In the late 1990s, against the background of the publication of many notable narratives about the former East Germany (GDR) and its postunification transformation, the appearance of a number of texts by young authors from the west signaled that the West German past too had become the object of literary scrutiny. Of course, many writers from the “old,” that is, preunification Federal Republic (FRG) had already had their say on this topic since 1990, including prominent figures of the West German literary scene such as Uwe Timm, F. C. Delius, and Ludwig Harig and less familiar names including Ralf Rothmann and Ulrich Woelk. But what was striking now, almost a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, was not just an increase in the quantity of literary texts focusing on West Germany between 1949 and 1989. Nor was it that many of the writers had been all but unknown just a few years earlier. Rather, it was the nostalgic, and occasionally ambivalent, picture of the unremarkable fabric of everyday life in the “old” Federal Republic painted by writers whose formative years had fallen in the 1970s and 1980s such as David Wagner, Frank Goosen, Karen Duve, and Gerhard Henschel.

In a postscript to Meine nachtblaue Hose (2000), David Wagner relates that he had set out to write his début novel in order to understand “wie es in Bonn, in der alten Bundesrepublik und in Berlin gewesen sein könnte, bevor die Oberbaumbrücke wiederaufgebaut war.”