This timely publication asks essential questions about German literature's complex, multilingual history, and provides varied and promising approaches to the field. The volume is organized into two parts. Part 1 is comprised of theoretical and historical approaches, and Part 2 features individual analyses. Most of the twelve contributions begin with a challenge to the term “literature of migration.” The anxiety around the attempts at defining it—and the variety of their proposed alternatives—ultimately reveals what this term cannot offer. Yet, these contributions provide important perspectives on the current boundaries within German literature.

Matthias Aumüller begins the volume by interrogating the titular “migration” as applied to literature. His literary history of the term, and its various precursors, reveals the difficulty inherent in defining this literature. He also explores the problematic ways that this term has been used to “other,” a phenomenon that is noticeable in the current public and academic discourse around these authors despite their general rejection of any sort of “extra” definition beyond “German.” Christian Steltz then looks at the rich scholarship and problematic language around “Turkish-German” literature as a model for the volume's focus on eastern Europe. He shows how much more useful a framework other than culture of origin would be, such as reading the novels as works exploring German unification, focusing on Berlin, or even as picaresque novels. Using the examples of Franz Kafka and James Joyce, he identifies these works as intertextual, as Modern, in order to claim that modern literature is migrant literature. Connecting Zafer Şenocak to Robert Musil, he suggests that inter- and transcultural literature is as old as German literature itself.

Until Dembeck introduces his promising concept of “philology of multilingualism,” the attempt is to find and follow traces and effects of linguistic migration in texts. He identifies monolingualism, and thus the assumption of an “only German” literature, as rare and more artificial than is often assumed in literary studies. He finds this multilingualism in German literature from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust (1938) to Feridun Zaimoğlu's Kanak Sprak (2004). We finish Part 1 with Nora Isterheld's sweeping history of a Russian conquering of the German literary market, indicating the public's fascination with all things Russian. She identifies the importance of the matriarch to this literature, a defining trope significant to Weertje Willms’ reading of Julya Rabinowich.

In Part II, Monika Wolting emphasizes how, in literature, the individual memories of characters transform into cultural memory. By reading literatures of migration as literatures of exile, she centers the political in literary studies. Thus, literatures of migration contribute to the writing of a national history. Next, Eva Hausbacher shows how Olga Martynova opens a counter discourse to a traditional remembering of events. Hausbacher uses postcolonial strategies to expose the transcultural value in this literature for memory studies. In her reading of Julya Rabinowich's Dazwischen: Ich (2016), Weertje Willms looks at how gender interacts with migration. The fictional diary entries of a young teen show the uneasy identity formation between the cultural expectations of her father, reflecting the family's unnamed place of origin and emigration, to their current life in Austria. The novel shows the development of a matriarchal family structure, a rejection of traditional concepts of gender, and ultimately female emancipation. Willms argues that the typical tensions of young adult fiction are intensified in intercultural literature, which is especially rich with stories of female identity construction.

Mara Matičević then adopts “Bewegung,” or movement, as a theoretical approach to examine the cultural legacy of the dissolution of Yugoslavia. She identifies the novels of Saša Stanišić, Aleksandar Hemon, Marica Bodrožić, and Terézia Mora as using a poetics of movement to explore the characters’ precarious experience of poverty, foreignness, illness, and lack of orientation, respectively. Her reading asks for migration to be understood as “border-crossing poetics,” a textual practice of movement. Crossing political and language borders, Jana-Katharina Mende investigates the work of Katja Petrowskaja in its original (self-consciously non-native) German, but also its Polish translation. She calls this novel a work of autobiographical, migrated literature of memory. These translations show the successful transference of multi-lingual texts, but also how this shift from German to Polish complicates writing about the Holocaust.

Renata Makarska reads Matthias Nawrat from memory studies, taking the shift from “foreign” to “our-foreign” as, she claims, the works become more central to German literary studies, leading to transnational and transcultural options for communicative memory. After presenting the nameless main character as a “person without qualities,” which directly evokes Robert Musil's novel of Habsburg decline, The Man without Qualities (1930), she suggests a more inclusive term, “German-language authors.” Makarska also asks for the field to include works written in the authors’ original or other languages. Eva Maria Hrdinová does just this as she compares Anna Zonová in German translation to Katharina Beta. She shows how the language of Eastern Orthodoxy becomes a location of lost paradise in Zonova's text, indicated by the untranslated Ruthenian, and an exotic escape for an inner-migration in Beta.

The final chapter reminds us of the long history of complexity within German-language literature, with Marek Nekula's intricate reading of codeswitching in Maxim Biller. As he leads us into the lost, bilingual world of Prague, Nekula argues for a third reader—using Homi Bhabha's idea of the third space—someone who is familiar enough with both German and Czech to understand Biller's play with names. This reading calls into question homogenous, monolingual cultures, and ends the volume with yet another call to locate any importance of migration in the works themselves, rather than in the biographies of the authors.

This important book reveals the limits of current geographic and linguistic boundaries of German literature. The missing pieces—for example, we have no mention of the 2009 Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller—only show how essential this conversation should be to contemporary German literary studies, as well as how clearly German literature is (and has always been) positioned in central and eastern Europe, rather than only looking west.