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A companion to contemporary German crime fiction for English-speaking audiences is overdue. Starting with the earlier Swiss “classics” Glauser and Dürrenmatt and including a number of important Austrian authors, such as Wolf Haas and Heinrich Steinfest, this volume will cover the essential writers, genres, and themes of crime fiction written in German. Where necessary and appropriate, crime fiction in media other than writing (TV-series, movies) will be included. Contemporary social and political developments, such as gender issues, life in a multicultural society, and the afterlife of German fascism today, play a crucial role in much of recent German crime fiction. A number of contributions to this volume will comment on the literary reflection of these issues in the texts. The goal of the volume is to make available to English-speaking audiences, to students, teachers and to a wider circle of interested readers, a series of articles on genres, topics, authors, and texts that will help them understand the scope and depth of German crime fiction, its ties to international traditions and also the specificity of the German context, its historical development and contemporary situation.

The culture of the Weimar Republic is important for understanding that of Nazi Germany, and German history as a whole. Between 1918 and 1933, German culture was greatly concerned with modernity, and in particular with the transformations of old structures of aesthetic communication into those appropriate to a cultural `mass market'. Recent debates about the German sonderweg - separate path to modernity - and German reunification, with its resurgence of right-wing ideologies, have forced a re-examination of the role of Weimar culture in German history, and a fresh look at the issues of cultural liberalism and repression during the Weimar Republic suggests important lessons for political, social, and economic stability in the aftermath of reunification. In this volume, experts from a variety of fields - history, film studies, music, women's studies, German studies, and art history - re-evaluate Weimarculture itself and explore the ways in which it represented a variety of possible responses to modernity.