IT HAS BECOME A MAINSTAY of globalization theory that local and global are not mutually exclusive categories. Global forces produce locally inflected culture, which does not exist outside of networks of transnational exchange. Within this dialectic of the nexus between global and local, literature has retained a privileged status. Literature’s dependence on language situates it as integral to national culture, especially in the case of Germany, which historically has defined itself as a Kulturnation (cultural nation). Yet national literature nonetheless responds to, incorporates, and partakes in global networks of production and circulation of culture. Thus, when Alina Bronsky’s Scherbenpark (2008; Broken Glass Park, 2010) tells the story of its main character Sascha Naimann, a teenage immigrant girl in the Russian ghetto of an unnamed German city, the text circulates within the boundaries of German-language literature but simultaneously echoes and engages with global impulses. Scherbenpark refracts and revises Germanness through a literary account of contemporary migration from Russia to Germany reliant on a binational model of chronological temporality and geography organized around nation-states and participates in a discourse that centers on the figure of the girl as a global phenomenon. The pseudonym “Alina Bronsky” names an emerging, yet successful, author whose novel can be explicated comprehensively only in a multilayered and multidimensional framework of transnational and intermedial intertextuality.

Scherbenpark tells the story of seventeen-year-old Sascha Naimann, who lives in a high-rise populated by Russian immigrants on the outskirts of a German city. Two years prior to the time of the novel’s action, Vadim — her mother’s second husband and father of Sascha’s younger siblings Anton and Alissa — had shot and killed her mother and her German boyfriend. Sascha’s mother had filed for divorce when Vadim had hit Sascha in the face with a belt while trying to beat Anton. The children continue to live in the apartment where their private horror took place with the help of Vadim’s cousin Maria from Novosibirsk. Sascha fantasizes about killing Vadim. When she sees a newspaper article sympathetically describing Vadim’s life in jail, she seeks out the article’s author, Susanne Mahler at the newspaper. Her boss, Volker Trebur, apologizes for her and offers Sascha help. Sascha requests that he take her to his home, where she meets his sixteen-year-old son Felix, with whom she has sex, even though she has feelings for his father.