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.

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.

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 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.

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,

The first collection of essays treating exclusively the figure of the prostitute in modern German literature.Unlike her counterpart in French literature, and despite her importance in drama, poetry, and prose, the figure of the prostitute in modern German literature has been a largely neglected phenomenon. Commodities of Desire addresses this omission: it is the first collection of essays to exclusively investigate this colorful and multi-faceted figure in its many forms and mutations. The book pursues this goal by analyzing a number of key texts -- from the Wilhelmine Empire to the Weimar Republic -- and by providing the social, legal, and cultural contexts necessary for their interpretation. While the 'sex-worker' has been a presence in literature for centuries, the prostitute was never more popular in German literature than between the late 1880s and the early 1930s. It was then -- during a time when prostitution had become one of the most pressing social problems of urban Germany -- that the streetwalker became a symbol of the destructive and fertile forces of the metropolis, an allegorization of the political and social crisis, and a vehicle for biting social criticism. This book focuses on prostitutes as literary figures and prostitution as a topic in works by well-known and lesser-known writers. It thus clarifies the iconography of the prostitute and aids the reader in understanding her significance in the development of modern German literature.Christiane Schönfeld teaches German at the University of Galway, Ireland.

The first full-length study of the literary criticism on the works of the controversial twentieth-century German writer Hans Henny Jahnn.Hans Henny Jahnn (1894-1959) is one of Germany's most controversial modern authors, in large part due to sharply diverging reactions to the depictions of sado-masochistic brutality, incest, and homoeroticism in his plays and novels. Jahnn's rank as a writer has long been a topic of intense debate between rival schools of critics, and his works have provoked extreme responses, both positive and negative, from a wide spectrum of scholars, writers, and critics, including such prominent figures as Alfred Döblin, Walter Benjamin, Thomas and Klaus Mann, Wolfgang Koeppen, Walter and Adolf Muschg, Wilhelm Emrich, Hubert Fichte and many others. Freeman focuses on characteristic examples ofdifferent approaches to Jahnn: structuralist, psychoanalytic, Jungian-archetypal, Marxist, biographical, literary-historical, postmodern, gay, and feminist. Freeman shows how behind the veil of objectivity, literary scholars oftenhave a hidden agenda that is based on an emotional reaction to Jahnn's portrayal of homosexuality and violence, his negative images of women, and his worldview, which some critics have linked to some of the same ideological presuppositions as those of National Socialism. This is the first full-length study of Jahnn criticism.Thomas Freeman is associate professor of German at Beloit College, Beloit, Wisconsin.

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

The German fascination with Italy, as seen in Goethe's Italian Journey and in a number of literary reactions to it.Italy has long exerted a particular fascination on the Germans, and this has been reflected in German literature, most prominently in Goethe's Italienische Reise but also by numerous other writers who have returned to the topic. This book is concerned with two inextricably linked images - those of the German traveler in Italy and of Italy in German literature in the first third of the 19th century. Goethe's publication of his account nearly three decades after his actual journey was in some measure a vehicle to resist the challenge of a new generation of writers, who in turn would confront what they found to be a questionable, if not altogether false, representation. Hachmeister emphasizes the consequences of the disparity between the reality of Goethe's journey and his depiction of it, taking into consideration also his occasional discomfort with Italy's classical past. She shows how the German predilection for Italy is unique in the larger European cultural context of the Grand Tour, before moving on to chapters that contain readings of Italienische Reise and Goethe's Römische Elegien. Individual chapters follow on Eichendorff's Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts, Platen's Sonette aus Venedig, and Heine's three Italian Reisebilder, each of which is to some degree a reaction to Goethe's work. These chapters investigatehow the individual's reaction to Italy reflects his view of Germany and the author's role in early 19th-century German society. The conclusion offers a short glance at the continued evolution of the German fascination with Italyin the mid- and late nineteenth century.Gretchen Hachmeister received her Ph.D. in German literature from Yale University.

New and insightful interpretations of the controversial stories of Heinrich von Kleist.The fascinating and controversial German writer of dramas and novellas Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) is one of the most interesting objects of analysis for scholars of German literature even today, nearly two centuries after hisdeath by suicide. In recent years, disagreements among Kleist scholars have been so extreme that some have suggested that his work subverts the very process of interpretation. Seán Allan challenges this view and the related one of Kleist as a profound pessimist. He argues that the focus on Kleist's uninterpretability has obscured important elements of social criticism present in his 'moral stories.' To correct the widely-held view of Kleist as a 'poet without a society,' Allan approaches the stories via investigation of four thematic clusters: justice and revenge; revolution and social change; education and the nature of evil; and art and religion. Allan holds that the perspectiveendorsed by the Kleistian narrator is designed to reflect the assumptions and prejudices of the members of the dominant class of Kleist's time (authoritarian and male-dominated as it was), and finds that by the end of the storiesit is precisely this perspective that has been profoundly called into question.Seán Allan is lecturer in German at the University of Warwick, UK.

A study of the breakthrough of the Germanic vernacular dialects into the realm of written language between the eighth and tenth centuries.For the German-speaking peoples under the Carolingians (c. AD 750-950), the dominant literary tongue was Latin, the lingua franca of the Christian West. Before the eighth century only isolated words, legal terms, and proper namesfrom the vernacular dialects had found their way into manuscripts. Cyril Edwards's collection of essays examines the breakthrough into literacy of the dialects known collectively as Old High German in the south and Old Saxon in the north. In an introductory essay, Edwards surveys the recording and survival of the earliest continuous German texts. This leads into seven essays, each inspired by a fresh look at the manuscripts. Two are concerned with the Wessobrunn Prayer, the earliest religious poem in German. A third looks at the destructive application of acids to medieval manuscripts in an attempt to read barely legible letters; it concentrates upon the Hildebrandslied, theonly surviving Old High German heroic lay, and the ninth-century eschatalogical poem, the Muspilli. Two studies are devoted to the Merseburg Charms, pagan survivals in a Christian manuscript, invoking gods familiar from the Old Norse pantheon. A study of the earliest traces of the love-lyric follows, poems that slipped through the net of censorship imposed by the Christian church. A final essay is concerned with the Ossian of the period, an ingenious forgery that was a cause célèbre in the nineteenth century, the Old High German Lullaby.Cyril Edwards is a Lecturer in German at St. Peter's College, Oxford, and an Honorary Research Fellow of University College London. He has published numerous articles on medieval German literature and co-edited a book on the medieval German lyric. He is currecntly preparing a new translation of Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival and Titurel.

Examines the image of the US in German poetry and the reception and influence of American poetry in Germany since 1945.This book focuses on the image of the US in German poetry and the reception of American poetry in Germany since 1945. Gregory Divers examines poems by major figures in 20th-century German literature - Benn, Brecht, Bachmann, Jandl, and Grass, among others - and by other poets who shaped America's postwar image in Germany. Divers traces America's postwar status in Germany from the prisoner-of-war poems of Günter Eich to the pop poetry of Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and Peter Handke. Continuing, he finds that although the 1960s protest poems of Erich Fried and others reflect the tarnishing of America's image due to Vietnam, 1970s travel poems by Brinkmann, Kunert, and Kunze confirm the resiliency of that image. Finally, Divers looks at poems by Hartung, Delius, and Kling to illustrate the new heights reached by America's image within German literary circles during the 1980s, and the status of America in Germany after reunification. In charting these developments in postwar German poetry, Divers also shows how American influences are crucial to its understanding, not only surveying postwar German reception of Whitman, Eliot, Pound, and William Carlos Williams, but also examining the influence of such figures as Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery, and Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath.Gregory Divers is Assistant Professor of German at Saint Louis University.

A collection of essays offering a nuanced understanding of the complex question of identity in today's Germany.This collection of fifteen essays by scholars from the UK, the US, Germany, and Scandinavia revisits the question of German identity. Unlike previous books on this topic, however, the focus is not exclusively on national identityin the aftermath of Hitler. Instead, the concentration is upon the plurality of ethnic, sexual, political, geographical, and cultural identities in modern Germany, and on their often fragmentary nature as the country struggles with the challenges of unification and international developments such as globalization, multiculturalism, and postmodernism. The multifaceted nature of German identity demands a variety of approaches: thus the essays are interdisciplinary, drawing upon historical, sociological, and literary sources. They are organized with reference to three distinct sections: Berlin, Political Formations, and Difference; yet at the same time they illuminate one another across the volume, offering a nuanced understanding of the complex question of identity in today's Germany. Topics include the new self-understanding of the Berlin Republic, Berlin as a public showcase, the Berlin architecture debate,the Walser-Bubis debate, fictions of German history and the end of the GDR, the impact of the German student movement on the FRG, Prime Minister Biedenkopf and the myth of Saxon identity, women in post-1989 Germany, trains as symbols and the function of the foreign in post-1989 fiction, identity construction among Turks in Germany and Turkish self-representation in post-1989 fiction, the state of German literature today. Contributors: Frank Brunssen, Ulrike Zitzlsperger, Janet Stewart, Kathrin Schödel, Karen Leeder, Ingo Cornils, Peter Thompson, Chris Szejnmann, Sabine Lang, Simon Ward, Roswitha Skare, Eva Kolinsky, Margaret Littler, Katharina Gerstenberger, and Stuart Parkes. Stuart Taberner is Lecturer in German, and Frank Finlay is Professor of German and Head of the Department of German, both at the University of Leeds, UK.