Matthew Philpotts - Böcker

Fresh perspectives on the cultural history of the German Democratic Republic, exploring the nation's dialogue with the German past.Established, commissioned, and edited by the Department of German at the University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh German Yearbook encourages and disseminates lively and open discussion of themes pertinent to German Studies, viewed from all angles but with particular interest in problems arising out of politics and history. No other yearbook covers the entire field while addressing a focused theme in each issue.Coinciding with the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, volume 3 re-directs current debates on memory and tradition, opening up fresh perspectives on the cultural history of the GDR and exploring how the nation's cultural discourses entered into a productive but often problematic dialogue with the values of the past and with the German cultural inheritance. Topics include the compositional engagement with musical heritage; industrial design and cultural politics; the establishment of antifascist monuments and their use as sites of resistance; constructions of a cultural heritage in architecture; the influence of cultural politics on literary scholarship; continuities and breaks with tradition in visualand literary culture; and engagement with the past in the works of Konrad Wolf, Irmtraud Morgner, and Anna Seghers.Contributors: Leonie Beiersdorf, Julian Blunk, Dara Bryant, Helen Finch, Carola Hähnel-Mesnard, StacyHartman, Elaine Kelly, Heather Mathews, Katharina Pfützner, Matthew Philpotts, Larson Powell, Tim Reiß, Marianne Schwarz-Scherer, Laura Silverberg.Matthew Philpotts is Lecturer in German at the University of Manchester, and Sabine Rolle is Lecturer in German at the University of Edinburgh.

This book seeks to move twentieth-century German literary history away from its stubbornly persistent reliance on the political turning-points of 1933 and 1945. In the first part of the book, the authors analyze a synchronic corpus of literary journals, identifying a restorative aesthetic mood in the years 1930-1960 which persists across political date boundaries. In the second part, the careers of five writers are considered diachronically against this prevailing restorative climate: Gottfried Benn, Johannes R. Becher, Bertolt Brecht, Günter Eich, and Peter Huchel. Combining these two approaches, the authors show that a fresh perspective that challenges established literary-historical periodisations can shed light on the common cultural and aesthetic ground shared by writers, editors and critics across the ideological divides of the era.