Franziska Bomski
Baseballschlägerjahre. Literarische Reflexionen über Neonazismus und Antifaschismus nach 1990
[The “Baseball Bat Years”: Reflections on Neo-Nazis and Antifascists in Post-GDR Literature]
A number of German authors born in the former East Germany who came of age around reunification went on to write autobiographically inflected novels set in that period. Many of these works include scenes of violent street clashes between antifascists and neo-Nazis, earning the early 1990s the epithet “the baseball bat years.” For the novels’ young protagonists, these bloody confrontations between individuals identifying with the far left and the far right breathed new life into an ideological framing that had once rung hollow in the official rhetoric of East German apparatchiks. In this talk, I examine how several works of post-GDR fiction depict attempts to make sense of antifascist and neo-Nazi currents in the years immediately following German reunification—currents that were real-existing even as they often went unnoticed by parents and state authorities. The spectrum of these accounts ranges from ethical arguments rooted in East German socialization to pragmatic stances that eschew politics for the sake of survival.
Franziska Bomski is a literary scholar whose work focuses on the intersection of literature and science from the 18th century until the present. She earned a PhD from the University of Freiburg with a dissertation on mathematics in the writing of Novalis, which was published by De Gruyter as Die Mathematik im Denken und Dichten von Novalis in 2014. She has also written on the history of German literary scholarship, with a particular emphasis on the Nazi era, and on various themes in the works of Robert Musil, Christa Wolf, Dietmar Dath, and Manja Präkels. Currently, she is working on portrayals of shared experience in post-GDR literature. She has held teaching positions at Goethe University Frankfurt, Yale University, and Beihang University, and she was a Volkswagen Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Washington University in St. Louis. From 2012 to 2018 she served as the research coordinator at the Klassik Stiftung Weimar. She joined the Einstein Forum in 2018 and became its deputy director in 2024.