With Bertolt Brecht and the Aztecs Toward an Imagined Transnation: A Literary Case Study

Abstract

The turn of the twenty-first century is characterized, among other things, by an emergence of nontraditional group configurations associated with multiplicity, transnational as well as transcultural clusters and networks, and mostly shaped by the challenging, dismantling, and remaking of public identities, such as Ulf Hannerz’s notion of the “global ecumene.”¹ All this piles on the pressure upon modern nation-states whose traditional demarcations and boundaries these formations transcend.² As Saskia Sassen writes in her evocatively entitled essay “When National Territory is Home to the Global: Old Borders to Novel Borderings,” “the changes under way are shifting the meaning of borders, even when the actual geographic lines that demarcate territories have not been altered” (2005, 523). These changes come to pass in many countries worldwide. Yet especially those countries bear a particular sociological and cultural-scientific relevance in which cultural heterogeneity has developed such an explosive force that it might even thwart the idea of national identity and lead to separatism or at least the formulation of challenging counternarratives of collective identity that put the nation-state into a crisis.