Books in the Studies in Modern German and Austrian Literature series

Based on a variety of close readings, this book analyzes the use of ice and snow motifs in selected literary, scientific, and philosophical texts by a wide range of European authors from Johannes Kepler to Thomas Mann. The focus of the book is on German literature. While the metaphorical significance of cold imagery has been studied by various scholars, the close relationship between figurations of the cold and writing or reading has so far been overlooked. Compared with other instances of «reading the book of nature», stars or stones for example, the unstable status of snow or ice configurations also renders their literary representation problematic. This inherent tension accounts for the attraction snow and ice have exerted on authors to this day. Particular attention is paid to those texts that negotiate the close rapport between the fragile literary object and the fragile status of language and readability, thus exposing the «fragile legibility» of snow and ice motifs. This focus allows us to address more general issues, such as the shifting status of the aesthetic at the intersection of older natural history and the emergence of modern science; the apocalyptic; and the melancholic implications of cold imagery.

China als Motiv in der deutschsprachigen Literatur kann auf eine lange Tradition zurückblicken. Die Darstellung Chinas in verschiedenen Epochen hängt jedoch nicht selten eng mit dem Zeitgeist und den historischen Gegebenheiten der jeweiligen Epoche zusammen. Die Niederschlagung der Studentenbewegung auf dem Platz des Himmlischen Friedens in Peking im Juni 1989 und der Fall der Berliner Mauer nur fünf Monate später, gefolgt von der Wiedervereinigung Deutschlands, führten jedoch u.a. dazu, dass deutsche Literaten nun enttäuscht und ernüchtert nach China blickten. In diesem Zusammenhang drängt sich die Frage auf, wie die Volksrepublik in der gegenwärtigen deutschsprachigen Literatur, vornehmlich in der Romanliteratur, dargestellt wird. Anhand von acht ausgewählten deutschen Romanen mit China-Motiven, die nach 1989 erschienen sind, soll die aktuelle Darstellung Chinas in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur untersucht werden. Dabei wird den Fragen nachgegangen, warum es so zustande gekommen ist und welche Entwicklungsperspektiven sich daraus ableiten lassen.

This volume examines trends in contemporary Austrian literature, film and culture, predominantly over the past thirty years. The collection offers a multi-perspectival view on how contemporary Austria sees itself and how it is, in turn, seen by others from various vantage points.

The GDR Today promotes interdisciplinary approaches to East Germany by gathering articles from a new generation of scholars in the fields of literary and visual studies, history, sociology, translation studies, political science, museum studies and curating practice. The contributors to this volume argue that it is necessary to transgress disciplinary boundaries to escape the gridlocked categories of GDR scholarship. Exploring East German everyday life, cultural policies, memory and memorialization, the volume aims to reinvigorate the study of the GDR. Through the combination and juxtaposition of different approaches to East Germany, it overcomes intra-disciplinary conceptual binaries and revitalizes debates about the very concepts we use to understand life under late twentieth-century state socialism.

The male homosexual appears in many guises in postwar West German literature: whether he is a sexually predatory soldier, corrupt teacher, decadent artist, purveyor of kitsch, or powerful industrialist, he appears almost always as an insider of the social and political system. Writers such as Heinrich Böll, Wolfgang Koeppen and Alfred Andersch utilized images of homosexuality in order to examine the Nazi past and to critique the Federal Republic of Germany. Their literary depictions are informed by discourses that circulated in the early twentieth century, including the scientism of Magnus Hirschfeld, the masculinism of the German youth movement and the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen, and the literary irony of Thomas Mann. Pre-Nazi images of homosexuality reappear in postwar West German literature in a new sociohistorical context, in which the meaning of the Nazi past and its relationship to the new Federal Republic is debated on many levels. The Nazi Abduction of Ganymede traces the development of a postwar West German literary tradition that participated in parallel developments in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and popular culture, all of which continued to find new ways to link homosexuality with fascism.

What became of ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe during the Second World War? In recent years, their suffering, flight and expulsion during and after the war has attracted increasing critical attention. A wave of literary fiction has accompanied this trend, contributing to, and sometimes triggering, heated debate in the media and German-speaking society more widely. Often said to have broken a 'taboo', these postunification novels are in fact only the latest in a long history of literary representations of flight and expulsion in German writing. This book offers the first comprehensive account in English of 'expulsion literature' in West Germany from the early 1950s to present-day Germany, providing detailed readings of both canonical and lesser known texts and carefully placing the novels in their broader literary and historical context. The book demonstrates that these literary representations have often been viewed too narrowly and offers an alternative and, arguably, more positive perspective on the representation of flight and expulsion over six decades in German literature.

Written during the vibrant crisis years of the Weimar Republic, Alfred Döblin¿s Berlin Alexanderplatz is a fascinating examination of the gradual disintegration of Germany in the aftermath of the Great War and in the shadow of a nascent National Socialism. This study engages the seminal image of the prostitute, the commodified woman, as a central and dominant motif in Döblin¿s work. Through this intersection of sex, gender and economics, the author scrutinizes the larger perspective of German culture through the lens of its suppressed underclasses and considers how the politics of language both construct and constrain woman¿s identity in this society. The true history of the Weimar Republic, therefore, is read through Döblin¿s portraits of prostitutes and petty criminals, homosexuality and Lustmord.

This book is the first comprehensive study of Gottfried Benn¿s poetry to appear in English. It covers the entirety of Benn¿s verse, from his early Morgue cycle (1912) and Expressionist poems through to the «anthropological» poetry of his middle period to the «postmodern» Phase II work after the Second World War. Against the background of the poet¿s theoretical writings, this study, drawing upon the classic texts of Benn scholarship, analyzes in detail the major themes of his verse and its distinctive idiom. In particular, this work focuses on Gottfried Benn¿s extended process of rhetorical self-fashioning, his use of classical iconography, color motifs and chiffres, his often confusing historical semantics, the seemingly self-constituting «absolute» poem, and the colloquial idiom of his late verse. The book also engages with the multiplicity of voices in Benn¿s work and their varied textual forms, the hermeneutically variable positions of speech that they articulate and the often contradictory notion of selfhood to which they give rise.

This ambitious and exciting study analyses the use of colour language in the work of Stefan George, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wassily Kandinsky and Else Lasker-Schuler to open up an understanding of how poetic language works and to ask how we read poetry.

Walter Vogt, the Swiss psychiatrist and author (1927-1988), can be considered a gadfly in the Swiss medical profession and a paradox in the Swiss literary arena. This ¿writing doctor¿ shocked the Swiss medical establishment with a scathing exposé in his 1965 novel, Wüthrich, and then continued to write prolifically until his death. He was noted for his use of the grotesque, as well as for his literary sarcasm and use of parody. Vogt¿s use of the diary as his main genre enhanced his popularity. He was one of the first Swiss writers with a strong commitment to preventing environmental degradation. Vogt suffered from many physical illnesses, in addition to a multitude of psychological conflicts throughout his life. He was focused on death and illness from his early adult years. This book not only looks at Vogt from a psychiatric point of view, but also at his contribution to contemporary Swiss-German literature.

The ideas underlying Benn¿s Ausdruckswelt not only anticipate and parallel many of the assumptions now current in recent trends in literary criticism; they also disclose their ultimate limitations. Benn¿s poetics were founded on the intellectual crises of the early years of the twentieth century. Following Nietzschean leads, Benn sought to achieve in his person and his work a return to a primitive, archetypal mode of perception which he felt would restore a purer, more natural mentality to modern man, whom he portrayed as being ¿far ahead of his syntax¿. By focusing on Benn¿s early Expressionist prose and what this study calls his ¿fictive self¿, the author traces the relationship between Benn¿s Weltanschauung and later critical theory. Building upon the latest scholarship, she analyses Benn¿s poetics as precursor of certain postmodernist ideas concerning language, meaning and polysemy, aesthetics, personal identity, authorial intention versus reader reception, intertextuality, and the role of art in society. By paying specific attention to the concept of the autonomous self and its relation to language, this study demonstrates that Gottfried Benn¿s aesthetic theories do not represent the end of German Expressionism, but rather the beginning of the present post-modernist period.

This book examines the depiction of childhood and the Nazi German past in post-1989 German literature. Focusing on the work of W.G. Sebald, Marcel Beyer, Martin Walser and Dieter Forte, the study analyses how these authors employ tropes and myths of childhood in their engagements with Germany's National Socialist past, including the remembrance and representation of the Holocaust, German suffering and trauma, and the National Socialist 'everyday'. Their works are thus read as points of contact between the politics of the German past and the cultural construction of childhood. The term 'childness' is here modified and developed to establish a new theoretical frame of reference for literary childhood. The encounter between the adult reader and the fictional child is understood as one marked by complex and intense forms of desire, conducive to revision, mourning, nostalgia and defamiliarization. Through this framework, the study casts new light on the fictional child as a focal point of ideology and desire.

The fleeting nature of time is a defining feature of modern and postmodern existence. This volume engages with the critical sense of time in German culture, exploring the importance of temporality for artistic and literary production since c. 1800. Topics include time and space in art, the politics of time and memory, and the poetics of time.

This volume assesses the current field of Black German Studies by exploring how periods of recent German history inform the present and future of the interdisciplinary field. The experiences of present generations of Black Germans, the construction and reimagining of race, and the opportunities for counter-narratives are considered.