Characteristic features of postmodernism in German and Azerbaijani novels

Abstract

Postmodernism’s arrival in German and Azerbaijani literatures—shaped respectively by Germany’s post–Cold War reunification and Azerbaijan’s post‑Soviet cultural awakening—offers a revealing case study of how socio‑historical upheavals inform narrative innovation. Although previous scholarship has detailed the national trajectories of postmodern prose in each country, a systematic comparison of how German and Azerbaijani novelists deploy core postmodernist devices—particularly intertextuality, fragmentation, parody, irony, and play—remains largely unexplored. Thus, in this research is undertaken a comparative literary analysis of Botho Strauss’s Oniritti Cave Pictures (2016) and Sabir Ahmadli’s Forbidden Game (1988), examining how each text reconfigures classical sources and folk motifs into a metanarrative “play.” Close reading of narrative structure, motif deployment, and thematic resonance grounds our inquiry in both German and Azerbaijani aesthetic contexts. Both novels exemplify postmodern fragmentation and theatricality: Strauss weaves Dante’s Divine Comedy into a multimedia collage—incorporating myth, painting, film, and music—to dramatize humanity’s aimless descent into a digital “hell,” thus renewing classical intertextuality through ironic pastiche . Ahmadli, by contrast, deconstructs the Soviet‑era “King’s Game” into a series of ludic stages—each chapter title functioning as a folk‑play motif—to collapse distinctions between game and reality, turning narrative deconstruction into the very structure of his novel. By highlighting convergences and divergences in German and Azerbaijani postmodern prose, this study broadens our understanding of how peripheral literatures internalize and transform Western avant‑garde strategies. It suggests that cross‑cultural comparative frameworks can illuminate under‑examined regional inflections of postmodernism and encourages further research into other post‑Soviet and non‑Western literary landscapes.