This volume contains selected papers given at the conference ‘Violence, Culture and Identity’ held at St Andrews University in 2003. It contributes to the debate on the role of culture in propagating, mediating and controlling violence in society, concentrating on the relationship between culture and identity-formation in Germany and Austria from the Middle Ages to the present. Bringing together the work of twenty-two scholars with expertise in different literary and historical periods, the volume probes the complexities of representations of violence enacted and suffered, of affirmative and non-affirmative violence in text and visual form, revealing the often blurred line between victim and victimizer. Violence in its discursive and material forms is investigated, using the theoretical tools of sociology, post-colonial and gender studies, history and psychology as well as of literary criticism. The collection of essays focuses particularly on the relationship between war and identity, on 1970s terrorism and identity, on violence and the construction of gender, and on contemporary writing in German.