Description
Book Synopsis German economic crises from the past two hundred years have provoked diverse responses from journalists, politicians, scholars, and fiction writers. Among their responses, storylines have developed as proposals for reducing unemployment, improving workplace conditions, and increasing profitability when stock markets tumble, accompanied by inflation, deflation, and overwhelming debt. The contributors to Invested Narratives assess German-language economic crisis narratives from the interdisciplinary perspectives of finance, economics, political science, sociology, history, literature, and cultural studies. They interpret the ways German society has tried to comprehend, recover from, and avoid economic crises and in doing so widen our understanding of German economic debates and their influence on German society and the European Union.
Table of Contents Introduction: Narrating Economics as Crisis
Jill E. Twark
Part I: Shaping Economic Knowledge from Historical Perspectives
Chapter 1. German Finanzkapitalismus: A Narrative of Deutsche Bank and its Role in the German Financial System
Reinhard H Schmidt
Chapter 2. Narrative Confrontations with Socioeconomic Crisis: Ideas for Building Community in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century German Social Novel
Johannes Brambora
Chapter 3. Economic Knowledge and the Failure to Alleviate the Great Depression in Weimar Germany
Roman Köster
Chapter 4. The Moral Equation Works Out Differently: The Great Depression, the Crisis of Knowledge, and Value Order in Erich Kästner’s Fabian: The Story of a Moralist
Simela Delianidou
Part II: German Narratives of Work and Unemployment
Chapter 5. Unemployment as Crisis: Past and Present German-Language Sociological Narratives on the Loss of Work
Annemarie Matthies
Chapter 6. Cruel Optimism as Plot Driver in German and Austrian Economic Crisis Novels with Adult and Child Protagonists Thrust into Poverty
Jill E. Twark
Chapter 7. John von Düffel’s Ego (2001) as a Seismographic Recorder of the Neoliberal Crisis of the Self
Johanna Tönsing
Part III: German ‘Exceptionalism’ in Contemporary European Crisis Situations
Chapter 8. Germany’s Compromises: The Impact of Crisis Narratives on the European Central Bank and Euro Governance
Sara Konoe
Chapter 9. Housing Crises and the Crisis of Housing: German Experiences with Neoliberal Reforms
Paulette Kurzer and Alice H. Cooper
Part IV: The Tricky Question of Cause and Effect
Chapter 10. Literature against the ‘Profit-Friendly Ideological Defense System’:Entertainment and Sociopolitical Enlightenment in Uwe Timm’s Headhunter
Monika Albrecht
Chapter 11. An Imaginary of Blame: The Representation of Crisis, the Crisis of Representation and Jonas Lüscher’s Barbarian Spring
Joel Kaipainen
