Jenny Erpenbeck

Jenny Erpenbeck is currently probably the most internationally successful German writer, more specifically from East Germany. Her literary texts have been awarded numerous prizes, including the Jury Prize of the Ingeborg Bachmann Competition (2001), the Joseph Breitbach Prize (2013), the Thomas Mann Prize (2016), and most recently the International Booker Prize 2024 for her novel "Kairos." Erpenbeck's literary and essayistic work engages with the major societal discourses of the 20th and 21st centuries. Themes such as political morality and responsibility, experiences of home and migration, the Shoah and cultural memory, the history of the GDR, and issues of identity and otherness are central to her work. The contributions in this issue illuminate her work from various perspectives: they examine the conditions of historical narration in Erpenbeck's novels, explore the paths of collective and multidirectional remembering and forgetting in her texts, compare her narrative and dramatic works, focus on Erpenbeck's aesthetic methods and poetological self-disclosures, and discuss the reception of her texts in literary criticism.