AMONG GERMAN-LANGUAGE PUBLICATIONS of the last ten years, a series of deeply sad prose works, and their themes of dying, death, and loss, stand out. Autobiographical or fictitious farewells to parents include Georg Diez's Der Tod meiner Mutter (2009) and Sabine Peters's story Abschied (2003), in which a daughter chronicles the aging and death of her authoritarian father. These are joined by what Dieter Lamping terms “fiktionale Sterbegeschichten,” such as Ludwig Fels's novel Reise zum Mittelpunkt des Herzens (2006), the story of a heterosexual couple's last day together that ends with the man's death from cancer. Mariana Leky's tragicomic novel Die Herrenausstatterin (2010) is also a fictional story of dying; an analysis of the loss of love, it tells the tale of a mishandled parting from a former lover, who died in a fatal accident. At the end, the ghostly protagonist dissolves into nothing. Friederike Mayröcker's great text of mourning about Ernst Jandl, Und ich schüttelte einen Liebling (2005) is, alongside Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) and Joyce Carol Oates's A Widow's Story: A Memoir (2011), part of an international trend toward impressive public farewells by major female authors to their deceased partners.

These existential issues of farewell form a longstanding literary tradition. They revolve around the end of a love relationship or the illness and death of partners, parents, relatives, or children. What the autobiographical examples mentioned here have in common is the focus on the “private” mourning of the writing subject and the personal working through of loss.