Literature is society in miniature. It not only reflects the fundamental upheavals that are following one another ever more rapidly, it also experiences the crises that define our present – social, political, economic, and aesthetic. In 1989, authors were once again called to the forefront: the demonstrators on Berlin's Alexanderplatz expected guidance from Christa Wolf. In the German-German literary dispute and the scandals surrounding Strauss, Handke, Walser, and Grass, the public sphere was fundamentally transformed. "Pop literature" reduced authors to mere brands among others. In the background, Amazon was using the book as a model for the first time to test the possibilities of digital capitalism. Literature had arrived in a new era, but not in the way it had once been hoped. Steffen Martus paints a panorama of German literature and its society from 1989 to the most recent debates on migration, identity, and classism. He opens our eyes to the diversity of literature and shows what it reveals about the present and what it means for our society's self-understanding. biography Steffen Martus, born in 1968, studied German Studies, Philosophy, Sociology, and Political Science in Regensburg and Berlin, received his doctorate in 1998, and is a research associate at the Institute for German Literature at Humboldt University of Berlin. He has published works on 17th-century linguistic theory, the history of Enlightenment drama, and on Hagedorn, Gellert, Wieland, and Goethe. New product