The beginning of the twenty-first century is marked by its strong intensity of engagement with politics and society, particularly observable in literature across Europe and in German-language literature in particular. From the documented inclusion of reality in the diegetic fiction of the ‘New Objectivity’ to the increasingly politically engaged phases of realism and neo-realism in the twentieth century to today’s ‘co-ethnography’, as Juli Zeh describes it, the writer’s participation in public life has become ever more visible and present.