German Monitor - Böcker

Since the tumultuous events of 1989/1990, writers, cultural practitioners and academics have responded to, reconstructed and reflected upon the process and enduring impact of German reunification. This bilingual volume provides a nuanced understanding of the literature and culture of the GDR and its legacy today. It explores a broad range of genres, combines perspectives on both lesser-known and more established writers, and juxtaposes academic articles with the personal reflections of those who directly experienced and engaged with the GDR from within or beyond its borders. Whether creative practitioners or academics, contributors consider the broader literary and intellectual contexts and traditions shaping GDR literature and culture in a way that enriches our understanding of reunification and its legacy.Contributors are: Deirdre Byrnes, Anna Chiarloni, Jean E. Conacher, Sabine Egger, Robert Gillett, Frank Thomas Grub, Jochen Hennig, Nick Hodgin, Frank Hörnigk, Therese Hörnigk, Gisela Holfter, Jeannine Jud, Astrid Köhler, Marieke Krajenbrink, Hannes Krauss, Reinhard Kuhnert, Katja Lange-Müller, Corina Löwe, Hugh Ridley, Kathrin Schmidt.

Anna Seghers: The Challenge of History features essays by leading scholars devoted to this most important German writer whose novels and stories have been read by millions worldwide. The volume is intended for teachers and students of literature and for general readers. The contributions address facets of Seghers’s large body of work which is characterized by reflections on political events shaping world history and written in a highly imaginative array of narrative styles. The first section focuses on the author’s famous novel The Seventh Cross. Articles in the next two sections analyze her reactions to crises that marked the twentieth century and her connections to other relevant thinkers of her time. The last section features new translations of Seghers’s works.

More than thirty years after German reunification, Life Stories from the German Democratic Republic addresses how life in the GDR is remembered, thereby enriching and complexifying the narratives of East German life found in public history, museums, tourist venues, film, media and popular fiction. The frequent stress on material lack, social restrictions and the repressive state is expanded and reconfigured by interviewees who variously both challenge and confirm widespread assumptions about what it meant to live in the GDR. Aimed at a wide readership, this book gives English-speaking readers access to varied and detailed accounts of everyday life, individual engagement with state institutions and different views of GDR politics, society and culture.

The bestselling, contemporary Swiss author Christian Kracht is as widely celebrated as he is a source of controversy. This introduction to his work suggests locating his writings in discourses that range beyond the labels that have been traditionally assigned to them, namely “postmodernism,” camp,” and “Popliteratur.” Instead, this volume considers Kracht’s work through the lenses of “authorship,” “irony,” and “globalism.” This volume argues that there is no fixed or uniform author represented in Kracht’s corpus, explores the ironic strategies involved in Kracht’s various authorial representations, and engages the cultural exchange inherent in Kracht’s work.

Against the backdrop of an insurgent far right and numerous deadly neo-Nazi attacks, various cultural practitioners have written far-right violence into Germany’s collective memory and imagined more inclusive futures in its wake. This volume explores contemporary examples from literature, music, theatre, film, television and art that respond to this situation. They demonstrate that, alongside the ways in which art expands the public sphere in terms of what is said and who is heard, aesthetic questions of how artistic works are presented are a crucial part of how they open up new perspectives.

Kerstin Hensel is one of the most prolific, versatile and influential authors in contemporary Germany. Her unique literary voice owes as much to her character, background and biography as it does to its dialogic openness to other voices. This is the first book to examine in detail Hensel’s correspondences and interactions with other authors as well as with literary schools, traditions, and models, delineating her various intertextual practices. Covering all literary genres, the volume provides both overviews and close readings of selected texts. It finishes with a part on translation which includes English versions of a cross-section of her poems.Kerstin Hensel ist eine der produktivsten, vielseitigsten und einflussreichsten Vertreterinnen der deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur. Ihre einzigartige literarische Stimme verdankt sich nicht nur ihrem Charakter, ihrer Herkunft und ihrer Biografie, sondern auch ihrer spezifisch dialogischen Offenheit für andere Stimmen. Dieses Buch bietet umfassende Untersuchungen von Hensels literarischen Korrespondenzen mit anderen Autoren sowie mit literarischen Schulen, Traditionen und Vorbildern, und erhellt somit ihre verschiedenen intertextuellen Praktiken. Der Band deckt alle literarischen Gattungen ab und enthält sowohl Überblickskapitel als auch detaillierte Analysen ausgewählter Texte. Er schließt mit einem Übersetzungsteil, der unter anderem englische Versionen eines Querschnitts ihrer Gedichte enthält.

On the occasion of Volker Braun's 65th and GDR/German Monitor's 25th birthday an attempt is made to re-evaluate Braun's contribution to 20th and 21st century German literature. The seventeen essays of the collection, written by a truly international set of scholars, demonstrate the unique quality and breadth of Braun's writing, spanning all literary genres. But not only that, they also reveal the diversity of interpretative perspectives which Braun's oeuvre productively stimulates. They showcase an author who refuses to indulge complacently in past achievements and an opus that defies all attempts at labelling. Braun's texts, so the verdict of the contributors, are driven by an insatiable thirst for the whole story, the depth beneath the superficial, the complex truth of our human predicament; for the precise expression which is not caught up in the limitations of the dominant ideology, whatever it might be.

A physical chemist (Fritz Haber), a photographer (Josef Breitenbach), a cabaret artist (Georg Kreisler), two writers (Otto Alscher and Albin Stuebs), a pioneering scholar in Irish-German studies (John Hennig) and a Celtic philologist (Julius Pokorny) are the focus of this volume. What they have in common is a biography fractured by the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933. Six were forced into exile; the life of the seventh, the Romanian-German writer Otto Alscher, shows that even the biography of a Nazi sympathiser could be dislocated by the years of dictatorship. As the previously unpublished letters which are reproduced here show, Fritz Haber, a Nobel prize winner, spent ‘his last lonely months’ seeking a dignified way to leave the country to which he had once felt the deepest attachment. Although a prominent member of Germany’s academic élite, Julius Pokorny had to retire because of his Jewish ancestry in December 1935 and yet was allowed to continue publishing on ethnic themes until his exile in 1943. Albin Stuebs was forced to seek refuge in Prague and later England when his left-wing political convictions made him a certain target for the Nazis. Because of his marriage into a liberal Jewish family, John Hennig had to renounce all hope of an academic career in Nazi Germany and, after his exile to Ireland, struggled in straitened circumstances to support his family while at the same time developing into an unusually prolific scholar. Proof that exile may stimulate creative energy is provided by Josef Breitenbach, whose remarkable biography appears to show that loss and uprootedness may release otherwise undeveloped creative potential. Similarly, the flight of Georg Kreisler from Vienna in 1938 was the start of ‘a remarkable voyage of discovery’ which saw him grow into a major, if consistently undervalued figure in the world of post-war German cabaret.

Anne Duden’s reputation as one of the most innovative writers of her generation, established in 1982 with the experimental stories in Übergang, was confirmed in 1985 by Das Judasschaf, a novel interweaving an individual’s anguish with the cultural trauma of the German past. In her acclaimed poem cycles Steinschlag (1993) and Hingegend (1999) Duden pushes the limits of language in densely metaphoric evocations of landscapes and places of political and personal remembrance, mixing lament for ruined nature with grotesque comedy, mystic vision with horror. Duden is a distinguished practitioner of short forms. Her essays display the same intense engagement with the visual arts as informs her narrative texts. Her deep interest in music is echoed in the musicality of short prose poems.This volume presents for the first time a comprehensive collection of approaches to Duden's fiction, poetry and essays by international scholars. Topics include: the ethics and aesthetics of Duden’s engagement with German history; her constructions of female subjectivity; her criticism of western dualistic thinking with its devaluation of the body and exploitation of nature; her position within a modernist tradition with roots in the Romantic Age; the visual arts and poetic influences such as Hölderlin and Celan; the dilemmas of translating Duden’s highly individual style. Three essays on Steinschlag constitute the first systematic reading of this difficult, much praised cycle.

In diesem Band werden zum ersten Mal die Ansichten von 12 Forschern zum Œuvre der Berliner Autorin Monika Maron (1941) zusammengebracht. Die Beiträge entstanden im Rahmen eines internationalen Symposiums anlässlich des 60. Geburtstages der Autorin, das Ende März 2001 an der Universität Gent stattgefunden hat. Junge wie etablierte Wissenschaftler haben Einzelanalysen und Übersichtsartikel verfasst, die zusammen das gesamte Œuvre von Flugasche bis Pawels Briefe umspannen und zugleich einen Ausblick auf die Zukunft ermöglichen. Die gemeinsame ‘dialogische’ Ausrichtung der präsentierten Einblicke äußert sich darin, dass jeweils mit eigener Akzentsetzung die Grenzen des Textes nach außen hin überschritten werden. Dabei werden nicht nur die vielfältigen Wechselwirkungen zwischen Text und Zeit, sondern auch die bisher viel weniger thematisierte Bedeutung anderer Texte sowie die diversen Arten der Rezeption untersucht. Methodologisch reichen die Ansätze von der traditionellen Hermeneutik über historische Fragestellungen, Diskursanalyse und Rezeptionstheorie bis hin zu Überlegungen zur Ethik der Ästhetik. Eine umfangreiche Bibliographie, in der eine möglichst umfassende Übersicht über Verbreitung und Rezeption von Marons Werken geboten wird, schließt den Band ab. Monika Maron in Perspective dokumentiert so, in den Beiträgen wie in der Bibliographie, den heutigen Stand der Forschung und liefert zudem zahlreiche Impulse zu einer weiteren Auseinandersetzung mit dem Werk.

This volume presents the first collection of critical essays on the work of the contemporary poet Barbara Köhler (b.1959). Köhler's first collection Deutsches Roulette attracted wide critical acclaim on its publication in 1991, when its poetic articulation of a last days' consciousness of the German Democratic Republic hit a nerve with the German reading public. The radicalisation of her poetics in her subsequent mainstream publications, Blue Box (1995) and Wittgensteins Nichte (1999), together with her interest in pursuing work at the periphery of the publishing scene, perhaps explains the relative lack of critical attention accorded her work up until now. The seven critical essays in the volume provide an overview of the various aspects of her work to date (poetry, essays, text installation in the public sphere), as well as debating from different theoretical perspectives (including feminist and media theory) the reconceptualisation of the subject and of intersubjective relations that lies at the heart of her poetological project. The volume also includes texts by Köhler from the late 1990s - two poems from her 1998 artbook publication cor responde, and her extended reflection on gender relations in the German language, Tango. Ein Distanz -, a conversation between the author and Georgina Paul, and, as a coda, an essay on translating Köhler that presents versions of one of her best-known poems ‘Rondeau Allemagne'.

This volume contains some 46 essays on various aspects of contemporary German-Jewish literature. The approaches are diverse, reflecting the international origins of the contributors, who are based in seventeen different countries. Holocaust literature is just one theme in this context; others are memory, identity, Christian-Jewish relations, anti-Zionism, la belle juive, and more. Prose, poetry and drama are all represented, and there is a major debate on the controversial attempt to stage Fassbinder’s Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod in 1985. The overall approach of the volume is an inclusive one. In his introduction, the editor calls for a reappraisal of the terms of German-Jewish discourse away from the notion of ‘Germans’ and ‘Jews’ and towards the idea that both Jews and non-Jews, all of them Germans, have contributed to the corpus of ‘German-Jewish literature’.

Unlike many writers from the former GDR, Christoph Hein's reputation and standing - and his creativity - have remained intact despite the demise of the GDR in 1989-90. Christoph Hein in Perspective brings together essays by both established and younger scholars from Britain, Germany and the USA which together cover a wide spectrum of his work, from the early writings of the 1970s to the play In Acht und Bann of 1999 and including his speeches and essays as well as all his major prose works. There is a marked emphasis in the volume on Hein's post-Wende output, with about half the contributions focusing primarily on this period. Another feature is the diversity of perspectives from which the works are examined: historical and political viewpoints are complemented by formal and comparative studies as well as by gender-based perspectives. The volume includes additionally the first published English translation of what is for many Hein's most successful work for the stage, Die wahre Geschichte des Ah Q of 1983 (‘The True Story of Ah Q'). The volume as a whole should be of interest to scholars concerned with the GDR and with contemporary German culture, to undergraduate and postgraduate students, and also the others interested in the history and culture of Germany since 1945. Six of the essays are in English and six in German.

German-speaking Exiles in Ireland 1933-1945 is a pioneering study of the impact the German-speaking exiles of the Hitler years had on Ireland as the first large group of immigrants in the country in the twentieth century. It therefore adds an important yet hitherto virtually unknown Irish dimension to international exile studies. After providing an overview of the topic and an analysis of current developments in exile studies the volume devotes two chapters to Jewish refugees and another to the considerable number of Austrian exiles, investigates the relationship between Irish government policy and public opinion, and explores the problems of identity faced by so many in exile. It then focuses on some eminent refugees - Erwin Schrödinger, Ludwig Bieler, Robert Weil, Ernst Scheyer, and Hans Sachs - before concluding with personal accounts by Ruth Braunizer (the daughter of Erwin Schrödinger, excerpts from whose diaries are published here for the first time), Monica Schefold (the daughter of John Hennig), and Eva Gross. The fourteen contributors to the volume are Wolfgang Benz, Ruth Braunizer, John Cooke, Horst Dickel, Eva Gross, Gisela Holfter, Dermot Keogh, Wolfgang Muchitsch, Siobhán O'Connor, Hermann Rasche, Monica Schefold, Birte Schulz, Raphael V. Siev, and Colin Walker.

Pushing at Boundaries presents approaches to women writers who have recently had a big impact in shaping the contemporary literary field in Germany. The opening chapters offer the first extensive consideration of Karen Duve’s work, including an excerpt from her latest novel, the romance parody Die entführte Prinzessin, a fascinating commentary by her translator Anthea Bell, and essays on her acclaimed novel Regenroman, her subversive take on West German youth culture in the 1980s in Dies ist kein Liebeslied, and explorations of the witty echoes of fairy tales and myths in all her novels and stories. Other writers compared with Duve or discussed independently include Anne Duden, Jenny Erpenbeck, Julia Franck, Michael Fritz, Kerstin Hensel, Julia Schoch, Malin Schwerdtfeger, and Maike Wetzel. A final essay explores Berlin, as capital city and urban jungle, in recent novels by Sibylle Berg, Tanja Dückers, Alexa Hennig von Lange, Judith Hermann, Unda Hörner, Inka Parei, Kathrin Röggla, Antje Stelling, and Antje Rávic Strubel.Readers will find many cross-connections and contrasts reflecting the heterogeneous and often conflict-ridden culture in Germany today. Topics include the subversion of gender stereotypes; the merging of 'high' and 'low' culture; the invasion of cultivated spheres by 'wild' nature; post-Wende border crossings between East and West; and the highly charged relationship between lust and disgust.

The collapse of the supposedly ‘civilized’ German nation into the ‘barbarism’ of Hitler’s Third Reich has cast a long shadow over interpretations of German culture and society. In the remarkable work of Norbert Elias, himself a refugee from Nazi Germany, a deep concern with the distinctiveness of ‘the Germans’ is linked with an ambitious attempt to work out more general relations between broad historical processes – patterns of state formation, changing social structures – and the character of the individual self, as evidenced in changing thresholds of shame and embarrassment. In critical engagement with Elias’s notion of the ‘civilizing process’, the essays collected here explore moments of excess and transgression, moments when the very boundaries of ‘civilization’ are both constructed and challenged. Inter-disciplinary contributions – on topics ranging from medieval laughter, cursing and swearing, through to music, the bourgeois self, and aspects of modern violence – highlight the complexity of inter-relations between the individual imagination and creativity, on the one hand, and the brute facts of political power and social structural inequalities, on the other; and develop new insights into the changing patterns of culture and society in Germany from the Middle Ages to the present.

Erstmals liegt mit Schaltstelle eine umfassende Studie zur zeitgenössischen deutschsprachigen Lyrik auf der Schwelle zum 21. Jahrhundert vor. In einem breiten Spektrum an Beiträgen international renommierter Experten aus Deutschland, Großbritannien, den USA, Kanada, Italien und den Niederlanden präsentiert diese Untersuchung ausführliche Analysen zu bekannten Größen (wie Volker Braun, Ulrike Draesner, Durs Grünbein, Ernst Jandl, Barbara Köhler, Friederike Mayröcker, Brigitte Oleschinski und Raoul Schrott), eingehende Betrachtungen zur Lyrik des Körpers, zur Verwendung von Klischee-Bildern, zum Topos der Kindheit oder zur ‘neuen Schlichtheit’, sowie Beiträge zur jüngsten Generation von Dichterinnen und Dichtern, die im neuen Jahrhundert ihren Einstand gegeben haben. Untersuchungen zu individuellen Gedichtsammlungen ergänzen sich mit Abhandlungen, die Dialoge über die Jahrhundertgrenzen hinweg aufzeigen oder den Einfluß von Schlüsselfiguren wie Paul Celan und Gottfried Benn nachweisen. Zudem enthält der Band ein Interview mit Heinz Czechowski und neue Gedichte von acht führenden deutschsprachigen Lyrikerinnen und Lyrikern. Zu oft wird in Diskussionen zur Literatur in der Berliner Republik die Lyrik marginalisiert: dieser Band zeigt, daß sie im Gegenteil eine unerläßliche Rolle zu spielen hat. Für Wissenschaftler und Studierende der Germanistik, wie überhaupt für alle, die an den Entwicklungen auf dem Gebiet der modernen Lyrik interessiert sind, sollte diese Veröffentlichung zur Pflichtlektüre erhoben werden.Schaltstelle presents a pioneering examination of contemporary German poetry at the turn of the twenty-first century. Internationally recognised experts from Germany, UK, USA, Canada, Italy and the Netherlands offer a first assessment of the paths that German poetry has taken into the new millennium. Alongside in-depth analyses of established names are broader surveys of poetry of the body, the use of cliché, theories of metaphor, the topos of childhood, the ‘new simplicity’, and contributions dedicated to the youngest generation of poets making their debut in the new century. The volume also contains an interview with Heinz Czechowski, a substantial Bibliography and new poems by eight leading poets. Poetry is too often marginalised in discussions about literature in the Berlin Republic: this volume demonstrates that it has a vital role to play at their heart.

This volume is dedicated to the study of artistic and historical documents that recall German left-wing terrorism in the 1970s. It is intended to contribute to a better understanding of this violent epoch in Germany’s recent past and the many ways it is remembered.The cultural memory of the RAF past is a useful device to disentangle the complex relationship between terror and the arts. This bond has become a particularly pressing matter in an era of a new, so-called global terrorism when the culture industry is obviously fascinated with terror.Fourteen scholars of visual cultures and contemporary literature offer in-depth investigations into the artistic process of engaging with West Germany’s era of political violence in the 1970s. The assessments are framed by two essays from historians: one looks back at the previously ignored anti-Semitic context of 1970s terrorism, the other offers a thought-provoking epilogue on the extension of the so-called Stammheim syndrome to the debate on the treatment of prisoners in Guantánamo Bay. The contributions on cultural memory argue that any future memory of German left-wing terrorism will need to acknowledge the inseparable bond between terror and the artistic response it produces.

Dislocation and the need for radical reorientation are central experiences in 20th-century German history. Much of German culture has also consisted of reflections on and responses to the historical caesurae of 1933, 1945 and 1989-90, and the massive political, social and economic changes that accompanied them. In the first instance, dislocation and reorientation are to be understood in the physical sense, i.e. the loss of their homes in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia by Jewish and Communist émigrés after 1933, by Germans in Eastern Europe after 1945, and by disaffected individuals leaving the GDR for the West between 1949 and 1989. But they are also ideological, social and cultural experiences.This volume seeks to explore the parallels and differences between the impact on these groups of their sense of loss and their struggle to establish new identities after major upheavals. What their diverse experiences have in common is the sense of social and intellectual dislocation, even amongst those whose physical location did not change for long periods of time. Drawing on the ideas of various social and cultural theorists, and adopting a variety of approaches, our contributors examine how not only dislocation but also reorientation has been articulated, both in political discourse and across the cultural spectrum from fiction to life writing, from poetry to film.

Over the last decade German culture has been engaged in a re-examination of the traumatic events of the Second World War and their post-war legacy in the public and private sphere. This shift in German memory culture from a focus on responsibility for the Holocaust to a focus on wartime suffering has attracted a lot of critical attention over the past decade, in both Cultural and Literary Studies and History. This volume brings together British, German, Dutch and American scholars from the fields of Cultural Studies, History and Sociology to address the national and international significance of discourses of ‘German wartime suffering’ in post-war and contemporary Germany. The focus of this interdisciplinary volume is both on the historical roots of the ‘Germans as victims’ narratives and the forms of their continuing existence in contemporary public memory and culture. The first three sections of this volume explore the conditions of German victim discourses in a variety of media and public arenas from historiography, sociology, literature and film to monuments, civil defence bunkers and local public memory. The final section sets the contemporary re-articulation of German wartime suffering in an international context with respect to its reception and its reflection in both Western and Eastern Europe and Israel.

This collection of essays, written by leading scholars in the fields of East German art, film, literature, music, and museum studies, seeks to renegotiate the artistic legacy of the German Democratic Republic. Combining a range of theoretical and practical perspectives, the volume challenges the narrow frameworks of totalitarianism and Ostalgie that have dominated discussions of art produced in the GDR. It explores the diversity of art produced in the state and contests the long-held perception that socialist realism and artistic innovation were mutually exclusive. Crucially, the collection puts art itself to the fore; GDR art is considered not simply as a political by-product, as is so often the case, but as an entity of innovation and aesthetic value in its own right.

Taking as its starting point the work of Professor Dennis Tate, this volume brings together essays which explore varieties of East German autobiographical writing before, during and after German unification. The volume examines the invention and re-invention of the self through literature in response to historical change, analysing how authors have negotiated social transition in the East German context. Many of the contributions also discuss how authors have sought to understand lives which have spanned the National Socialist, socialist and post-unification periods. This volume will be particularly valuable to students and researchers working on contemporary Germany and its culture, as well as to those with an interest in autobiographical writing.

This volume introduces ten emerging voices in German-language literature by women. Their texts speak to the diverse modalities of transition that characterise society and culture in the twenty-first century, such as the adaptation to evolving political and social conditions in a newly united Germany; globalisation, the dissolution of borders, and the changing face of Europe; dramatic shifts in the meaning of national, ethnic, sexual, gender, religious, and class identities; rapid technological advancement and the revolutionary power of new media, which in turn have radically altered the connections between public and private, personal and political. In their literature, the authors presented here reflect on the notion of transition and offer some unique interventions on its meaning in the contemporary era.