The Limits of Hospitality

Abstract

This chapter returns to the early 1990s and the large-scale immigration to Germany after the end of the Cold War from around Eastern Europe (including many Jews from the former Soviet Union), refugees and asylum seekers from the wars in the ex-Yugoslavia, and elsewhere in the world. It posits the “shock” that this large influx caused for the Federal Republic’s self-understanding and explores debates on the obligation to extend hospitality to “strangers.” Readings of novels by Terézia Mora, Richard Wagner, and Olga Grjasnowa reveal the gulf between Germany’s image of itself as open to otherness and the reality of prejudice and discrimination, the characterization of border-crossers as “queer”—and the eventual commodification of this queerness—and (in Russian-Jewish writer Grjasnowa’s later work) the more recent transformation of the debate on transnationalism.