A Rooted Cosmopolitanism?

Abstract

This chapter draws out the theme that is implicit throughout Transnationalism and German-Language Literature in the Twenty-First Century, namely cosmopolitanism. Close readings of Christian Kracht’s Imperium, Ilija Trojanow’s Der Weltensammler, and Christa Wolf’s Stadt der Engel focus on the question of whether a “rooted cosmopolitanism” might be possible; that is, an openness to the world, and to otherness, that is not at odds with attachment to the nation but rather rooted in it. In this chapter, the debate on transnationalism has moved from the focus on the concrete and particular—the arrival of refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants—to the abstract: is it possible to belong to a nation and to the world at the same time? Each of the novels examined offers a different response to this question—and to this extent, they embody the ambivalence of transnationalism itself as it simultaneously provokes both utopian optimism and acute pessimism about “the world.”