Books by Matthew Philpotts

This book seeks to move twentieth-century German literary history away from its stubbornly persistent reliance on the political turning-points of 1933 and 1945. In the first part of the book, the authors analyze a synchronic corpus of literary journals, identifying a restorative aesthetic mood in the years 1930-1960 which persists across political date boundaries. In the second part, the careers of five writers are considered diachronically against this prevailing restorative climate: Gottfried Benn, Johannes R. Becher, Bertolt Brecht, Gunter Eich, and Peter Huchel. Combining these two approaches, the authors show that a fresh perspective that challenges established literary-historical periodisations can shed light on the common cultural and aesthetic ground shared by writers, editors and critics across the ideological divides of the era.

Covers the history of the legendary literary journal, "Sinn und Form". This study is organised in seven anatomical categories: founding conception; cultural-political context; institutional infrastructure; role of editors; networks of contributors; text and composition; and, readership and reception.

In this study the author elaborates a comparative framework for analysing literary texts from the Third Reich and the GDR in terms of the extent of assent and/or dissent expressed through them towards the National Socialist and SED regimes. The author maps out areas of similarity and difference in the workings of cultural policy in the two dictatorships. In the second part of the study, Günter Eich¿s work for the Nazi radio system and Bertolt Brecht¿s cultural activities in the GDR act as case studies to illuminate the patterns of interdependent assent and dissent generated under the conditions of dictatorship.