Christine Waldschmidt

Often, literature debates revolve around the handling of history: about memory conflicts, where one memory confronts others, thus interpreting the shared present from different, if not opposing, places and times. The contributors take the convergence of memory-political debates and literary engagements with the present as an opportunity to inquire about the "aggregates of the present" (Stephan Braese), to which past and current memory-political assessments in the literary field condense. They also illuminate their influence on the historical and critical understanding of our time.