Books by Caroline Schaumann

The first scholarly English translations of thirteen vital texts that elucidate the central role mountains have played across nearly five centuries of Germanophone cultural history.Mountains have occupied a central place in German, Swiss, and Austrian intellectual culture for centuries. This volume offers the first scholarly English translations of thirteen key texts from the Germanophone tradition of engagement with mountains. The selected texts span over 450 years, ranging from the early modern period to the postmodern era, and encompass several discursive modes of the mountain experience including geographical descriptions, philosophical meditations, aesthetic deliberations, and autobiographical climbing narratives. Well-known figures covered in this translational sourcebook include Conrad Gessner, Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, G.W.F. Hegel, Alexander von Humboldt, Georg Simmel, Leni Riefenstahl, and Reinhold Messner. Each text is accompanied by a critical introduction that places the translated text within a broader cultural context. The dual translational-interpretational approach offered in this volume is intended to stimulate new international and interdisciplinary dialogue on the cultural history of mountains and mountaineering. Contributors: Paul Buchholz, Sean Franzel, Gundolf Graml, Kamaal Haque, Harald Hobusch, Dan Hooley, Sean Ireton, Jennifer Jenkins, Jens Klenner, Martina Kopf, Seth Peabody, Caroline Schaumann, Christoph Weber, Wilfried Wilms. Sean Ireton (University of Missouri) and Caroline Schaumann (Emory University) are also the editors of Heights of Reflection: Mountains in the German Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century (2012).

Memory Matters juxtaposes in tripartite structure texts by a child of German bystanders (Wolf), an Austrian-Jewish child-survivor (Kluger), a daughter of Jewish emigres (Honigmann), a daughter of an officer involved in the German resistance (Bruhns), a granddaughter of a baptized Polish Jew (Maron), and a granddaughter of German refuges from East Prussia (Duckers). Placed outside of the distorting victim-perpetrator, Jewish-German, man-woman, and war-postwar binary, it becomes visible that the texts neither complete nor contradict each other, but respond to one another by means of inspiration, reverberation, refraction, incongruity, and ambiguity. Focusing on genealogies of women, the book delineates a different cultural memory than the counting of (male-inflected) generations and a male-dominated Holocaust and postwar literature canon. It examines intergenerational conflicts and the negotiation of memories against the backdrop of a complicated mother-daughter relationship that follows unpredictable patterns and provokes both discord and empathy. Schaumann's approach questions the assumption that German-gentile and German-Jewish postwar experiences are necessarily diametrically opposed (i.e. respond to a "e;negative symbiosis"e;) and uncovers intersections and continuities in addition to conflicts.

Examines the lure of mountains in German literature, philosophy, film, music, and culture from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century.