ABSTRACT
Today's leading German magazines and newspapers have a global perspective: the crisis in Kosovo, elections in Israel and their impact on the Middle Eastern peace process, and millennia! concerns make headlines there as they do in the United States. What, if any, role can German language literature play in Europe and Germany at the end of the twentieth century, when aesthetic pursuits and criticism are the privilege of a select few? Literature has traditionally played a significant role in shaping national discourses, for example in Austria after the Napoleonic occupation, in the German Democratic Republic, where the great German heritage of Goethe, Schiller, and the nineteenth century was embraced, and in the Federal Republic, where the Kahlschlae or the Point Zero, proclaimed in the postwar era, called for a distancing from tradition, including the Nazi.
