This dissertation explores narratives of citizenship in the German novel from the Weimar Republic to the post-war era, 1926 – 1959. As an inherently contested concept, citizenship presented an important terrain for many of the twentieth century’s key political struggles. The main body of the dissertation is divided into three parts, each of which interweaves close readings of one or two novels with the discussion of a major change in German citizenship law and the historically informed study of a theme or concept that relates to citizenship also beyond the temporal and local bounds of the dissertation.

In the first chapter, in which I discuss Marieluise Fleißer’s Mehlreisende Frieda Geier (1931) and Irmgard Keun’s Gilgi, eine von uns (1931), I analyse the place of gender and the body in the politics of citizenship during the period following the introduction of the female franchise in Weimar Germany, and investigate an historic connection between narratives of sexual violence and the constitution of sovereignty. In the second chapter, based on readings of B. Traven’s Das Totenschiff (1926) and Anna Seghers’ Transit (1944), I look at the history and narratives of the passport as the primary bureaucratic signifier of citizenship, as well as the conscious production of statelessness under National Socialism. In the final chapter, in which I discuss Uwe Johnson’s Mutmassungen über Jakob (1959), I explore the nexus between socialist citizenship, ideologies of progress, and phenomena of psycho-social division.

The three chapters are embedded in a broader historical analysis provided in the introduction and conclusion. In approaching citizenship through the lens of creative fiction and the intimate insight into socio-cultural imaginaries and practices it offers, I aim to contribute to the growing field of interdisciplinary citizenship studies and to promote a deeper understanding of how contestations over citizenship have been staged not only administratively and physically, but also symbolically.