Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture – serie

A superb new (and complete) translation of Rilke's luminously lyrical early book of poems, with scholarly introduction and commentary.Rainer Maria Rilke is arguably the most important modern German-language poet. His New Poems, Duino Elegies, and Sonnets to Orpheus are pillars of 20th-century poetry. Yet his earlier verse is less known. The Bookof Hours, written in three bursts between 1899 and 1903, is Rilke's most formative work, covering a crucial period in his rapid ascent from fin-de-siècle epigone to distinctive modern voice. The poems document Rilke'stour of Russia with Lou Andreas-Salomé, his hasty marriage and fathering of a child in Worpswede, and his turn toward the urban modernity of Paris. He assumes the persona of an artist-monk undertaking the Romantics' journey into the self, speaking to God as part transcendent deity, part needy neighbor. The poems can be read simply for their luminous lyricism, captured in Susan Ranson's superb new translation, which reproduces the music of the original German with impressive fluidity. An in-depth introduction explains the context of the work and elucidates its major themes, while the poem-by-poem commentary is helpful to the student and the general reader. A translator's note treating the technical problems of rhythm, meter, and rhyme that the translator of Rilke faces completes the volume. Susan Ranson is the co-translator, with Marielle Sutherland, of Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poems (Oxford World's Classics, 2011). Ben Hutchinson is Reader in Modern German at the University of Kent, UK.

The first major study of the neglected fiction works of the well-known revolutionary politician Kurt Eisner.This fascinating study analyzes the fiction (including the didactic political Märchen) of Kurt Eisner, who is best known as a revolutionary politician of the Wilhelminian and Weimar periods. Eisner's literary work has been little studied, even in the German Democratic Republic, where he was revered as a political martyr. This is the first major study of this neglected aspect of Eisner's production.

Fresh articles about a much neglected genre, fiction from and about the Jewish ghetto.Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries ghetto fiction played an important part in the expression of a particularly German-Jewish quest for identity. The volume Ghetto Writing takes the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the publication of Leopold Kompert's collection of ghetto stories Aus dem Ghetto (1848) to fill a gap and give testimony to an important genre that has been unduly silenced in the literary histories of the post-war period. The volume presents some 15 articles by scholars from Scandinavia, Germany, Great Britain, and Ireland whose contributions offer new analyses of ghetto writing by well known authors such as Heinrich Heine and Joseph Roth, andcompletely new material on forgotten ghetto writers who deserve to be rediscovered, such as Alexander Granach. The articles cover various types of ghetto writing, ranging from ghetto fiction in the tradition of Leopold Kompert and Karl Emil Franzos, to diaries, travelogues, autobiography, and even contemporary German HipHop and Rap lyrics.

Study of the three most signficant late works of the Austrian novelist and playwright Thomas Bernhard. (In German language.)Three late prose works of the Austrian novelist and playwright Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989), published between 1983 and 1985, display a number of interesting similarities and intertextual references in form and content. They are considered here as a single, trilogy-like work, replacing the monumental Extinction (which appeared in 1986 but was completed as early as 1981/2) as Bernhard's magnum opus. Taking as its point of departure a close textual analysis, the work attempts to unveil the internal construction of the novel rather than second-guess the author and his intentions. The underlying model for this project is Nabokov's famous reading of Kafka's "Metamorphosis." The three novels under consideration share a common core of narrative structure. Each one derives its composition from the form of art that is also central to the plot: music, drama, and painting respectively. In all three works, the untenability of the narrative situation is thematized. As the inherent perspective is dissolved, the musical, dramatic, and compositional structures are revealed that form the basis of these prose experiments.

Provides a view of the late Stifter as a forerunner of twentieth-century modernism.Adalbert Stifter has always been viewed as a natural heir to the Great Classical tradition, even by those critics who detect disturbing subtexts in his fiction. But he should be viewed quite differently: however well disguised, heis in truth a closet modernist, and a major trailblazer for Kafka and the Absurd.This is most evident in his late fiction, which has been almost universally ignored, dismissed or disparaged by his critics. His last novel Witiko in particular has been conspicuously neglected by both nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics. Ragg-Kirkby demonstrates -- largely by way of close reading -- that this is Stifter's extreme masterpiece. Beneath the surface of Biedermeier stuffiness is a vision of fracture, emptiness, meaninglessness, and mania not only more radical than that of any other 19th-century author, but arguably more radical than that of any 20th-century author, precisely because there is such a disjuncture between text and sub-text. In his final novel, Stifter simply leaves the future behind.Helena Ragg-Kirkby is a lecturer in German at the University of Sheffield.

A collection of essays examining the influence of Kant on Heinrich von Kleist.The great and eccentric German writer Heinrich von Kleist, famous for his enigmatic dramas and novellas, read the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant in 1801. A series of letters written around this time speak of the distresshe felt as he absorbed the implications of Kantian thought. This sense of distress -- long considered important to understanding Kleist's subsequent works -- has become known to Kleist scholars as the 'Kant crisis,' and marks Kleist's abandonment of the hope of gaining metaphysical certainty about his life. But it has never been established which texts of Kant Kleist actually read, how well he understood them, and why they precipitated such despair. Kleisthimself -- aside from one paraphrasing of Kant in a letter of 1801 -- was never explicit about what he called this 'sad philosophy.' Yet the distress seems never to have left him and remains an abiding preoccupation throughout his dramas and stories.This collection of essays, all in German language, represents the most recent work of prominent scholars in the field. It takes the pervasive sense of metaphysical crisis in Kleist's works as a startingpoint. In the context of Kleist's response to Kant, the essays deal with his subversive treatment of the literary motifs and genres of his day, and with the ambiguity of truth in his works -- for his characters and readers alike.In tracing the source of crisis to specific writings of Kant and to other Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau and Wieland, the essays show Kleist's complex dialogue with the Enlightenment to be an important new approach to understanding this notoriously difficult writer.Tim Mehigan is Professor of German in the Department of Languages and Cultures at the University of Otago, New Zealand.

Study of the critical reception of one of the most famous and widely read works of modern literature.Thomas Mann's 1912 novella Death in Venice is one of the most famous and widely read texts in all of modern literature, raising such issues as beauty and decadence, eros and irony, and aesthetics and morality. The amount and variety of criticism on the work is enormous, and ranges from psychoanalytic criticism and readings inspired by Mann's own homosexuality to inquiries into the place of the novella in Mann's oeuvre, its structure and style, and its symbolism and politics. Critics have also drawn connections between the novella and works of Plato, Euripides, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Platen, Wagner, Nietzsche, Gide, and Conrad. Ellis Shookman surveys the reception of Deathin Venice, analyzing several hundred books, articles, and other reactions to the novella, proceeding in a chronological manner that allows a historical perspective. Critics cited include Heinrich Mann, Hermann Broch, D. H. Lawrence, Karl Kraus, Kenneth Burke, Georg Lukàcs, Wolfgang Koeppen, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Thomas Mann himself. Particular attention is paid to Luchino Visconti's film, Benjamin Britten's opera, and to other more recent creative adaptations, both in Germany and throughout the world. Ellis Shookman is associate professor of German at Dartmouth College.

A study of the enormous influence of the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche on turn-of-the-century German literature.The aim of this book is to explore "that post-Nietzschean archipelago of German literature which no one mind can hope to map, let alone inhabit" (Michael Hamburger) and to introduce it to the English-speaking reader for the firsttime, in accessible form. The study starts from the assumption that the daring imagery and cosmic sweep of Thus Spake Zarathustra provided the impetus for the creation of visionary epics and cosmological poetic universes. The book is original in that it presents for the first time a selection of writers hitherto regarded as impossible of access and reduces their epic scope to manageable proportions while preserving their essential meaning. Among thewriters treated are Alfred Mombert, Theodor Däubler, Rudolf Pannwitz, Ludwig Derleth, Alfred Schuler, Ludwig Klages, Christian Morgenstern, and the members of the Friedrichshagen Circle. Furness draws on the most recent scholarship and provides a fascinating account of a 'lost generation.' The book will be of interest to Nietzsche scholars, to students of Lebensphilosophie, and to those interested in German literature around the turn of the century. It will be of special interest to those drawn to the creation of myths and to radical religious thought.Raymond Furness is professor and former chair of German at St.Andrews University, Scotland. He has published widely on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German literature.

A comprehensive narrative overview and analysis of the criticism of the controversial German author's works.When the Swedish Academy announced that Günter Grass had been awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature, it singled out his first novel The Tin Drum (1959, English translation 1963) as a seminal work that had signaled thepostwar rebirth of German letters, auguring "a new beginning after decades of linguistic and moral destruction." Nearly fifty years after its publication, the novel's significance has been generally acknowledged: it is the uncontested favorite among Grass's works of fiction on the part of reading public and critics alike, yet its canonical status tends to obscure the decidedly mixed and even hostile reactions it initially elicited. Along with The Tin Drum, Grass's impressive body of literary work since the 1950s has spawned a cottage industry of Grass criticism, making a reliable guide through the thicket of sometimes contradictory readings a definite desideratum. SiegfriedMews fills this lacuna in Grass scholarship by way of a detailed but succinct, descriptive as well as analytical and evaluative overview of the scholarship from 1959 to 2005. Grass's politically motivated interventions in publicdiscourse have kept him highly visible, blurring the boundaries between politics and aesthetics. Mews therefore examines not only academic criticism but also the daily and weekly press (and other news media), providing additionalinsight into the reception of Grass's works.Siegfried Mews is Professor of German at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Collection of sixteen German novellas from the 17th to the 20th century in the original language, showing the wide range of the genre, and fully glossed.This new collection, intended for the student and the interested general reader of German alike, includes both traditional examples, and those which fall outside the usual canon. The sixteen novellas in the volume have been carefully chosen on the bases of length, historical significance, popularity, and interest, and have been extensively glossed by the editor, who also provides an introduction to the history and theory of the genre. SiegfriedWeing is Professor of Modern Languages at the Virginia Military Institute.

The first full-length study in English of Heinrich Mann's literary work and political activism.Heinrich Mann, once counted among the most important literary figures in Germany, is known to most English-speaking readers only as the brother of Thomas Mann, or in connection with Marlene Dietrich and the film "The Blue Angel,"which was based on one of his novels. Only a few of his novels and stories and virtually none of his hundreds of provocative essays are available in English. But he deserves special attention for the window his work provides ontothe intellectual, social, and political history of Germany, especially Germany's struggle with the question of democracy in the early twentieth century. In his essays and novels, Mann exposed Germany's resistance to democracy wellbefore the First World War, and especially during the Revolution of 1918/19 and the Weimar Republic he made the education of the German people to democratic values and a democratic form of government the center of his life and work. Professor Gunnemann's book is the first work in English that explores Heinrich Mann's work in detail. Special attention is given to the history of the reception of Mann's works in Germany, which is also a history of that nation's self-understanding. Karin Verena Gunnemann is professor of German at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta.

Critical study of Grimmelshausen's `Simplician' novels.Johann Jakob von Grimmelshausen (1622-76) wished to be taken seriously as a writer, which by and large, in his own day, he was not. He was in fact the author of the first great German novel, Der abentheuerliche Simplicissimus (1688), out of which arose a kind of cycle of `Simplician' novels. Later generations have made up for this neglect, and established him as an accomplished satirist and profound allegorist, who confronted the temporal and eternal issues of the seventeenth century. This study sets out to show, principally through detailed textual analysis, that Grimmelshausen's `Simplician style' allows of the co-existence of general religious and moral concerns with a spontaneous response to the individual vitality, curiousness, and above all, humour of life, which is the motive force of true storytelling. In addition, while the constituent novels of the `Simplician Cycle' should be and are considered as separate entities, the author's claim that they should also be seen as a coherent whole cannot be brushed aside, and this becomes a progressively more important theme.

A long-overdue study of the East German view of the Holocaust over the years 1946-1989.Stated Memory: East Germany and the Holocaust investigates communist Germany's attempt to explain the Holocaust within a framework that was at once German and Marxist. The book probes the contradictions and self-deceptionsarising from East Germany's official self-understanding as an enlightened, modern society in which Jewishness did not constitute "difference" or otherness. The study examines East German historiography of the Holocaust, includingits reflection in schoolbooks; analyzes East German concentration camp memorials; discusses the situation of Jews who remained in East Germany; and surveys East German cinematic and literary responses to the Nazi murder of the Jews. The book shows that regardless of the sincerity of the individuals involved in constructing these various forms of memory, the state attempted to orchestrate Holocaust discourse for its own purposes. Thomas C. Foxis professor of German at the University of Alabama. He has written extensively on East German literature and the Holocaust.

A fascinating look at Nazi Germany as revealed in its films.This collection of essays offers a view of Nazi Germany through an analysis of twenty films, representing a sampling of the period's directors and reflecting the film medium's major genres. In spite of the control that Goebbels's film industry exercised over all aspects of filmmaking in the Third Reich, the films reveal an individuality that belies subsuming them under any one rubric or containing them within any one theory. Films such as Hitlerjunge Quex, Die große Liebe, and Auf Wiedersehen Franziska represent the Nazi film industry's efforts to propagandize through entertainment. Others such as Immensee, Kleider machen Leute, and Der Schimmelreiter reveal an attempt to expropriate Germany's rich literary past for the regime. These literary adaptations and films like Glückskinder, La Habanera, and Der Kaiser von Kalifornien today seem void of Nazi ideology if viewed outside the context of Nazism. But another film, Der ewige Jude, shocks us with its virulent anti-Semitism and hateful propaganda almost sixty years after its release. All of the films treated, regardless of their fame or notoriety or the level of commitment of their directors to the Nazi cause, played an important role in a cinema that not only represents the dreams and lives of the citizens of the Third Reich, but influencedthem as well.Robert C. Reimer is professor of German at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

First comprehensive study in English of Germany's most prominent female author.Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (1798-1848) remains Germany's foremost female author. Perhaps best known for her novella Die Judenbuche and her ballads, Droste's narrative ability in prose or verse, and her gift for forging highly crafted, often poignant lyrical works, have brought her continuing and growing critical acclaim. Recent critical interest has brought her new recognition as a forerunner in the struggle of women to find their own literary voices.This volume is the first comprehensive study in English of Droste's works and authorial career. It combines a broad view of her literary and epistolary writings with close readings of individual works.

Kafka's interest in and use of China establish him as a principal commentator in Western discourse on the Orient.Goebel studies four representative works by Kafka that explore the problems of the Western representation of the Orient: his 'Description of a Struggle'; several letters to Felice Bauer, offering an interpretation of Chinese poetry in connection with the conflict between writing and Kafka's love for Felice; the canonical story 'The Great Wall of China', parodically appropriating sterotypes of China's stagnant history and authoritarian emperors for a refutation of colonialist ideas of progress; and the sequel 'An Old Manuscript', dramatising China's invasion by foreign powers and the breakdown of crosscultural communication. Elucidating these themes from a broadly comparative perspective, Goebel shows Kafka to be one of German modernism's most intriguing and self-reflective writers on the Orient.ROLF J. GOEBEL is Professor of German at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

A collection of essays -- early seminal works as well as freshinterpretations -- on the famous German expressionist film,Metropolis.Fritz Lang's classic 1927 film Metropolis has justifiably become an icon for the complexities of Weimar culture. Among the important general issues it also raises are the relation between ideology and art, the status and authorship of the film text in the entertainment market, the city, the construction of gender, the relation between the human body and the machine in modernity, and the relation between mass and high culture. This volume provides abroad range of materials and resources for the study of Lang's film, including both well-known, previously published critical essays and contributions appearing for the first time here. The editors provide a two-part introductionthat furnishes context for what follows: Bachmann's part deals with the genesis, production, and contemporary reception of the film, while Minden's defines the problems posed by the text and reviews thesolutions to these problemsas proposed by later generations of critics.The first part of the book proper includes selected contemporaryreviews, commentary by Fritz Lang and others involved in the making ofthe film, and extracts from Thea von Harbou's original novel. In the second part, eight modern scholars provide fresh essays on the genesis, promotion, and reception of the film. Approximately half of the material in the volume has never before appeared in print. The volume will appealto students of German, film, cultural and intellectual history, and social theory.Michael Minden is University Lecturer in German at Cambridge University and a fellow of Jesus College. Holger Bachmann received hisPh.D. from Cambridge on Arthur Schnitzler and film.

A fresh look at the critical reception of Schiller's early dramas such as The Robbers and Don Carlos.The interpretation of the works of Friedrich Schiller, with Goethe one of the co-founders of German classicism, has long been a central concern of German critics. In a country known as 'the land of poets and thinkers,' the achievements of great writers have been a matter of national pride and identity. But special problems are raised by Schiller, whose dramas address political questions more directly than those of his fellow-classicist Goethe, yet tend toend in a manner that shifts the focus to a general moral or metaphysical level, leaving politically engaged readers dissatisfied. The reception of Schiller's works is thus not only a topic in the history of criticism, but forms achapter in the history of German political and national consciousness. Given this situation, Professor Pugh's study of the plays' fortunes at the hands of the various schools of German literary scholarship is useful both to literary scholars seeking orientation in the field and also to readers with a wider interest in German intellectual traditions.David V. Pugh is associate professor in the Department of German, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and is the author of Dialectic of Love: Platonism in Schiller's Aesthetics.

A study of Mann's novel tetralogy of the 1930s that stresses its relationship to three key essays by Mann.McDonald's study offers fresh insights into Mann's Joseph tetralogy in two ways. Beginning with Mann's well documented love for public performance, he rereads the Joseph novels as a script, showing how performance figures prominently in the form as well as the substance of the narrative. Then he interprets several of the essay-lectures composed during the Joseph years (1926-1943), emphasizing their performative qualities and their conscious (and subliminal) interweavings with the novel. Mann's passionate re-enactment of Kleist's play "Amphitryon" in his 1927 lecture provided a model of identity that he developed fully in Joseph. The model also helped him contain the more pessimistic account of identity he encountered in Freud. The Freud lectures of 1929 and 1936 develop psychoanalysis as an Enlightenment project useful in combating the irrationalism of the Nazis, and carefully control its darker aspects.

Proceedings of the Brandeis conference on Jewish Germanists who fled Nazi Germany and their impact on Anglo-American German studies.Among the Jewish academics and intellectuals expelled from Germany and Austria during the Nazi era were many specialists in German literature. Strangely, their impact on the practice of Germanistik in the United States, England, and Canada has been given little attention. Who were they? Did their vision of German literature and culture differ significantly from that of those who remained in their former homeland? What problems did they face in theAmerican and British academic settings? Above all, how did they help shape German studies in the postwar era? This unique and important symposium, which convened at Brandeis University under the auspices of its Center for Germanand European Studies, addresses these and many other questions. Among its distinguished participants--who numbered over thirty in all--are Peter Demetz (Yale, emeritus), Gesa Dane (Göttingen), Amir Eshel (Stanford), Willi Goetschel (Toronto), Barbara Hahn (Princeton), Susanne Klingenstein (MIT), Christoph König (Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach), Ritchie Robertson (Oxford), Egon Schwarz (Washington University St. Louis, emeritus), Hinrich Seeba (UC Berkeley), Walter Sokel (University of Virginia, emeritus), Frank Trommler (University of Pennsylvania), and many more. The volume includes not only the (revised) essays of the participants but also their prepared responses, transcripts of the panel discussion, and dialogue of the participants with members of the audience.Stephen D. Dowden is professor of German at Brandeis University; Meike G. Werner is assistant professor of German at Vanderbilt University.

Pursues the unresolved question of Canetti's place as a cultural and civilizational critic.The award of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1981 has seemingly assured Elias Canetti's place in literary history. But his significance as a cultural critic has not been adequately recognized. The present study redresses this situation in two ways: by mapping the counter-image of human existence, history, and society that informs Canetti's critique of the modern world and its sciences; and by opening up Canetti's hermetic oeuvre by tracing his cryptic and often concealed dialogue with major figures within the Western tradition such as Hobbes, Durkheim, and Freud and contemporaries such as Adorno, Arendt, and Elias. The authors ask how Canetti's alternative vision of man and society relates to important themes of twentieth-century social and civilizational thought even as it calls into question fundamental assumptions of the social and human sciences. In analyses of Auto da Fé, Crowds and Power, andthe aphorisms, the authors elucidate key aspects of Canetti's interrogation of human existence and human history across five thematic complexes: individual and social psychology, totalitarian politics, religion and politics, theories of society, and power and culture. They thus trace the movement of Canetti's thought from an apocalyptic sense of crisis to his search for cultural resources to set against the holocaust of European civilization.Johann P.Arnason teaches sociology at La Trobe University, Melbourne and David Roberts is Emeritus Professor of German at Monash University, Melbourne.

A study of the rise of the German novel viewed from a feminist standpoint.This book treats both the literary history of the modern German novel and theoretical considerations about gender and 18th-century narrative strategies. It attempts to overcome a two-fold division in scholarship by treating Christoph Martin Wieland's Geschichte des Agathon and Sophie von La Roche's Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim, the two novels generally considered to be foundational in the development of the German Bildungsroman, inconjunction, rather than as examples of unrelated traditions, and by considering the reciprocal influence of fictional and theoretical writing dealing with the developing genre of the modern German novel. Baldwin also examines Wieland's Don Sylvio and Maria Anna Sagar's Karolinens Tagebuch and analyzes how gender as a relative construct functions in each of the four texts. In so doing she shows how the new German novel of the 1770s aligns reading and narrative practices with gendered attributes to establish narrative authority and cultural legitimacy for the new stories of identity they explore. The interpretations proceed from an analysis of the ways that reading andnarration are represented in the novels, and in their poetological prefaces, to show that the texts take up, challenge, and contribute to contemporary literary and social theories of the novel.Claire Baldwin is assistant professor of German at Colgate Unversity in Hamilton, New York.

Essays on key aspects of Romanticism, viewed in a wider European context.Despite a century of sustained critical activity and an interest level in the last ten years never before reached (as reflected in the sheer number of scholarly works produced), the study of Romanticism remains focused for the most part through individual, national, and linguistic views, and is now largely embedded in the complications of contemporary theory as applied through those limiting views. Partly responsible is the fact that Romanticism itself forms a set of rhetorical, cultural, and ideological lenses refracting a multiplicity and even chaos that at times seems to defy comparative analysis.In an attempt to refocus on Romanticism without trying to invent a new synthesis for the movement, the editors have selected thirteen essays from a variety of older and newer scholarly voices that represent a rethinking of key Romantic texts and interrelations through the lens of three fundamental theoretical issues: power, gender, and subjectivity. They call for a newly comparative sense of Romanticism that avoids the kind of critical explication of these issues limited to single national, linguistic, or cultural traditions, or seenthrough too narrowly applied contemporary theoretical `-isms'.

The influence of German literature and philosophy on American intellectuals in 19th-century New England.German literature played an important part in the formation of the minds and imaginations of progressive nineteenth-century New England intellectuals; this study looks especially at the Transcendentalists of the Concord circle, presenting five portraits of authors and their worlds -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, and Louisa May Alcott -- showing that each had a peculiarly productive relationship with the literature and intellectual traditions of Germany. The two main chapters of this study are devoted to Emerson and Fuller. Emerson learned German in order to read Goethe, even taking Goethe's Italienische Reise with him as hisvade mecum when he made his own Italian pilgrimage. Margaret Fuller's extraordinary knowledge of Goethe served her well in her position as editor of the Dial from 1840 to 1842, during which time she translated fromGerman and wrote essays on German subjects. The attention Bauschinger devotes to this journal clarifies the extent of the intellectual engagement Americans enjoyed with German thought and letters in its pages. The three shorter chapters on Thoreau and the Alcotts (father and daughter) concentrate on the inspirational role German literature played in various times of their lives. Sigrid Bauschinger teaches at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst; Thomas S. Hansen is professor of German at Wellesley College.

This work studies in detail a heretofore much neglected aned aspect of German literature.This collection of twenty-three essays sets its sights on the points of queerness, marginality, and alterity already present within the German canon and introduces further difference and deviation in the form of openly gay Germanliterature in order to promote the always-ongoing shift in cultural representation. Queering the Canon provides new analyses, from queer perspectives, of texts by authors whose names are familiar to canonical lists, including Goethe, Schiller, Thomas and Klaus Mann, Ingeborg Bachmann, Christa Reinig, and Elfriede Jelinek. It also makes welcome room for discussions of literary works that have seldom received scholarly attention.

A analysis of recent German novelistic treatments of the effect of the Nazi past on the relationships between parents and children.This book focuses on representations of familial conflict in German and Austrian prose of the last twenty-five years. Some of the most prominent German and Austrian writers examine the theme of familial conflict that cannot be explained by traditional explanations: psychic hostilities, economic deprivation, or repressed experience. At the heart of these novels is the collision between the bonds of family and the events that form the decisive turning points of our age: National Socialism, the Second World War, and the Holocaust. Snyder Hook examines five novels in detail: Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster, Thomas Bernhard's Auslöschung, Peter Schneider's Vati, Elfriede Jelinek's Die Ausgesperrten, and Elisabeth Reichart's Februarschatten. Central to the discussions of each novel are questions of guilt, cultural identity, and atonement, and of the relocation of these ultimately unresolvable issues from the larger national and political arena to the realm of intimate relationships between parents and children.Elizabeth Snyder Hook is professor of German at the University of North Carolina-Asheville.

The development of epic theater before, during, and after Brecht's time, and analysis of epic productions, showing the form's continued relevance.Bertolt Brecht and the director Erwin Piscator developed epic theater in the 1920s because they found Western realism limited to the single perspective of an individual, and thus unable to confront the new realities: technologicalwarfare, revolution, the metropolis, and the mass media, among others. The epic stage juxtaposed the old media of actors and scenery with new media, including film, photography, and electronic sound. Bryant-Bertail provides analyses of theatrical productions in the epic tradition from before, during, and after Brecht's lifetime: Hasek's The Good Soldier Schwejk directed by Piscator; Mother Courage written and directed by Brecht; Lenz's The Tutor directed by Brecht; Ibsen's Peer Gynt in productions directed by Peter Stein and Rustom Bharucha; Büchner's Leon and Lena (& Lenz) directed by JoAnne Akalaitis; and Les Atrides (The House of Atreus) from Aeschylus and Euripides, directed by Ariane Mnouchkine. Bryant-Bertail shows that epic theater's relevance for politically engaged artists lies in its discovery that history, fate, and human nature are spatio-temporal constructs that may be reconstructed on stage.Sarah Bryant-Bertail is associate professor in the School of Drama at the University of Washington.

A look at neglected aspects of the early career of one of the premier poets of the German language.Although Rainer Maria Rilke and his work have been much studied and written about over the past century -- as befits the perhaps most important German-language poet of modern times -- certain aspects of his early life and career have been neglected or are in need of a fresh look. Accordingly, this book investigates Rilke's life and career from adolescence until the verge of thirty. Here the reader finds the hysterical, harried tutee clinging to Valerie vonRhonfeld; the clever, supercilious, and anxious stroller through Prague of Larenopfer; the narcissistic diarist preening for Lou Andreas-Salomé in Italy and elsewhere; the priggishly high-minded but lethal reviewer of German-language literature; the devoted but delusional presenter of Nordic letters. A final section focuses on thirteen poems or poem clusters composed between 1892 and 1900 and mostly left untouched by Rilke scholarship. While depending heavily on the evidence of the texts themselves, the present author allows himself to conjecture about, for instance, the traces left by the boy's hasty training in Latin; his knowledge -- or ignorance -- of Czech national opera and popular literature; the genesis of some willfully "decadent" poems; his odd literary likes and dislikes; and so on. From this "Wirrnis" (confusion, muddle; one of his favorite words), the young Rilke emerges as a dogged self-educator, and, for all his laments and insecurities and languorous poses, a figure of distinction, gifted with an almost preternatural verbal inventiveness and recondite energy.George C. Schoolfield is Emeritus Professor of German and Scandinavian Literature at Yale.

Discussion of Thomas Mann's fiction (particularly Doctor Faustus), his preoccupation with redemption, and the connection in his work between myth and music.Thomas Mann's response to the crisis of modernity and the catastrophe of fascism is defined by the thematic matrix of history, myth and music: this book is the first to explore the interrelations of the three - and the first studyto approach the music in Mann's fiction through narrative theory. Discussion centers on Mann's preoccupation with redemption, which begins with his Nietzschean critique of Wagner's redemption motifs, and culminates in his radicalquestioning of the Christian myth in Doctor Faustus. The argument is developed through reference to four seminal figures, Nietzsche, Wagner, Weber and Tillich; while the centrality of Nietzsche and Wagner to Mann is well known,