Amsterdamer Publikationen zur Sprache und Literatur – serie

Die ironisch-spielerische Neuverwendung von populären Gattungen und tradierten Darstellungsweisen stellt ein bemerkenswertes Phänomen heutiger Literatur dar. Die vorliegende Arbeit analysiert diese Form von Intertextualität in Prosawerken von Peter Handke und Botho Strauß und führt damit differente Spielarten solcher Gattungs-Transformation vor. Beide Autoren — die hier erstmals unter diesem erzähltechnischen Aspekt zusammengebracht werden — verwenden zur Konstruktion ihrer Texte 'vorgefertigte' Erzählmodelle: den Kriminalroman und den romantischen Roman. Die Untersuchung zeigt, wie Handke und Strauß deren Bauelemente neuartig einsetzen und so innovative Erzählformen schaffen. Wie in Handkes Krimi-Transformationen die Rätsel unaufgeklärt bleiben und sich das 'looking for clues' mit der Thematik von Zeichendeutung verbindet, wird in den Analysen dargelegt. In Der Hausierer, Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter und Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied zeigt sich dabei eine Entwicklungslinie. Darüber hinaus stellt sich Die Stunde der wahren Empfindung durch den Befund einer Transgression des Krimi-Modells als Scharnierwerk im Oeuvre dar. Die Erarbeitung der vielfältigen Romantik-Bezüge in Strauß' Der junge Mann enthüllt, wie die prätextuellen Themen und Motive mit ironischer Distanz verwendet werden. Romantische Reflexionsstrukturen werden radikalisiert und in andere Funktionszusammenhänge gestellt. Abschließend werden die nachgewiesenen intertextuellen Konstruktionsprinzipien im Kontext postmoderner Literatur betrachtet.

Diese Untersuchung zeigt, daß in dem Zeitraum, in dem nach allgemeinem Konsens der Sprachgeschichtsschreibung die Normierung der Adjektivdeklination durchgeführt wurde, eine Vertikalisierung funktionaler Varianten stattgefunden hat. Anhand von Texten verschiedener literarischer Textsorten des normsetzenden Sprachraums werden variante Belege der ersten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts ermittelt und diskutiert. Alle analysierten Belege weisen eine systematische, funktionale Verwendung der Adjektivdeklination auf, die sich in den entsprechenden morphosyntaktischen Umgebungen im späteren Neuhochdeutschen nicht mehr findet, da sie im Normierungsprozeß, oft zugunsten einer anderen funktionalen Verwendung, aufgegeben wird. Die Vertikalisierung des Variantenspektrums ist im Fall der Adjektivdeklination nicht durch die Bevorzugung der Varianten des normsetzenden Sprachraums zu erklären, denn auch hier vollzieht sich eine Vertikalisierung funktionaler Verwendungsweisen. Um auslösende Faktoren der Variantenhierarchisierung zu ermitteln, werden die Aussagen der zeitgenössischen Sprachtheoretiker zur Adjektivdeklination herangezogen. Deren Schriften belegen jedoch nur in Einzelfällen zugrundeliegende Auswahlprinzipien. Statt dessen enthalten sie umfangreiche Angaben zur Rechtfertigung oder Pejoration von Varianten, die die Vertikalisierung als eine am Sozialprestige orientierte Variantenhierarchisierung offenbart.

Interest in Johannes Bobrowski (1917-1965) has suffered from an impression of the complexity of his works and of the narrowness of his focus: on 'The Germans and their Eastern European neighbours'. The current study re-examines aspects of Bobrowski's 'Sarmatian' works, especially their chronological development, but places them within the wider context of the whole of his oeuvre. It looks at the long period of development before he discovered his 'theme' in the early 1950s and examines his development after Sarmatische Zeit and Schattenland Ströme, seeing the volume Wetterzeichen as moving increasingly away from the past and towards more contemporary issues. His short stories and novels are related to the issues confronting him in East Germany and develop increasingly into responses to immediate poetic and social problems.Far from being a remote and backward orientated 'Sarmatian', Bobrowski emerges as a writer attempting to communicate with a society which, he felt, threatened to ignore basic human needs and aspirations. The study makes use of material from Bobrowski's Nachlaß to present a figure looking for and offering patterns for orientation in his East German society, but with renewed relevance for post-unification Germany.

In response to the silence that continues to shroud Austria’s historical past, Austrian literature after 1950 wants to retrace an untold history that left its marks in mental schemata and cultural clichés. The question how literature can refer to the facts silenced by a political unconscious, the question of literary reference and reality description, lies at the core of Austrian literature since the 1950’s.This book traces the development of contemporary Austrian fiction from the 1950s to the 1990s, showing how the Vienna Group’s literary reductionism led to gesture of mere pointing in happening and performance. While strongly indebted to the experimental techniques of the Vienna Group, later Austrian authors such as Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, Peter Rosei, and Gerhard Roth employ literary forms and extra-literary media prone to the indexical in an attempt to cut through the net of linguistic and cultural clichés, alluding to the microfascisms latent in common percepts, and indexing a reality that eludes plain description.

Auf Wolfgang Hilbig, veritablen Büchnerpreisträger und gleichzeitig „Kind, das mit Meeren spielt“ (Fühmann), auf den Prosaisten und Lyriker zielt diese Monographie, die drei ebenfalls aus Dissertationen entstandenen Beiträgen nachfolgt. Der „Seelenzunge des Lesens“, so der Laudator Georg Klein bei der Preisverleihung, verdankte sich das Forschungsinteresse des vorliegenden Projektes, bei weitem bevor es sich im Sinne der Disziplin, also der Germanistik, und im Sinne der Hermeneutik, also abseitig jedweder Disziplin und Denkreglementierung, die Texte aneignete. Die Werke dieses Autors sind eben nicht nur Selbstbehauptungsversuche eines Heizers in der DDR; ihre berückende, weil geerdete Formschönheit verlangt geradezu das analytische Interesse des Germanisten: deshalb die Instrumente der Textinterpretation, die Theorie und der Griff in den Fundus der Literaturgeschichte. Aber doch verhehlt dieser Ansatz nicht, dass die prekäre, ambivalente, ausgehöhlte Position des Subjekts in Hilbigs Subversions- und Widerstandsgeschichten, in der verdrehten, phantastischen Erzählwirklichkeit auch Anlass war, einen distanzierten Ton ex cathedra zu vermeiden. Das Verstörende, Versehrt-Verzehrende, gleichzeitig Aufbegehrend-Kraftvolle sollte nicht von der Patina und der Haltung der Disziplin in Beschlag genommen werden, die man unwillkürlich manch ausladendem, staubigem Buchrücken zuordnet.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 marked the end of East Germany’s socialist regime and a new beginning for a unified German Federal Republic. Cultural historians agree that the event caused one of the deepest rifts in time and thinking seen by an entire generation of Germans—a rift that left its mark on the psyche of every citizen, challenging notions of the personal and the political, and crashing traditional understandings of the individual and the collective self.In this bold rethinking of the question, Cheryl Dueck goes beyond the social, political, and psychological discourses that Marx and Freud, Foucault and Lacan viewed as the initiators of modern (socialist) identities to explore the literature and discourse of the quest for unity of the female subject. Reading such authors as Christa Wolf, Brigitte Reimann, Helga Königsdorf, and Helga Schubert, Dueck traces the striking fissures which run through time and through the female self, haunting women within the socialist project.The book shows how two generations of women writers have struggled consciously and systematically in their letters, aesthetic writings, and literary production to create a new language to express their own sense of self within a restrictive socialist and patriarchal system. Rifts in Time and in the Self offers an unprecedented look at the reconceptualizations of the female subject during several phases of GDR history, and women writers’ persistent attempt to carve out spaces of identity and community.

Writing against Boundaries. Nationality, Ethnicity and Gender in the German-speaking Context presents a series of essays by prominent scholars who critically explore the intersection of nation and subjectivity, the production of national identities, and the tense negotiation of multiculturalism in German-speaking countries. By looking at a wide spectrum of texts that range from Richard Wagner's operas to Hans Bellmer's art, and to literature by Aras Ören, Irene Dische, Annette Kolb, Elizabeth Langgässer, Karin Reschke, Christa Wolf, to contemporary German theater by Bettina Fless, Elfriede Jelinek, Anna Langhoff, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and to Monika Treut's films, the volume explores the intersection of gender, ethnicity and nation and examines concepts of national culture and the foreigner or so-called 'other.' Focusing on such issues as immigration, xenophobia, gender, and sexuality, the volume looks at narratives that sustain the myth of a homogeneous nation, and those that disrupt it. It responds to a growing concern with borders and identity in a time in which borders are tightening as the demands of globalization increase.

Christoph Hein is one of the best-known authors of the former GDR, and his works of fiction have been widely interpreted as responses to and critiques of socialist society. In this study, David Clarke undertakes a detailed analysis of all of Christoph Hein’s major works of fiction from Der fremde Freund (1928) to Willenbrock (2000) in order to explore Hein’s critique of the GDR regime, whilst also demonstrating how aspects of that critique provided a starting point for Hein’s rejection of capitalism both before and after German unification. For Hein, socialism had failed to make good its promise to create a community bound together by common values and goals, preferring instead to impose conformity upon its citizens. Capitalism, he believed, was equally unable to meet the need for community, and Hein sought to demonstrate the consequences of this state of affairs in the figure of Wörle in his first post-unification novel, Das Napoleon-Spiel (1993). After this point, Clarke argues, Hein was nevertheless forced to re-examine his criticism of capitalism, a process which ultimately led to the more differentiated and convincing portrayal to be found in Willenbrock.

This study of contemporary German poetry represents the first attempt to examine comprehensively and at some length the lyric response to the unification period. It sets out to investigate, by means of close textual analysis, whether the German ‘Wende’ was also a turning-point for poetry, exploring how GDR poets responded both to the revolutionary events of 1989 and subsequently to the new, united Germany. An introductory chapter considers what is distinct about poetry as a genre, especially under censorship or amid historic change, as well as outlining the post-unification ‘Literaturstreit’. The following chapter offers a survey of the poet’s role in the GDR from 1949 until 1989. Two central chapters then gather the poetry of the ‘Wende’ and unification as a corpus of work and characterize it, through the elucidation of recurring themes, motifs and techniques. The volume strikes a balance between giving a general overview of poetry written in 1989-1996 and focusing on individual poets whose work is particularly compelling. After identifying broad trends across a wide range of individual poems, collections and anthologies, single chapters therefore examine in greater depth the work of Volker Braun and Durs Grünbein. The concluding chapter addresses the issue of a separate GDR literature. Finally, an extensive, structured bibliography is provided, covering the poetry, literary criticism and cultural history of the period.

Dieses Buch bietet zum erstenmal eine zusammenhängende Darstellung der Etymologie von historischen und gegenwartssprachlichen lexikalisierten Farbwortverbindungen. Untersuchungsgegenstand sind Phraseologismen wie blauer Montag ‘freier Montag, Fastnachts-, Karmontag’, Gründonnerstag ‘Donnerstag der Karwoche’, blau sein ‘betrunken sein’, rot sehen ‘wütend werden’, satzförmige Phraseologismen wie Grün ist die Hoffnung, Phraseologismen anderer Sprachen wie ndl. Iem. eene blauwe huik omhangen ‘jmd. betrügen’, ndl. Blauwboekjes ‘Schmähschriften’, frz. conte bleu ‘Lüge’, Lehnübersetzungen wie blaues Blut aus span. sangre azul ‘Adel’ oder Blaustrumpf aus engl. blue stocking ‘intellektuelle Frau’ und ausgestorbene Phraseologismen wie blaue Ente ‘Lüge’.Im Zentrum der Arbeit steht die Frage, wie das Farbadjektiv, ausgehend von der Gesamtbedeutung der Farbwortverbindung, zu seiner Bedeutung gekommen ist. Weshalb bedeutet blau in blauer Montag ‘arbeitsfrei’ und blau in blaues Blut ‘adelig’? Um die Motivation von Benennungen zu erschließen, wird zunächst ermittelt, wann und in welcher Quelle sich die Bezeichnung zum erstenmal nachweisen läßt und welche Bedeutung sich aus dem Belegkontext ergibt. Anhand kulturgeschichtlicher und sprachlicher Angaben ist schließlich die Klärung der Herkunft undurchsichtig gewordener Benennungen möglich.Durch ein Wortregister kann die Arbeit als Nachschlagewerk für Farbwortverbindungen dienen. Da neben der linguistischen Analyse kulturgeschichtliche Zusammenhänge miteinbezogen werden, ist dieses Buch nicht nur für die Sprachwissenschaft, sondern auch für die Literaturwissenschaft, Volkskunde, Kunst- und Rechtsgeschichte interessant.For the first time, this book offers a coherent representation of the etymology of historical and contemporary lexicalised idioms involving colour. The investigation covers idioms such as blauer Montag, meaning ‘Monday off, Monday of carnival week’, Gründonnerstag, ‘Thursday of Holy Week’, blau sein, ‘to be drunk’, rot sehen, ‘to get angry’, idioms in sentence form such as Grün ist die Hoffnung, idioms from other languages, such as the Dutch iem. eene blauwe huik omhangen, ‘to deceive someone’, Blauwboekjes, ‘defamatory writings’, the French conte blue, ‘lie’, loan translations such as blaues Blut from the Spanish sangre azul meaning ‘noble’ or Blaustrumpf from the English blue stocking meaning ‘intellectual woman’ and obsolete idioms such as blaue Ente meaning a ‘lie’. The work focuses on the question as to how the colour adjective went from the overall meaning of the colour word to take on its new meaning. Why does blau mean ‘no work’ in blauer Montag and ‘noble’ in blaues Blut? In order to determine the motivation of the expressions, the first stage was to ascertain when and in what source evidence of the phrase was first found, and what meaning could be deduced from the context of the document. It is then possible to clarify the origin of what are now unfathomable phrases on the basis of cultural, historical and linguistic information. There is an index which means the work can be used a source of reference for colour idioms. As there are cultural and historical contexts as well as purely linguistic analysis, this book is not only useful for language scientists, but also for the study of literature, folklore and the history of art and the law.

As Brecht’s Galileo observed, a country which needs heroes is unfortunate indeed – words which suggest that a society’s need for heroes is always a function of its shortcomings. By examining the role that heroes and heroism have played in German literature and culture over the past two centuries, the essays in this volume illuminate and contour both a flawed German society in need of heroes and the flawed but essential heroes brought forth by that society. Beginning in he era of the anti-Napoleontic Wars of Liberation, advancing to the challenging situation Germany faced at the end of World War II, and concluding with the current reemergence of a unified Germany after almost half a century of division, this volume broadens our understanding of the inadequacies and breakdowns of German society. In addition to analyses of heroism in German culture during the last two centuries, this volume contains the first major essays in English on cultural representations of disability in German culture and on AIDS in German literature, as well as two essays on the scholarly accomplishments of Jost Hermand, to whom all of the essays in the volume are dedicated.

In this study, Geoffrey Westgate offers a new understanding of Irmtraud Morgner by reading her as a specifically East German writer. Through close analysis of her works – the early journalism and socialist realism, the ‘socialist modernism’ of the banned Rumba auf einen Herbst, the largely neglected, but key, texts of the late 1960s, the major novels, Beatriz and Amanda, and the final, uncompleted work, Das heroische Testament – the book examines the literary strategies Morgner adopted with respect to pivotal cultural-political developments in the GDR. The first to consider the trajectory of Morgner’s career as a whole, the study uncovers texts which have not appeared in bibliographies of her writings and draws on new biographical material, including the writer’s Nachlaß.In addition, the author uses archival material from the GDR Ministerium für Kultur and Ministerium für Staatssicherheit to illustrate how Morgner’s texts were censored and how the writer was monitored by the secret police. The book therefore provides a case study of official GDR Autorenpolitik and also shows that Morgner’s oeuvre cannot be fully understood unless it is viewed in the context of this state control and surveillance. Morgner’s writings bear complex but eloquent testimony to the possibilities for literature in a dictatorship.

Mallorca läßt zunächst einmal nicht an deutschsprachige Schriftsteller als Exilanten des Dritten Reiches denken. Doch verschlug es einige von ihnen auch dorthin, so Albert Vigoleis Thelen, Harry Graf Kessler, Franz Blei, Karl Otten, Marte Brill, Erich Arendt, Klaus Mann und Herbert Schlüter. Einmal auf der Insel angelangt, verbrachten sie ihre Exilzeit dort unter unterschiedlichen Umständen und verließen Mallorca spätestens 1936, als der Spanische Bürgerkrieg anfing und sie sich gewissermaßen wieder auf der falschen Seite befanden. Ihre Inselerlebnisse haben sie z.T. auch literarisch verarbeitet: Otten und Thelen in den Romanen Torquemadas Schatten und Die Insel des zweiten Gesichts, Blei in einem Romanfragment mit dem Titel Lydwina und Arendt in Gedichten. In den Emigrantenromanen Der Vulkan und Der Schmelztiegel von Mann und Brill hat sich die Insel ebenfalls niedergeschlagen. Die vorliegende Studie setzt sich das Ziel, dieses unbekannte Kapitel in der deutschen Exilforschung aufzuarbeiten. Dabei werden die näheren Umstände der Exilzeit auf Mallorca beleuchtet und die erwähnten Werke analysiert. Zu einem großen Teil stützt sich diese Studie auf unveröffentlichte Quellen

Wolfgang Hilbig is a writer who is widely acknowledged as one of the most important to have emerged from the former GDR. In this study, the first in English, Paul Cooke explores the interplay of aesthetic and social ‘taboos’, as defined by the official discourse of the GDR, in a cross-section of Hilbig’s critical writing, poetry and prose. The protagonists in Hilbig’s texts suffer from a profound crisis of identity due to the disparity between the state’s official presentation of life in the East and their own experience. Cooke argues that through their exploration of the ‘taboo’, i.e. that which is excluded from the state’s official discourse, Hilbig’s characters attempt to break through the banal rhetoric of the ruling elite in order to realise an authentic sense of self.

This study offers new perspectives on Wolfgang Koeppen, a writer too often consigned to the margins of post-1945 literary history. Examining the interaction of the personal and the social in Koeppen's writings, this book demonstrates that the politics of his works are inherent to their form.Through a series of close readings, the book explores the positive and negative aspects of liminality, a dominant trope in Koeppen’s works. Stressing the thematic and formal continuities of his oeuvre, the first section illustrates how his protagonists perpetually establish a space for themselves 'in between' states. The second section examines how Koeppen negotiates with the discourse of 'nation' during two central periods of his career. It shows how his experiences in the Third Reich and his reappraisal of the years prior to 1933 determine his perspective on modernity, modernism and Germany after 1945. Having defined the location of culture in his works, the book concludes by resituating Koeppen's writings within post-war West German literary culture.

Despite all the assertions towards the end of the twentieth century that the literary subject had expired along with the author, the wave of autobiographies published in German after the Wende was a clear indication that, on the contrary, life stories were very much alive. In this study, Owen Evans examines the work of eight authors – Ludwig Harig, Uwe Saeger, Ruth Klüger, Günter de Bruyn, Günter Kunert, Christoph Hein, Grete Weil and Monika Maron – who all published personal texts after 1989 dealing either with life in Nazi Germany or the GDR, and in some cases both. By means of close textual analysis, Evans explores the impact these regimes had on the individuals concerned and the contrasting ways in which the authors handle the autobiographical project. They adopt varying textual strategies to render the self on the page, with some employing overt fiction, and yet in each case, the project was clearly motivated by the need to treat psychological wounds inflicted on the self by totalitarianism. In their mapping of the contours of oppression, the texts at the heart of this study combine to offer a powerful defence of literary autobiography, in Germany at least, as a valuable means of tackling the legacy of totalitarianism.

Text Analysis in Translation has become a classic in Translation Studies. Based on a functional approach to translation and endebted to pragmatic text linguistics, it suggests a model for translation-oriented source-text analysis applicable to all text types and genres independent of the language and culture pairs involved.Part 1 of the study presents the theoretical framework on which the model is based, and surveys the various concepts of translation theory and text linguistics. Part 2 describes the role and scope of source-text analysis in the translation process and explains why the model is relevant to translation. Part 3 presents a detailed study of the extratextual and intratextual factors and their interaction in the text, using numerous examples from all areas of professional translation. Part 4 discusses the applications of the model to translator training, placing particular emphasis on the selection of material for translation classes, grading the difficulty of translation tasks, and translation quality assessment. The book concludes with the practical analysis of a number of texts and their translations, taking into account various text types and several languages (German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Dutch).

Paul Celan: Studies in His Early Poetry scrutinizes the influences detectable in the poems written during 1938-48. Among German writers, Büchner, Goethe, Gottfried von Strassburg, Gryphius, Mörike, the poet of the Nibelungenlied, Novalis, Rilke, and Trakl all provided motifs that, often repeated, make for a dense network inviting attention to the self-referential and self-revealing patterns in Celan’s early work. In addition, there are many poems that contain motifs gleaned from Greek mythology and/or biblical data. These references, on occasion quite clear, more often so obscure as to be hazy allusions, yield the view that during his first decade of poetic activities Celan becomes increasingly recondite. When these references or allusions stand side-by-side in a given poem, they acquire a surrealistic tint and threaten to withhold clear meaning. Ambiguities, deliberately cultivated in the earliest poems, begin to boomerang and read like so many preludes to the struggles with language evident in the poetry of Celan’s maturity.It is a certainty that Celan reacted quickly, if not immediately, to the events befalling the scenes of his early years (Czernowitz and the forced-labor camp). This phenomenon mandates the view of his poems as so many pieces of autobiography. It thus is inevitable that as early as 1940 he wrote against the backdrop of war, and soon thereafter in the shadow of the Holocaust that was destined to brand his mind forever.This volume is meant for anyone interested in Celan, close reading of modern poetry in general, comparative literature, motif studies, poetic reactions to Holocaust events, or even in a Jew’s concept regarding the role of the deity in the destruction of those for whom the poet speaks.

Mit dem Ende der DDR entstand in der Literaturwissenschaft der dringende Bedarf an (neuen) Forschungsarbeiten zu Entwicklungen auf dem Gebiet der Literatur der DDR. Literarische Texte sollten dabei in erster Linie als Literatur gesehen werden und nicht, wie es bisher oft der Fall war, als Dokumente, die Einblick in die politisch-gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse gewährten. Diese Dissertation zeigt anhand vier relativ selbständiger Teilobjekte in diachroner und synchroner Hinsicht innovative Aspekte in der literarischen Kommunikation der DDR auf. Auf Grund bereits vorhandener Untersuchungen wurden Auseinandersetzungen zwischen Lyrikern und Literaturwissenschaftlern sowie -kritikern der Jahre 1966 und 1971/72 zum Ausgangspunkt genommen. Die deutlichen Initiativen einiger Lyriker und nicht zuletzt einiger Literaturwissenschaftler, im Jahre 1966 zu einer Erneuerung des rezeptiven Umgangs mit Lyrik zu gelangen, konnten sich erst zu Beginn der siebziger Jahre durchsetzen. Das letzte Kapitel setzt sich nachdrücklich mit den aktuellen Diskussionen um die Position der Lyrik und die ihrer Autoren (Stasi-Mitarbeit) auseinander.

This study explores Heinrich Böll's 'aesthetic thinking', as it is expressed in the author's disparate and voluminous writings on literature. Böll's work in this field is situated in the multi-faceted context of social, political, and cultural developments in post-war Germany, and is shown to be an important adjunct to the novels and stories which were honoured with the Nobel Prize for Literature.An understanding of Heinrich Böll's 'aesthetic thinking' can illuminate the writer's fiction in an intriguing way. In particular, Böll's defence of the 'rationality of poetry' raises issues which reverberate in continuing debates on the social validity of literature.