Introduction: Developing a Nomadic Ethics

Summary

This book explores how literary texts by five German-speaking women writers conceptualize contemporary German and Austrian identities — especially but not only gender identities — in ethically instructive ways. The writers — Birgit Vanderbeke, Dorothea Grünzweig, Antje Rávic Strubel, Anna Mitgutsch, and Barbara Honigmann — reveal how factors such as sexuality, ethnicity, religion, and disability affect the status and comfort of the subject. They problematize the categories of gender and nation, revealing them to be artificial and restrictive — though still pertinent and influential — and they suggest more inclusive and nuanced ways of framing identities in a postmodern, globalized era. They propose methods of conceiving contemporary subjectivity that account for fluidity and mobility while also acknowledging the material, the everyday, and the relational. I term their various strategies “nomadic” and view their work as ethically significant.

Why ethics? Ethical inquiries are in fact unavoidable, since, as John D. Caputo puts it, “Obligation happens.” Obligation toward others is an inescapable given that requires expression. The current ethical turn in theory both points up and reflects on this given. Arguably, ethics is especially urgent in the German-speaking context. Sander L. Gilman writes of the new Germany's “self-consciously ethical” confrontations with the past, suggesting that morality is a conscious concern of many recent German debates. This is a logical development if one accepts his contention that twentieth-century German history, more than the history of any other nation, demands the production of ethical accounts of the present and the future. I will return shortly to the key questions of Germanness and Austrianness.