of the bourgeois Interieur and mimesis as a process of assimilation with space. The terms geography, place, and space are thus in the following paper used as real, relatable, physical central European cities and urban places, but also as literary images thematizing migration crises, flawed geopolitics and social systems with distorted values. The city as topos thus points toward the fragmentariness and discrepancy between the dominant ‘we’ or ‘us’ and the ‘other’, the centre and the periphery, the foreground, i.e. the focus, and the background, which in the end leads to a subversive attitude towards the system. Philipp Löhle’s play Wir sind keine Barbaren! and Lutz Hübner and Sarah Nemitz’s play Phantom (Ein Spiel) are both set in mid-sized or large western European city, while Menasse’s novel Die Hauptstadt takes place in Brussels, the capital of Europe and a place that is nominally a symbol of multinationality and multiculturality, but Menasse’s changing narrative perspectives also outline other parts of the EU, such as Krakow. It can be said that contemporary authors choose cities and urban, central locations to show the flaws of the geopolitical system, in which the complex dynamics of integration, separation, segregation and exclusion are constantly at play, at the expense of marginalized groups. While the migrant crisis in Menasse’s novel Die Hauptstadt is only a fleeting occurrence in the extremely complex plot, the analysis of this event in the general narrative structure as a moment of repression can indicate how the processes of repression towards the periphery are uncovered and criticized. The EU, which is perceived as a centrally positioned union of states in which order, civilization, culture, progress, tolerance, and all the other enlightened ideals, turns out to be just the opposite. The exclusion of the ‘other’ primarily takes place in the minds and the self-image of the community, which sees itself as a homogeneous society, and this exclusion manifests itself as a symbolic, figurative, but also physical and material displacement of the ‘other’ to the periphery. The migration crisis is pushed aside, and migrants/refugees are driven out of the foreground of events and made invisible, remaining ignored or used for selfish purposes. In Philipp Löhle’s play Wir sind keine Barbaren! and Lutz Hübner and Sarah Nemitz’s Phantom (Ein Spiel) migrants/refugees find themselves in the centre of the action, but their peripheral status in society is highlighted through processes of repression and exclusion. The romanticized notions of the “promised land” that Blanca and Bobo/Klimt have before they reach the new country disappear when they are confronted with reality, i.e. when they find themselves on the fringes of society and when their human rights are placed in question. When the apparent acceptance of migrants/refugee occurs, this again becomes an attempt to integrate the others into the new society, either to gain certain advantage because of it or because they want to clear their own consciences. 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.

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