This volume on the term Europe is based on a conference that took place in the winter of 2018 at the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundation in Munich. Europe in its complexity, in its character of radical change and its power of fascination is of unbroken topicality. At the same time, European identity is endangered by current challenges such as populism and the rise of nationalism. The contributions to the conference address the question of the extent to which contemporary literature and also current films react to these upheavals and to what extent the talk of a crisis in Europe or European integration is perceptible in the areas of literature and film.

This book is a translation of the original German 1st edition Europa im Umbruch edited by Michaela Nicole Raß and Kay Wolfinger, published by Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature in 2020. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors.

Michaela Nicole Raß, Dr., is a research assistant at the Institute for German Philology at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich.

Kay Wolfinger, Dr., is a research associate at the Institute for German Philology at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich.

Part I: Europe in transition. Identity in politics, literature and film.- Europe is everywhere: Introductory thoughts.- Part II: Europe as a (political) construct in the mirror of culture (and) theory.- Critique of criticism: On the more recent Europe theses by Robert Menasse..- Recent debates on Europe in the historical cultural studies of the 21st century.- The House of Europe: On the difficulty of loving a building site that remains one.- Part III: Europe.- A fiction? Current constructions of Europe as an idea, concept, image, cultural conception.- On the price of freedom and accessible books : some remarks on the concept of East Central Europein current discussions.- Working on Europe: About a flamboyant project of young intellectuals.- Part IV: Europe and Europeans.- An identity-forming unit?.- Europe and the concept of empire.- Between small states and the European public: Anthologies on the subject of Europe Reflections on the 'good Europeans' in the phase of Brexism.- Part V: Images of Europe in film and contemporary literature.- Utopias and dystopias.- Europe as utopia and dystopia in the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Lars von Trier.- Maps, zones: Figurations of Europe in Lars von Trier's early films.- Believe in Europe? The community of states in two contemporary documentaries.- Europe on the high seas: Sea voyage with Hans Pleschinski's novel Brabant (1995).- The neoliberal decomposition of democracy in Alexander Schimmelbusch's novel Hochdeutschland..- Crisis or Revolution? Brexit as reflected in literature and film. An overview.