Mercurial Mediterraneans: Nation, Narration, and Migration from Däubler to Erpenbeck
Asylum seekers gather in protest as part of the OPlatz Bewegung
in Berlin’s “Lampedusa Village”
The space of the Mediterranean has long played a role in German self-conceptions of national identity. In the German postwar period, two such literary instances may be found in Carl Schmitt’s 1946 reading of an antisemitic politics of enmity in Theodor Däubler’s Sang an Palermo and Jenny Erpenbeck’s 2015 Gehen, ging, gegangen, which revolves around the fraught treatment of refugees in contemporary Germany. The appearance of Hermes/Mercury—the Graeco-Roman god of transit and transmission—in both these works offers a narratological figure for a transnational German perspective in the wake of migration. Erpenbeck’s novel in particular offers a post-Wende narrative that dramatizes both the fatal contradictions and critical potential for the future of what Ulrich Beck once termed “German Europe.”
Peter Makhlouf is a Lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. His research centers on the fields of German-Jewish studies, media theory, and Kulturwissenschaft, while his recent publications span comparative poetics, global intellectual history, and the many afterlives of antiquity. His current book project, An Anxiety of Influence for the Twenty-First Century traces how poetics, media, and political economy collaborate and compete to leverage human affects in an increasingly technologized world.
