DO YOU research or teach in postwar German literature?
DO YOU ever have difficulty getting access to contemporary literary texts?
WOULD YOU value the chance to browse a collection of every German-language work of literary quality published since the sixties?

If it’s yes to any of these, then the University of Warwick’s German literature collection is just what you need.

Warwick’s Library has built up an outstanding collection of twentieth-century, especially contemporary, literary texts in German. The core of the collection is an “approval plan” which automatically delivers all literary works of research value in German – between 400 and 500 volumes per year. This gives us in effect a “copyright library” of quality contemporary literature – not just from the European German-speaking countries but from any country in which German is written. The collection numbers about 16,000 titles representing work by over 4000 authors, of whom at least 1600 are still writing; of these about 600 have been published only since 2000.

The collection spans the full breadth of the German-language literary scene, from experimental to popular, and reflects the increasingly multicultural elements in German society. We think the collection is comprehensive for every work of quality since the sixties, and is very strong for the whole postwar period. Areas of concentration include:

• Underground and counterculture texts (60s to 80s mainly)
• “Gastarbeiterliteratur” and migrant/diasporic writing
• Working-class literature
• Work by upcoming authors
• Popular literature, with a focus on detective novels.

We also have substantial and unusual holdings of earlier twentieth-century texts, including popular novels, novels by women, working class and political literature, Sprechchöre etc., and first-rate holdings of editions of 18^th and 19^th century authors.

You can find details of all our collections in COPAC, the CURL union catalogue, and in our public catalogue. And you can read more about all our holdings in German Studies.

The whole of the contemporary German collection is available for loan via Document Supply (inter-library loan); ask in your own library for details.

It is almost all on open access and can be browsed on site by prior arrangement; please contact the German subject specialist, Richard Perkins (r.perkins@warwick.ac.uk, 024 7652 2331).

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