AROMA IN PATRICK SUSKIND’S 'PERFUME: THE STORY OF A MURDER' (Pages 194-199) by Dr. Santhosh Kumar. C in THE ENGLISH RESEARCH EXPRESS / ISSN:2321-1164 (Online); 2347-2642 (Print)

German literature comprises the written works of the German speaking people of central Europe. It has shared the fate of German politics and history, fragmentation and discontinuity. Germany did not become a modern nation state until 1871, and the prior history of the various German states is marked by warfare, religious turmoil and periods of economic decline. This fragmented development sets German literature apart from the national literatures of France and England, for instance, which enjoyed uninterrupted brilliance from the middle Ages to the modern era. In the last decades of the twentieth century, German literature was influenced by international postmodernism, a movement that combined heterogeneous elements in order to appeal a popular and a more sophisticated readership. Parody, pastiche, and multiple allusions to other types of cultural production are characteristic of postmodernist literature. German literature comprises those literary texts written in the German language. The great age of German literature began in the eighteenth century. The revolutionary literary movement known as Young Germany, which strove to arouse German political opinion, turned from romanticism to the more sober realism. Keywords: German Literature, Politics and History, Warfare, Religious Turmoil and Periods of Economic Decline, Heterogeneous Elements, Parody, Pastiche, Multiple Allusions.