Border and Border Experience: Investigations into the Philosophical and Literary Understanding of a German Motif

This interdisciplinary study aims to understand the complex experience of what is an essentially German debate on a philosophical and literary motif. It suggests Karl Jaspers’ Existenzerhellung as a distinctive way of thinking about borders and thresholds. The threshold analogy, in particular, lends itself to the analysis of German literature on border and border experience in the second half of the twentieth century.