Building on scholarship concerning aesthetic and social tensions between mono- and multilingualism, on the one hand, and queer critiques of normative cultural paradigms, on the other, this dissertation proposes “queer multilingualism” to interrogate transnational and translinguistic border crossings in critical relation to socio-cultural norms of embodied binarisms. A queer approach to literary multilingualism not only does away with presumptions that linguistic identities are stable or fixed and therefore readily distinguishable from one another. In addition, this dissertation argues that transnational literatures associated with migration often cultivate queer multilingual forms even in seemingly monolingual texts. This project examines in particular multilingual forms of writing culture in Russian-German literatures of the last 100 years, including 20th-century literature by Russian writers who fled to Germany after the Bolshevik Revolution and 21st-century German literature associated with post-Soviet migration. The dissertation opens with close readings of Marina Tsvetaeva’s letters, poems, and essays. Tsvetaeva developed a queer multilingual poetics through applications of multiple grammars, orthographies, and vocabularies to articulate a variety of linguistic, social, political, spatial, temporal, and sexual crossings. The second chapter analyses poems and archived prose pieces by the Jewish writer Vera Lourié, a long-forgotten contemporary of Tsvetaeva, who survived the Holocaust in Berlin. Lourié’s archived manuscripts of her short fiction reveals a multilingual form of writing itself (e.g. in drafting, self-translating, and editing) that makes it impossible to designate any language as a point of departure or arrival. The third chapter turns to the twenty-first century and centers Olga Grjasnowa’s debut novel Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt. In what I call trans-languaging of trauma, Grjasnowa’s writing bespeaks multilingual and multigenerational memory, a strategy for countering the violence of monolingualism within transhistorical and transnational contexts. The concluding fourth chapter focusses on Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s play Muttersprache Mameloschn and the novel Im Menschen muss alles herrlich sein. This chapter argues that Salzmann’s literary language, which incorporates German, Yiddish, and Russian among others, employs a queer linguistic practice unrestricted by national and monolingual borders to find kinship and solidarity with others impacted by the solitary closet of monolingualism. Situated at the intersection of literary studies and queer studies, my dissertation contributes to the growing field of literary multilingualism studies with a new approach for the analysis of aesthetic and stylistic means of multilingual and transnational writing. Queer multilingualism in Russian-German literature puts migration, sexuality, gender, code-switching, and East-West divisions of Europe itself in productive conversation and renders them legible in constant transition.