Introduction: Narrating Economics as Crisis
Jill E. Twark

Part I: Shaping Economic Knowledge from Historical Perspectives

Chapter 1. German Finanzkapitalismus: A Narrative of Deutsche Bank and its Role in the German Financial System
Reinhard H Schmidt

Chapter 2. Narrative Confrontations with Socioeconomic Crisis: Ideas for Building Community in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century German Social Novel
Johannes Brambora

Chapter 3. Economic Knowledge and the Failure to Alleviate the Great Depression in Weimar Germany
Roman Köster

Chapter 4. The Moral Equation Works Out Differently: The Great Depression, the Crisis of Knowledge, and Value Order in Erich Kästner's Fabian: The Story of a Moralist
Simela Delianidou

Part II: German Narratives of Work and Unemployment

Chapter 5. Unemployment as Crisis: Past and Present German-Language Sociological Narratives on the Loss of Work
Annemarie Matthies

Chapter 6. Cruel Optimism as Plot Driver in German and Austrian Economic Crisis Novels with Adult and Child Protagonists Thrust into Poverty
Jill E. Twark

Chapter 7. John von Düffel's Ego (2001) as a Seismographic Recorder of the Neoliberal Crisis of the Self
Johanna Tönsing

Part III: German 'Exceptionalism' in Contemporary European Crisis Situations

Chapter 8. Germany's Compromises: The Impact of Crisis Narratives on the European Central Bank and Euro Governance
Sara Konoe

Chapter 9. Housing Crises and the Crisis of Housing: German Experiences with Neoliberal Reforms
Paulette Kurzer and Alice H. Cooper

Part IV: The Tricky Question of Cause and Effect

Chapter 10. Literature against the 'Profit-Friendly Ideological Defense System':Entertainment and Sociopolitical Enlightenment in Uwe Timm's Headhunter
Monika Albrecht

Chapter 11. An Imaginary of Blame: The Representation of Crisis, the Crisis of Representation and Jonas Lüscher's Barbarian Spring
Joel Kaipainen

Jill E. Twark is Associate Professor of German at East Carolina University. Her research focuses on contemporary German literature and culture. Along with her monograph, Humor, Satire, and Identity: Eastern German Literature in the 1990s (De Gruyter 2007), she has edited books on post-unification German humor and social-justice dilemmas.