Fluid Borders and “Contaminated Landscapes”: Judith Hermann’s critical discourse on Eastern Europe (Dr. Natasha Gordinsy)

This research on the canonic contemporary writer Judith Hermann explores the representation of Eastern Europe in her short-fiction. I argue that these stories  that were published between 1998 and 2016 do not merely represent another trajectory of travel to those countries that to what during the Cold War belonged to the Eastern Block, rather they offer a subtle multilayered critique of the very concept of Eastern European space as it perceived from the Western vantage point. The article will demonstrate how on the cultural level, Hermann’s stories epitomize the radical change within Europe, or what the eminent German historian Karl Schloegel called the Spatial Revolution of 1989, out of which the concept or Europe itself was re-conceptualized.