In the aftermath of WWII, Johannes Bobrowski's Sarmatia created a poetic borderland space that challenged existing borders in Central and Eastern Europe - and has continued to do so in the 20th and 21st century. Recent scholarship has increasingly begun to question borders by introducing terms such as liminality (Turner), third space (Bhabha), or similarity (Bhatti). Individual chapters in this volume discuss how borderland spaces are staged, intermedially reflected, or deconstructed in German-language literature, and what impact this might have within a particular field or discourse. By comparing works of Musil, Celan, Sebald or Trojanow with Russian, Kazakh, Polish or Czech literature (e.g. Babel, Tokarczuk, Belger), comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives are opened on a vibrant panorama of literary spaces reaching beyond the borders of Europe.

»Als wertvollste Leistung des Bandes kann die tiefere Einbindung Bobrowskis und auch des Mitteleuropadiskurses in aktuelle transnationale und interkulturelle Debatten in der Germanistik betrachtet werden.«

- aus: Germanistik in Ireland, 16 (2021), S. 247-249 (Yvonne Zivkovic, Universität Graz)

»This volume presents a bilingual (German/English) compendium of the diverse and multifaceted depictions of and theoretical deliberations on the topic of borders from the geopolitical to the linguistic. This comprehensive undertaking has a wide sweep covering mostly German-language literary examples from the last 100 years. [...] this is a book that can be highly recommended.«

- aus: Jahrbuch »Gegenwartsliteratur«, Band 21 (2022), S. 352-354 (Kathleen E. Thorpe, University of the Witwatersrand)

»Der Sammelband wird sowohl das Interesse von BOBROWSKI-Expert*innen, Forscher*innen in den Bereichen Geistesgeschichte, deutschsprachiger Kultur und Geschichte Osteuropas erwecken als auch das von Theoretiker*innen literarischer Hybridität und bietet neben detaillierten und nuancierten Textanalysen auch einen äußerst nützlichen Überblick zu relevanten Grenztheorien an.«

- aus: Convivium. Germanistisches Jahrbuch Polen (2022), S. 217-220 (Jenny Watson, University of Edinburgh)