Introduction: The Implicated Subject in Post‐1945 German‐language Literature

Drawing on Michael Rothberg's concept of 'the implicated subject', this special issue brings together articles that explore how Germanlanguage literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries negotiates the contested terrains of victimhood, perpetration, complicity, solidarity and their afterlives.The contributions investigate how literary texts articulate both individual and collective entanglements in systems of political, societal, colonial and sexual violence.They examine implication not only as a structural position but also as an affect: what does it mean to feel implicated? 1 What aesthetic strategies and narrative forms render implication visible?How do texts implicate their readers, drawing them into ethical and mnemonic constellations that blur the boundaries between guilt, responsibility and solidarity?In the German context, the analysis of implication is inseparable from the country's responsibility for the Shoah and the division of Germany in the wake of World War II.Literature's engagement with these histories remains central to debates about 'Vergangenheitsbewältigung', but recent political shifts have contributed to reframing these discourses.Chancellor Olaf Scholz's 2022 declaration of a 'Zeitenwende' -a watershed moment in response to Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine -marked not only a political and ideological shift towards increased military spending and military power but was also a turning point in German memory politics.2 Scholz's rhetoric reoriented national self-understanding by moving away from pacifist traditions rooted in Holocaust memory.In response, intellectuals such as Jürgen Habermas, as well as public forum debates, have re-examined earlier paradigms of remorse and reconciliation (Willi Brandt's 'Ostpolitik') and economic rapprochement for Eastern Europe and Russia (Angela Merkel's 'Wandel durch Handel'), signalling that Germany's narratives of guilt, responsibility and solidarity are again 1