Die Geschichte unseres Landes ist so viel mehr als nur der Zweite Weltkrieg”
German Cultural History Meets Transnational Genre Narratives in How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast)
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10498557 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Benjamin Schaper (0009-0001-8615-0688, Independent Scholar, Nuremberg, Bavaria, Germany, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 61 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 239-265 |
| Publication date | 2025-11-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Seminar A Journal of Germanic Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0037-1939 • E-ISSN: 1911-026X |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3138/seminar.61.4.2 |
| OpenAlex | W7116900020 |
| Language | DE |
| References cited | 5 |
This article examines Netflix’s third original German series, How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast) (2019–), in order to situate German (streaming) television in the broader media developments of the convergence era. Transnationally conceived from the outset, the series combines transnational genre narratives with German cultural history in order to address broad audiences across the globe. Focusing on narrative complexity, intertextuality, and genre hybridity, the article first analyzes the series’ references to both national and international nerd narratives such as Baran bo Odar’s Who am I: Kein System ist sicher (2014) and David Fincher’s The Social Network (2010) . Then it contextualizes How to Sell Drugs within twenty-first-century societal debates in Germany and canonical works from nineteenth-century German literary tradition—especially Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774) and Faust (1808) , as well as Frank Wedekind’s Frühlings Erwachen (1891) . In doing so, this article demonstrates that the series creates ambiguous images simultaneously inspired by both German and Anglo-American cultural history to appeal to audiences around the globe
Appeal · Cultural history · German · German history · German Literature · Narrative · Order (exchange · Television series · German Colonialism and Identity Studies · German Literature and Culture Studies · Narrative Theory and Analysis
| Highly cited | No |
|---|