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This is Camden House’s general German studies series, in which numerous titles have appeared since the early 1980s. It welcomes a broad range of topics and approaches - from traditional, narrowly literary studies on one hand to forays into cultural studies and cultural history on the other, from approaches based on traditional close reading to those emphasizing theory, from feminist to postmodern to multicultural. All periods of German culture and literature are fair game, from medieval Spielmannsepen to currently emerging writers of the twenty-first century.

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253 results in Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture

Page 12 of 13

Humor and Irony in Nineteenth-Century German Women's Writing
  • Studies in Prose Fiction, 1840–1900
  • Helen Chambers
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 June 2007
  • Nineteenth-century German literature is seldom seen as rich in humor and irony, and women's writing from that period is perhaps even less likely to be seen as possessing those qualities. Yet since comedy is bound to societal norms, and humor and irony are recognized weapons of the weak against authority, what this innovative study reveals should not be surprising: women writers found much to laugh at in a bourgeois age when social constraints, particularly on women, were tight. Helen Chambers analyzes prose fiction by leading female writers of the day who prominently employ humor and irony. Arguing that humor and irony involve cognitive and rational processes, she highlights the inadequacy of binary theories of gender that classify the female as emotional and the male as rational. Chambers focuses on nine women writers: Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Ida Hahn-Hahn, Ottilie Wildermuth, Helene Böhlau, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Ada Christen, Clara Viebig, Isolde Kurz, and Ricarda Huch. She uncovers a rich seam of unsuspected or forgotten variety, identifies fresh avenues of approach, and suggests a range of works that merit a place on university reading lists and attention in scholarly studies. Helen Chambers is Professor of German at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK.

Ghetto Voices in Contemporary German Culture
  • Textscapes, Filmscapes, Soundscapes
  • Maria Stehle
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 November 2012
  • Accounts of how Germany has changed since unification often portray the Berlin Republic as a new Germany that has left the Nazi past and Cold War division behind and entered the new millennium as a peaceful, worldly, and cautiously proud nation. Closer inspection, however, reveals tensions between such views and the realities of a country that continues to struggle with racism, provincialism, and fear of the perceived Other. Mainstream media foster such fears by describing violence in ghetto schools, failed integration, and the loss of society's core values. The city emerges as a key site not only of ethnic and political tension but of social change. Maria Stehle illuminates these tensions and transformations by following the metaphor of the ghetto in literary works from the 1990s by Feridun Zaimoglu, in German ghettocentric films from the late 1990s and the early twenty-first century, and in hip-hop and rap music of the same periods. In their representations of ghettos, authors, filmmakers, musicians, and performers redefine and challenge provincialism and nationalism and employ transcultural frameworks for their diverging political agendas. By contextualizing these discussions within social and political developments, this study illuminates the complexities that define Germany today for scholars and students across the disciplines of German, European, cultural, urban, and media studies. Maria Stehle is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Traumatic Verses
  • On Poetry in German from the Concentration Camps, 1933–1945
  • Andrés Nader
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 October 2007
  • Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Christianstadt, Dachau. The names of Nazi concentration camps evoke images of radical destitution. The atrocities we call the Holocaust defy comprehension, while thinkers continue to ponder the possibility of 'poetry after Auschwitz.' And yet a number of people composed poems while imprisoned in the camps. Unlike most documents about the camps, these poems are self-representations that convey the perspective of the inmates who wrote them. 'Traumatic Verses' provides psychoanalytically informed close readings of a range of poems and discusses their significance for aesthetic theory and for research on the camps. It also tells the stories behind the composition and preservation of these poems and the history of their publication since 1945. Most of the poems appear here for the first time in English translation along with the original texts. This book fills a gap left by literary historians, who have mostly ignored writings from the camps and avoided careful scrutiny of literature produced under the Nazi regime. Studies of trauma have concentrated on post-traumatic experiences; discussions of aesthetics 'after' the Holocaust have neglected the issue of the artistic impulse 'in' the camps. On both counts this book constitutes a unique contribution to scholarship, showing that, when read attentively, the poems written in the camps are invaluable sites for confronting the Nazi past. Andrés J. Nader is Project Manager at the Amadeu Antonio Foundation in Berlin, and lectures at the Humboldt University. Winner, 2008 Modern Language Association Book Prize for Independent Scholars; from the statement of the Selection Committee: Leading a new generation of students of the Holocaust, Nader persuasively analyzes the psychological needs and motivations behind ... poetry composed in the concentration camps. Displaying a strong command of trauma and pain theory, as well as the prior history of Holocaust studies, [Nader] illuminates the role of poetry in the camp inmates' reclamation of the German language and cultural heritage. Offering many poems in English for the first time, in elegant translation, Nader's anthology and commentary add a significant new dimension to Holocaust studies.

German Literature of the 1990s and Beyond
  • Normalization and the Berlin Republic
  • Stuart Taberner
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    15 January 2005
  • This book presents a comprehensive, lively account of recent developments in German fiction at a moment when-for the first time in many years-German authors are once again the subject of international attention and acclaim. It introduces English-speaking audiences to the complex dilemmas that are shaping the ways in which Germans are presently defining themselves, their difficult past, and the new 'Berlin Republic.' The theme that runs throughout the volume is the ongoing debate on German 'normalization.' In offering a wide-ranging consideration of contemporary German literature, the book complements a broad discussion of trends in present-day German politics, society, and culture with detailed readings of texts by internationally renowned figures as W. G. Sebald, Günter Grass, Martin Walser, Marcel Beyer, Ingo Schulze, Judith Hermann, Thomas Brussig, and Bernhard Schlink, and by newer, emerging writers. Topics include the literary debates of the 1990s, the literary market and marketing, literary responses to the former East and West Germany in the age of globalization and to the Nazi past and portrayals of 'ordinary Germans,' depictions of 'German wartime suffering,' contemporary writing on 'Jewish fates' and efforts to revive the 'German-Jewish symbiosis,' and finally, the recent wave of writing about the provinces. Stuart Taberner is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of German at the University of Leeds, UK.

The Revivifying Word
  • Literature, Philosophy, and the Theory of Life in Europe's Romantic Age
  • Clayton Koelb
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 October 2008
  • 'What is not 'Life' that really is?' asked Coleridge, struggling, like many poets, philosophers, and scientists of Europe's Romantic age, to formulate a theory of life that explained the mysterious relation between dead material bodies and living, animate beings. Romantic intellectuals found a key to this mystery surprisingly close at hand: the process by which dead matter could come to life must be something like the process of reading. 'The Revivifying Word' examines the reanimating acts of reading that became a central focus of attention for Romantic writers. German theorists, building on the Apostle Paul's assertion that the dead letter can be revivified by the living spirit, proposed a permeable, legible boundary between the living and the dead. This inaugurated a revolution in European aesthetics, implanting the germ of an extraordinarily productive narrative idea that enriched Romantic literature for decades. Poets and novelists created a large cast of characters who crossed the boundary between death and life with the help of some form of reading: figures like Keats's Glaucus, Kleist's Elizabeth Kohlhaas, Shelley's Frankenstein (and the monster he creates), Maturin's Melmoth, Poe's Madeline Usher, and Gautier's Spirite. Clayton Koelb demonstrates that such fictions offer a nuanced consideration of the most urgent question facing any theory of life: how do material bodies come to acquire, to lose, and then perhaps to regain the immaterial intellectual/spiritual quality that defines animate beings? Clayton Koelb is Guy B. Johnson Professor of German, English, and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Friedrich Nietzsche and Weimar Classicism
  • Paul Bishop, R. H. Stephenson
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    24 November 2004
  • This book argues that Nietzsche's polemics against the 19th-century reception of Goethe and Schiller should not obscure his own more positive evaluation of Weimar classicism, as has generally been the case. The authors uncover the continuing influence of Weimar classicism at the very heart of Nietzsche's aesthetic theory, which in turn became the cornerstone of his epistemological and moral concerns. The book takes as its starting point the view that 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' has a single, coherent message that it identifies with what Goethe called 'the gospel of beauty.' A hitherto unappreciated unity of plot, style, and argument is thus revealed in both 'Zarathustra' and Nietzsche's philosophical 'oeuvre' as a whole, showing how he participates in a 'perennial aesthetic.' In this connection Nietzsche's statement in 'The Gay Science' is revealing: 'I want to learn more and more to see what is necessary in things as what is beautiful ? then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful.' The book provides an overview of related scholarly literature; discusses Nietzsche's aesthetic theory in 'The Birth of Tragedy'; recounts the composition of 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' and offers an interpretation of its 'aesthetic gospel'; a concluding chapter explores historical continuities in aesthetic theory. By demonstrating the constitutive function of the aesthetics of Weimar classicism in his philosophy, this book opens up a fresh and original perspective on Nietzsche. Paul Bishop is Professor of German, and R. H. Stephenson is William Jacks Professor of German Language and Literature, both at the University of Glasgow.

Perspectives on Gender in Post-1945 German Literature
  • Georgina Paul
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 October 2009
  • Rooted in Enlightenment rationalism, modernity tends to privilege masculine-connoted characteristics - conscious subjective agency, rational control and self-containment, the subjugation of nature - and has generated a conceptualization of human subjectivity emphasizing these qualities. Yet the costs of this conception of human selfhood are high, and at modernity's most acute moments of historical crisis writers and artists can be seen turning to feminine-connoted figurations - nature, tradition, myth and spirituality, intuition, relationality, flux. In recent decades studies have examined the cultural crisis of German modernity, notably at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, as a crisis of masculinity. Feminist critiques, meanwhile, have viewed cultural history as male-generated and 'phallocentric,' in need of a feminine corrective. The innovation of this book is to examine these two gendered perspectives side by side, investigating the culturally symbolic significance of gender in post 1945 German language literature via a sequence of paired readings of major, thematically related texts by male and female authors, including Ingeborg Bachmann's novel 'Malina' (1971) and Max Frisch's 'Mein Name sei Gantenbein' (1964); Frisch's 'Homo Faber' (1957) and Christa Wolf's 'Störfall' (1987); Elfriede Jelinek's 'Die Klavierspielerin' and Rainald Goetz's 'Irre' (both 1983); and Heiner Müller's 'Die Hamletmaschine' (1977) and Christa Wolf's 'Kassandra' (1983). Finally, Barbara Köhler's eight-poem cycle 'Elektra. Spiegelungen' (written 1984-85; published 1991) is considered as offering a way past the 'impasse' of the male and female viewpoints. Georgina Paul is University Lecturer in German at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St. Hilda's College.

The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature
  • Nature in Rilke, Benn, Brecht, and Döblin
  • Larson Powell
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 May 2008
  • Even after the end of modernism and postmodernism, grandiose fantasies of artifice and self-reference still resonate in the 'social constructivism' of current literary and cultural theory: in the idea that we can perform or construct 'identities' or social roles without external constraint, as if we had consumer choice of self. Larson Powell's book posits nature as a limit to such fantasies, redefining aesthetic modernity's conception of and relation to nature and therefore its relation to reality. Powell's term 'the Technological Unconscious' refers both to the intersection between psychoanalysis and theories of modernism and to the philosophical mediation between history and nature, a motif important from Kant to Adorno. The book's four chapters center on the representation of nature in German prose and - especially - poetry by Rilke, Benn, Brecht, and Döblin from the years 1900 to 1945. In connection with these works, Powell analyzes the conceptions of 'subject' and 'system' in the theories of Adorno, Luhmann, and Lacan and their relation to their complement, nature. 'The Technological Unconscious' is thus an important polemical intervention both in the debates over interdisciplinarity and in those between eclectic 'culturalist' theories such as New Historicism and postcolonialism on the one hand and systems theory and psychoanalysis on the other. Larson Powell is assistant professor of German at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Schiller the Dramatist
  • A Study of Gesture in the Plays
  • John Guthrie
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    15 July 2009
  • Many aspects of the works of Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) have attracted attention. His work as a philosopher and pioneering thinker in poetics and aesthetics and as a historian have recently been the focus of much attention. But Schiller's dramas have always held the most interest, and they continue to be performed regularly both in German-speaking lands and around the world. Schiller is a dramatist of psychological conflict rather than of abstract ideas, and he had a unique grasp of how to use the stage to that end. This study of Schiller's use of gesture begins with a discussion of the origins of the gestures he employs, viewing them in relation to his medical writings, his literary influences, theories of the theater and acting, and Enlightenment thinking in general. The study then considers the use of gesture and related aspects of stagecraft in Schiller's nine completed dramas, highlighting elements of continuity and development. It is concerned with the interpretation of gesture, often marginalized in studies of Schiller's works, and with the interrelationship between gesture and verbal text. It also considers Schiller's relationship to the theater of his day, and discusses the first performances of his plays as well as their more recent stage history in both Germany and Great Britain. Appearing in the 250th anniversary of Schiller's birth, this study treats his dramas as plays written to be performed - as works that reach their fullest potential in the theater. John Guthrie teaches modern German literature and language at the University of Cambridge, where he is fellow and director of studies at Murray Edwards College.

Imagining the Age of Goethe in German Literature, 1970–2010
  • John D. Pizer
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 August 2011
  • The Age of Goethe is widely viewed as the apogee of German culture. Its writers and thinkers, especially Goethe, have been exalted as role models for life and art, particularly after 1945. Yet in the 1970s, a new generation of German writers in both East and West rebelled against the postwar hagiography, taking up a tradition of imaginatively engaging with the giants of the period, casting them in major roles in their works in order to critique the nation's past and its present, a tradition that has been carried on by more contemporary writers. This is the first book-length study devoted to modern German 'author-as-character' fiction set in the Age of Goethe. It shows for the first time in a sustained manner the powerful hold the 'Goethezeit' continues to exercise on the imagination of many of Germany's leading writers. This inner-German dialogue across the ages provides an important corrective to the dominant critical view that contemporary German-language literature is composed primarily under the sign of both globalization and the influence of mass American culture. The book will be of interest to both scholars of the 'Goethezeit' and of contemporary German literature and culture. John D. Pizer is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Louisiana State University.

Who Is This Schiller Now?
  • Essays on his Reception and Significance
  • Edited by Jeffrey L. High, Nicholas Martin, Norbert Oellers
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    20 May 2011
  • The works of Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) - an innovative and resonant tragedian and an important poet, essayist, historian, and aesthetic theorist - are among the best known of German and world literature. Schiller's explosive original artistry and feel for timely and enduring personal tragedy embedded in timeless sociohistorical conflicts remain the topic of lively academic debate. The essays in this volume address the many flashpoints and canonical shifts in the cyclically polarized reception of Schiller and his works, in pursuit of historical and contemporary answers to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's expression of frightened admiration in 1794: 'Who is this Schiller?' The responses demonstrate pronounced shifts from widespread twentieth-century understandings of Schiller: the overwhelming emphasis here is on Schiller the cosmopolitan realist, and little or no trace is left of the ultimately untenable view of Schiller as an abstract idealist who turned his back on politics. Ehrhard Bahr, Matthew Bell, Frederick Burwick, Jennifer Driscoll Colosimo, Bernd Fischer, Gail K. Hart, Fritz Heuer, Hans H. Hiebel, Jeffrey L. High, Walter Hinderer, Paul E. Kerry, Erik B. Knoedler, Elisabeth Krimmer, Maria del Rosario Acosta López, Laura Anna Macor, Dennis F. Mahoney, Nicholas Martin, John A. McCarthy, Yvonne Nilges, Norbert Oellers, Peter Pabisch, David Pugh, T. J. Reed, Wolfgang Riedel, Jörg Robert, Ritchie Robertson, Jeffrey L. Sammons, Henrik Sponsel. Jeffrey L. High is Associate Professor of German Studies at California State University Long Beach, Nicholas Martin is Reader in European Intellectual History at the University of Birmingham, and Norbert Oellers is Professor Emeritus of German Literature at the University of Bonn.

Encounters with Islam in German Literature and Culture
  • Edited by James Hodkinson, Jeffrey Morrison
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 December 2009
  • Islam has been a rich topic in German-language literature since the middle ages, and the writings about it not only reveal much about Islamic culture but also about the European 'home' culture. Many of the early essays in this chronologically arranged volume uncover fresh evidence of how German writers used images of Islam-as-other to define their individual subject positions as well as to define the German nation and the Christian religion. The perspectives of many contemporary writers are, however, far removed from such a polar opposition of cultures. Their experience of the German-Islamic encounter is complicated by a crucial factor: many of them emerge from Muslim migrant communities such as the German-Turkish community. The culturally hybrid origins of these writers and their expression of experiences and ideologies that cross boundaries of East and West, Christendom and Islam, strongly affect the findings of the essays as the volume moves toward the present. The texts discussed include travelogues and other firsthand encounters with Islam; reports for colonial authorities; aesthetic treatises on Islamic art; literary, essayistic, and theological writing on Islamic religious practice; the incorporation of characters, situations, and settings from the Islamic world into fiction or drama; and fictional and autobiographical writing by Muslims in German. Contributors: Cyril Edwards, Silke Falkner, James Hodkinson, Timothy R. Jackson, Margaret Littler, Rachel MagShamráin, Frauke Matthes, Yomb May, Jeffrey Morrison, Kate Roy, Monika Shafi, Edwin Wieringa, W. Daniel Wilson, Karin E. Yesilada. James Hodkinson is Assistant Professor of German at Warwick University; Jeffrey Morrison is Senior Lecturer at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.

Nolten the Painter
  • A Novella in Two Parts
  • Eduard Mörike
  • Translated by Raleigh Whitinger
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 March 2005
  • When one thinks of German artist-novels and 'Bildungsromane,' works long available in translation come to mind-by Goethe, Novalis, Hoffmann, Stifter, Keller, or more recently by Mann, Kafka, Musil, or Grass. Yet Eduard Mörike's provocatively subtitled 'Maler Nolten: Novelle in zwei Teilen' (Nolten the Painter: A Novella in Two Parts, 1832) has remained neglected and misunderstood, and until now has never been translated into English, despite its obvious ties to other artist-novels and its striking modernity in playing with conventions of narrative authority and heroic identity. Witness the subtle irony of the opening sequence, in which the narrator is subverted by hints at his own clumsiness and intimations about the dire truths that lurk behind the protagonist Nolten's relationships to his male friends and to the seductive yet somehow frightening women in his life. Or the interplay between the narrator's attempts to make sense of Nolten's complex inner motivations in his loves and art and the ludicrously pompous pathos with which Nolten persists in speaking and thinking, as he concocts a heroic persona caught up in passion, intrigue, and tragedy. Fascinating too is the mysterious trail of the 'Grenzgänger,' or border-line characters, with their hints at the dimension of 'Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves' that seems to threaten and at the same time to foster the complex unfolding of the realities of life and art that defy Nolten's all-too-artful 'mastery.' Raleigh Whitinger is professor in the Department of Germanic Languages at the University of Alberta.

The Rediscovered Writings of Veza Canetti
  • Out of the Shadows of a Husband
  • Julian Preece
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    02 April 2007
  • The Viennese playwright, novelist, and short-story writer Veza Canetti was born in 1897 into a mixed Sephardic-Ashkenazi Jewish family and died in 1963 in London. Part of the avant garde in 1920s Vienna (where she met her future husband and Nobel Prize winner, Elias Canetti), from 1932 she wrote radical short stories drawn from everyday life for the Vienna 'Arbeiter-Zeitung.' After censorship under the so-called Corporate State reduced her opportunities for publication, she disguised her critique in irony and humor, but from then on published little. Until 1990, when her first novel, 'Yellow Street,' was finally published, Veza was known only as her husband's muse and literary assistant. As more of her writings appeared, critics became convinced that it was he who was responsible for her decline into obscurity, notwithstanding his protestations of support and admiration. This biography tells a more nuanced story, presenting Veza's literary career against the background of her troubled times, drawing on Elias's unpublished papers to assess their literary partnership, showing how their early writings constituted a private dialogue on topics as diverse as feminism and Jewish identity and how several key themes in his work are anticipated in hers. Julian Preece is Professor of German at the University of Wales, Swansea.

In the Shadow of Empire
  • Austrian Experiences of Modernity in the Writings of Musil, Roth, and Bachmann
  • Malcolm Spencer
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 September 2008
  • Austria was not the only European country whose old order disintegrated in the early twentieth century, giving way to the crisis of modernity, nor the only country whose literature bears the marks of this crisis. But modernity's onset was experienced differently in Austria: in the words of Karl Kraus, it served as 'laboratory for the fall of world civilization.' This book examines the crisis as reflected in fiction written by Robert Musil, Joseph Roth, and Ingeborg Bachmann between 1920 and 1970. After examining the elusive concept of modernity, Malcolm Spencer looks at the responses of the three authors to the central themes of modernity: fragmentation, nationalism, the end of empire, and ambivalence. Chapters on Musil examine his understanding of the 'ancien régime' in Austria and his analysis of the ideological stage of modernity. Spencer then considers Roth's more negative reaction, showing the post-imperial novel 'Radetzkymarsch' to be a nostalgic response to the collapse of Habsburg Austria and the rise of fascism. The final chapter looks again at the end of empire, not in the work of writers who lived through it, but through that of one who experienced it as a historical and cultural legacy: Ingeborg Bachmann. Malcolm Spencer is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Birmingham.

Nomadic Ethics in Contemporary Women's Writing in German
  • Strange Subjects
  • Emily Jeremiah
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 December 2012
  • How can postmodern subjectivity be ethically conceived? What can literature contribute to this project? What role do 'gender' and 'nation' play in the construction of contemporary identities? 'Nomadic Ethics' broaches these questions, exploring the work of five women writers who live outside of the German-speaking countries or thematize a move away from them: Birgit Vanderbeke, Dorothea Grünzweig, Antje Rávic Strubel, Anna Mitgutsch, and Barbara Honigmann. It draws on work by Rosi Braidotti, Sara Ahmed, and Judith Butler to develop a nomadic ethics, and examines how the writers under discussion conceptualize contemporary German and Austrian identities - especially but not only gender identities - in instructive ways. The book engages with a number of critical issues in contemporary German studies: globalization; green thought; questions of gender and sexuality; East (and West) German identities; Austrianness; the postmemory of the Holocaust; and Jewishness. In this way, 'Nomadic Ethics' offers a valuable contribution to debates about the nature of German studies itself, as well as insightful readings of the individual authors and texts concerned. Emily Jeremiah is Lecturer in German, Royal Holloway, University of London.

Politics and Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany
  • Edited by William Niven, James Jordan
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 July 2003
  • The cultural history of 20th-century Germany, more perhaps than that of any other European country, was decisively influenced by political forces and developments. This volume of essays focuses on the relationship between German politics and culture, which is most obvious in the case of the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic, where the one-party control of all areas of life was extended to the arts; these were expected to conform to the ideals of the day. But the relationship between politics and the arts has not always been one purely of coercion, censorship, collusion, and opportunism. Many writers greeted the First World War with quite voluntary enthusiasm; others conjured up the National Socialist revolution in intense Expressionist images long before 1933. The GDR was heralded by writers returning from Nazi exile as the anti-fascist answer to the Third Reich. And in West Germany, politics did not dictate artistic norms, nor was it greeted with any great enthusiasm among intellectuals, but writers did tend to ally themselves with particular parties. To an extent, the pre-1990 literary establishment in the Federal Republic was dominated by a left-liberal consensus that German division was the just punishment for Auschwitz. United Germany began its existence with a fierce literary debate in 1990-92, with leading literary critics arguing that East and West German literature had basically shored up the political order in the two countries. Now a new literature was required, one that was free of ideology, intensely subjective and experimental in its aesthetic. In 1998, the author Martin Walser called for an end to the author's role as "conscience of the nation" and for the right to subjective experience. This is the first book to examine this crucial relationship between politics and culture in Germany. William Niven and James Jordan are readers in German at the University of Nottingham Trent.

Women in the Works of Lou Andreas-Salomé
  • Negotiating Identity
  • Muriel Cormican
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 December 2009
  • The writer and intellectual Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937) fascinates scholars of German literature because of her associations with Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud and because she was active in the cultural and intellectual vanguard of late 19th- and early 20th-century Germany and Austria. Recent editions of her fictional works have garnered wider attention from scholars of literature and theory, particularly those interested in women's studies, identity politics, and narrative theory. This study analyzes how Andreas-Salomé depicted women in her fictional works just as feminism was emerging, revealing a complex engagement with questions of narrative and identity. More than mere thematic explorations of women's changing roles in society, her works investigate the concept of identity and its relationship to gender, sexuality, and narrative representation. She is as concerned with a cultural crisis of femininity and masculinity as with the identity crises of her individual women characters. This book offers the best account of Andreas-Salomé's literary works, de-emphasizing biographical and psychoanalytical perspectives but taking into account the sociopolitical, historical, and cultural contexts in which they were written. It also adds to contemporary theoretical discourses on gender, feminism, and identity. Muriel Cormican is professor of German at the University of West Georgia, Carrollton, Georgia.

Hölderlin after the Catastrophe
  • Heidegger - Adorno - Brecht
  • Robert Savage
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 September 2008
  • Toward the end of the Second World War, the works of the great German poet Friedrich Hölderlin were heavily exploited by Nazi propaganda as a source of spiritual strength for the war-weary German people. Once the fires had burned out, scholars attempted to absolve Hölderlin of any responsibility for his wartime (mis)appropriation. Only a few saw that his work would have to be reread in the light of the iniquities that had been said and done in his name. This book examines how Hölderlin was taken up by three such thinkers, among the most influential and controversial of their time: Martin Heidegger, Theodor W. Adorno, and Bertolt Brecht. It extrapolates from their writings on the poet three irreconcilable paradigms of reception - conversation, polemic, and citation - that are of significance for the broader project of working through the tarnished German cultural legacy after 1945. In each case, Hölderlin is examined as the occasion for salvaging that legacy after, from, and in view of the catastrophe. This first full-length study of Hölderlin's postwar reception will be of interest to students and scholars working in the fields of German literature, European philosophy, the politics of cultural memory, and critical theory. Robert Savage is ARC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.

The World as Metaphor in Robert Musil's 'The Man without Qualities'
  • Possibility as Reality
  • Genese Grill
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 December 2012
  • Robert Musil, known to be a scientific and philosophical thinker, was committed to aesthetics as a process of experimental creation of an ever-shifting reality. Musil wanted, above all, to be a creative writer, and obsessively engaged in almost endless deferral via variations and metaphoric possibilities in his novel project, 'The Man without Qualities.' This lifelong process of writing is embodied in the unfinished novel by a recurring metaphor of self-generating de-centered circle worlds. The present study analyzes this structure with reference to Musil's concepts of the utopia of the Other Condition, Living and Dead Words, Specific and Non-Specific Emotions, Word Magic, and the Still Life. In contrast to most recent studies of Musil, it concludes that the extratemporal metaphoric experience of the Other Condition does not fail, but rather constitutes the formal and ethical core of Musil's novel. The first study to utilize the newly published Klagenfurt Edition of Musil's literary remains (a searchable annotated text), 'The World as Metaphor' offers a close reading of variations and text genesis, shedding light not only on Musil's novel, but also on larger questions about the modernist artist's role and responsibility in consciously re-creating the world. Genese Grill holds a PhD in Germanic Literatures and Languages from the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York.

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