Invested Narratives

Jill E. Twark is Associate Professor of German at East Carolina University. Her research focuses on contemporary German literature and culture. Along with her monograph, Humor, Satire, and Identity: Eastern German Literature in the 1990s (De Gruyter 2007), she has edited books on post-unification German humor and social-justice dilemmas.

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