OURS IS A WORLD where millions of people are on the move, because of a myriad of factors that are most often directly linked to globalization. Economic precarity, terror and persecution, ethnic conflicts, and outright wars continue to expand, especially in the Global South, causing displacement and influencing people's decisions to seek safety and stability elsewhere. Travelers, tourists, migrants, and refugees are physically traversing the globe and producing new cultural formations and identities in the process. Their travel is marked by gender, class, and race and is often coerced by dependent labor. Places are sites of both residence and travel encounters and for the individual subject, travel becomes an engagement with both the familiar and the unfamiliar, leading to a blurring between the notions of “home” and “abroad.”

Given the ways in which mobility produced by economic, spatial, and social inequities has altered the real places and imagined spaces we inhabit, it is not surprising that German-language literature has partaken extensively in this discourse. Especially for writers of an “eastern turn,” with roots in Eastern and Central Europe, movement across borders, displacement, and deterritorialization provide narrative material. This literature has staked “a claim in the project of redefining Europe, insisting on broadening out both historically and geographically the Cold- War definitions of Europe based on the Franco-German heart of the European Union.”

Notions of travel and mobility feature prominently in works, written by two writers who hail from the East, that are the focus of this essay. The novels Die Erdfresserin (The Earth Eater, 2012) by Julya Rabinowich and Das Ungeheuer (The Monster, 2013) by Terézia Mora share a number of characteristics that make them an ideal pair to be analyzed side by side. Both texts are “road novels” that center on characters who become a projection screen for the state of Europe in neoliberal times. These characters move across national and cultural boundaries, communicate in several languages, and inhabit multiple, often binary identity positions. Yet their literal and metaphorical journeys go against the grain of more traditional notions of travel writing, such as those referenced in compendia such as The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing (2016).