Neighbors and Neighborhoods: Living Together in the German-Speaking World is a bilingual collection of nine essays on culture, film, language, literature, and theory. The essays in this collection address questions of community and cohesion in the modern German-speaking world, a complex sociolinguistic community that is no longer defined by territorial boundaries but that remains, in many respects, a neighborhood. How can neighborliness be possible for this world in an age of mass migration and increasing globalization? Given the fluidity of modern identity, what could make communities uniform, harmonious, or even cohesive, if they can be created and dissolved in an instant? To what extent do modern technology and mass communication facilitate and/or inhibit the ability to inhabit multiple cultures and multiple worlds?
Examining the specific constitution of the modern German-speaking world, this volume contributes to recent scholarship in critical theory on the figure of the neighbor and the biblical injunction to love one’s neighbor as oneself. The essays in this volume, proceeding in a roughly chronological order, expose how images of neighbors and neighborhoods have developed in the German-speaking world over the course of the twentieth century. The examination of these developments should enrich both the study of multiculturalism and (trans-)nationalism in German Studies and that of subjectivity and political theology in critical theory. Offering a wide range of approaches to one critical topic, the essays in this volume will be useful to students and scholars in the fields of German Studies, cultural studies, language and literature, and film and media, especially those with an interest in secularism and globalization.
