DO WE HAVE A NUANCED VOCABULARY that enables us to discuss the role of contemporary literature in advocating for social justice without reducing the mutual suspicions of the aesthetic and the political to a rigid dichotomy? If we concede that active listening to social conflicts that we internalize as psychic pain, our own and that of others, constitutes a continuous act of moral courage, the aesthetic experience of reading literary works is at once a highly individual act and a shared social practice that can be understood as an ethical process of reciprocal and self-reflective empathy.

As Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929), Germany's most eminent living philosopher and sociologist, states in a rare jargon-free moment in an interview conducted in 1990, without constant efforts to evoke selfless empathy, our individual identities would run the risk of self-dissolution (Habermas 150). In a similar vein, in his monograph Der Fremde in uns (The Stranger within Us, 2000), the German-Swiss psychoanalyst and social psychologist Arno Gruen (b. 1923) declares the conscious awareness of one's own psychic and physical pain a necessary anthropological condition: “Ohne Bewußtsein seines Schmerzes kann ein Mensch nicht zum Menschen werden. Er kann höchstens einer effizienten Maschine gleichkommen, die das Menschsein imitiert” (218; Without being conscious of his own pain, no human can become a human being. He can at best approximate an efficient machine that imitates being human). Habermas's and Gruen's reflections on empathy as a vital human trait can be read as prosaic variations on Friedrich Hölderlin's soundings of the fear of amnesia and losing the ability to feel pain in the second version of his poem “Mnemosyne,” in which the mother of the muses and embodiment of memory laments: “Schmerzlos sind wir und haben/fast die Sprache in der Fremde verloren” (204; Devoid of pain are we and have/almost lost language in exile).

This chapter discusses how the recent book publications of two increasingly recognized bicultural and bilingual German writers, the Hungarian-born translator and novelist Terézia Mora (b. 1971, living in Berlin since 1990), and the Romanian-born poet Dana Ranga (b. 1964, living in Berlin since 1987), experiment with dystopian constellations of social exclusion, self-isolation, and existential breakdown in the face of apathetic and economically as well as psychologically predatory societies in which the sentient individual is encircled by collective numbness.