Books in the German Life & Civilization series

This book presents an innovative English adaptation of Stephan Hermlin's 1970 radio play Scardanelli, about the life of poet-philosopher Friedrich Hoelderlin, accompanied by essays and commentary. It will appeal to those engaged with German Romanticism, the poetics of translation and the cultural history of radio.

Pathology. Psychosis. Schizophrenia. These words often prove inseparable from the life and work of twentieth-century German-language writer Robert Walser. This book takes Walser's schizophrenia diagnosis as a point of departure and provides a cognitive study of his writing, suggesting that his unique prose is rooted in uncommon cognition.

Imagined Germany focuses on Wagner's idea of Deutschtum, especially during the unification of Germany, 1864-1871. Salmi discusses how Wagner defined Germanness, what stereotypes, ideas, and sentiments he attached to it, and what kind of state could realize Wagner's national ideals.

This book offers an in-depth study of the rich tapestry of happiness discourses in well-known philosophical novels by Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse and Ernst Junger, published between 1922 and 1949. The study is prompted, in part, by an awareness that despite the interdisciplinarity of happiness research, Western literary scholarship has paid scant attention to fictionalized constructs of happiness. Each of the four chapters uses extended textual analysis to explore the sites in which happiness (Gluck) and serenity (Heiterkeit) are sought, experienced, narrated, reflected upon and enacted. The author theorizes, with particular reference to Bachelard and Foucault, the interfaces between interior and exterior spaces and states of well-being. In addition to providing new interpretive perspectives on the canonical novels themselves, the book makes a significant contribution to a broader history of the idea of happiness through the appraisal of key intellectual cross-currents and traditions, both Western and Eastern, underpinning the novelists' varied and nuanced conceptualizations and aesthetic representations of happiness.

This volume explores the complex webs of interaction between the environmental movement, socialism, and the «natural» environment in Germany, and beyond, in the twentieth century. There has long been a divide between the environmental, or «green,» movement and socialist movements in Germany, a divide that has expressed itself in scholarship and intellectual discourse. And yet, upon closer inspection, the split between «red» and «green» is not as clear as it might at first seem. Indeed, little about the interaction between socialism and environmentalism, or socialism and the environment, fits into a neat binary. In a way, the discourses, positions, and policiesthat structure the interactions between environmentalism, nature, and socialism in German history and culture can be said to constitute a kind of ecology ¿ a complex and interdependent web of relations, which can appear as antagonisms, but which can also contain deeper, less immediately visible, interdependencies. Ecologies of Socialisms attempts to combine the work of scholars from a wide range of disciplines (history, literature, German/Austrian studies, philosophy, geography) in order to contribute to a better and more nuanced understanding of how «green» and «red» have clashed and also merged in German history and culture.

In the process of establishing the social and political reality of the German Democratic Republic, writers played a crucial role. The specific feature of GDR literary texts of the 1960s lies in their attempt at imagining and representing the emergence of a community that had previously not existed. A new sense of common belonging was being promoted. This study focuses on the ways in which Werner Bräunig and Erik Neutsch negotiated this tension in their novels by analysing the spatial and topographical dimensions of the texts. If literary texts map power structures by rewriting cartographies, then the analysis of the latter will shed light on the socio-political models that are being advocated. Neutsch's Spur der Steine (1964) and Bräunig's fragment Rummelplatz (2007) were both written in the 1960s but enjoyed a very different reception: while the former became a bestseller, the latter was censored and published posthumously in 2007. Yet they both speak to GDR society of the 1960s, highlighting the evocative power of literature within the East German context - and beyond.

The "Movement of Writing Workers" offers a paradigmatic view of the successes and failures of attempts to implement a socialist cultural revolution in East Germany. This study, based largely on original archival research, traces the development of this major cultural initiative and highlights the diversity of state-sponsored literary production.

In February 1943 intermarried Germans gathered in the now famous Rosenstrasse to protest the feared deportation of their Jewish spouses. This book examines the competing representations of the Rosenstrasse protest in contemporary Germany, demonstrating how cultural memories of this event are intertwined with each other and concepts of identity.

In the course of the 1970s, interdisciplinary German studies emerged in North America, breaking with what many in the field saw as a suffocating and politically tainted tradition of canon-based philology by broadening both the corpus of texts and the framing concept of culture.

Against All Odds

Dieser Band ist Alexander Stephan gewidmet und spiegelt dessen wissenschaftliche Interessengebiete und Leistungen wider. Das Buch enthält Aufsätze von führenden Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftlern zur Politik und Kultur deutsch-amerikanischer Beziehungen sowie zur Tradition der Kulturvermittlung. Die Themen reichen von der aktuellen Politik, Kulturdiplomatie und Amerikanisierung bis zur historischen Auseinandersetzung mit mitteleuropäischen Künstlern und Schriftstellern, die als Intellektuelle einen wesentlichen Einfluss auf die Kulturpolitik der 20er Jahre und auf die Zeit nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg ausübten. This volume reflects the scholarly interests and achievements of Alexander Stephan in whose honor it was conceived. The book presents essays by leading international scholars on the contours of politics and culture in German-American relations as well as broader traditions of cultural mediation. Topics range from current concerns about public policy and cultural diplomacy, Americanization and anti-Americanism to historical considerations of Central European artists and writers who as public intellectuals had signi¿cant impact on the politics of culture after World War Two and earlier.

This volume examines selected works of German literature from Gustav Freytag to Joseph Goebbels in relation to ethical, socio-economic, and political texts from the economic «take off» period in the middle of the nineteenth century up to the rise of National Socialism and investigates two aspects of anti-Semitic anti-capitalistic representations contained therein. First it traces how the Jews gained the dubious distinction of being the inventors, even embodiment, of capitalism and elaborates on negative traits assigned to both of them. Second it examines how representations of specifically Jewish capitalists were instrumentalized both to discredit laissez faire and simultaneously to assist in the definition of a specifically «German» socio-economic ethos.

This book offers a thorough examination of the novels of Irmtraud Morgner (1933-1990), one of the most talented, compelling and overlooked writers within East German feminist and avant-garde circles. Using a combination of theoretical approaches ¿ including Adornös aesthetic theories and Bakhtinian analyses of dialogism and the carnivalesque ¿ the author traces Morgner¿s engagement with postmodernist aesthetic strategies back to her efforts, beginning in the early 1970s, to pose questions about effective political practices. Morgner¿s work sheds new light on the fraught relationship between GDR intellectuals and the state, a hotly debated topic that marks most recent attempts to understand literary culture in the German Democratic Republic. Situating Morgner¿s fiction at the intersection of postmodern and feminist theory, this study also offers new evidence for viewing literature from the GDR as significantly more complex and aesthetically interesting than has been previously assumed.

This volume traces the development of the German Lied across the first part of the twentieth century, as new directions in songwriting and social and economic changes threatened the future of the genre. Works by Pfitzner, Hindemith, Eisler, Schoenberg, Berg and Webern are considered in this groundbreaking study.

This book offers a study of West-East cross-cultural and cross-contextual literacy by investigating Goethe's relationship to the poetics of fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz in the West-oestlicher Divan.

Twenty-two years after his death, Thomas Bernhard's work continues to fascinate, irritate, and please readers. This book analyzes Bernhard's writings in the light of post-war Austrian history, challenging the prevailing formalist and psychological reception of his work.

Presents ten essays by scholars from North America and Europe working in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences that endeavor to move the discipline of German-American studies away from the narrowly conceived historical investigation of the migration of ethnic Germans to America that has dominated the field for decades.