Leslie Adelson (Cornell): “The Future as Contested Ground: A Comparative Approach to Narrative Future-Making in Minority Literature in Contemporary Germany”

What does it mean to speak, as Hannah Arendt once did, of the broken “heart of time”? This lecture analyzes innovative forms of radical futurity in little known 21^st-century fiction by Emine Sevgi Özdamar, who holds emblematic status on Germany’s path from Turkish migration to transcultural Europe, and Michael Götting, who has authored the first sustained novel about Black German experience in contemporary Berlin. The analysis sheds surprising light on the narrative importance of minority writing in a future key in Germany today.