Imagining the Ultimate Other – Class and Longing in Hamburg Red-Light Novels

The red-light district is where a city's class differences manifest themselves spatially and where the haves and the have-nots interact in a small, enclosed space. It is therefore not surprising that Germany's most (in)famous district in the harbor area of Hamburg has become a favored subject for literary discourses on class. The talk discusses three contemporary red-light novels ("Große Freiheit" by Rocko Schamoni, "Der Goldene Handschuh" by Heinz Strunk, and "Die Wut ist ein heller Stern", by Anja Kampmann) and embeds them in a literary history of sex work, the bourgeoisie, and class struggle.

Dr. Jan Behrs is Visiting Associate Professor of German in the Department of Contemporary Literature at Tulane. His research focuses on literary theory, the sociology of literature, questions of belonging and exclusion in contemporary literature, and German film.